j.harshaw wrote: ↑Thu, 21. Apr 22, 11:09
If you assign ships to trade with and for a station then set it up such that you expect them to not be able to work in that station's sector, how would you expect them to function at all?
Sorry for the late reply, there were some holidays in-between. Thank you for already reading my initial post. I would appreciate reading my rather long answer too. Many thanks in advance
Yes, they should work. Why?
First, i assume station assigned ship technically work very similar or even the same as loose ships with exception that
a) The station now works as a base for default settings (e.g. it takes things like blacklist settings and list of tradable wares/buy-sell offers from the station)
b) Min/Max operating range possibly adjusted by station manager.
Second, I expect a in-sector auto trader to fail if it should operate in a black-listed sector.
But third, i do not expect station assigned ships to fail because as already described above the player loses a lot of fine-tuning potential for its ships and station or is forced to use horribly workarrounds (as separate production sector from trading station sector)
Fourth, how could this work internally (the algorithm behind what is visible to the player). By either including the assigned station to the list of possible trade offers before blacklisting/removing them and/or after removing possible stations/sectors from the list. But maybe it cost too much performance to do this? Either way I am 100% sure you technically know what you are doing and you designed the way it works for certain reasons.
Basically tl;dr of my point is the following:
* The X4 trade system (buy/sell offers, assigning ships to a station) somehow works out of the box without any fine-tuning. The purpose is simplicty rather then efficiency and that is fine.
* By default and over various patches player gained additional functionality to fine-tune behaviour, at least in theory (e.g. min/max prices for wares, blacklists, trade restrictions, setting reservered cargo space, etc.)
* Late-game player controlled assets can get pretty big, either by size (large stations) or numbers (ships and stations) having impact on game performance and complexity/player managment
* For various reasons (game performance, self-imposed "tidyness", self-imposed "efficiency", trying not to lose overview of player empire, trying to reach certain late-game goals [terraforming] in a reasonable amount of time) players me be inclined to optimize their assets (e.g. using less ships, set up a trade-chains, directing goods to certain npc or player stations/sectors)
=> The player combines his own creativity with the tools provided by the game trying to reach its goals. However (
in my opinion)
I ran into certain limits by working with provided trade system (e.g. using buy/trade settings + blacklists) rather then working against it (e.g. using hundreds of "repeat order" ships cluttering my ship list) as i described above
=> This leads to frustration because (as described already in the first two posts) a) the ships doesn't behave as expected because there is no in-game description and only Alan Phipps quoted answer that explain this exception and b) there is currently no other way to circumvent the described issues (some missing wareflow managment options) then to using contra-intuitive measures (as described above either mass repeated orders or set up "exluding
certain player assets"-trading stations as single stations in adjacent sectors (this is inefficient for performance and efficiency reasons)
Basically the following usecases can't be executed (either completely or only by weird counter-intuitive workarrounds) and even the implementation (as an option in any of the already available tools, e.g. blacklist, buy/sell offer settings, station setting, assigned alpha/beta/game/etc group command or trade rule) of only one of them (in my opinion) would massively help player wareflow and asset managment:
* Blacklists assigned to station exlude the station it-self (this threads topic)
* Expanded trade-rules options for "Buy only from NPC stations" and "Sell only to NPC stations" as currently it is only possible to either 1. Allow Any ships, 2.Allow only player ships, 3.Allow only NPC ships
* Adjustable priorisation of sell-offers to own stations (or a simply checkbox "Turn Off priosisation")[See short explanation below²]
²: This is basically the root cause for my intended use of blacklisting own stations in same sector. I provided the savegame and screenshots for this in my initial post. Summary:
a) Many single/dual ware producing stations in sector "Pious Mist II". Input only raw materials provided by adjacent "Pious Mist" sectors
b) Two "Trading" stations planned/in testing stage (one for raw materials overflow, one for produced wares overflow by producing stations in same sector)
c) Trading hubs should distribute/sell wares to anyone (Any NPC station in range plus player shipyard in "Sacred Relic" simply following auto price for best destinations)
d1) Raw Materials Trading station gets its wares delivered by adjacent "Pious Mist" sectors (This mostly works sufficient as prices are set and so only overflown raw materials not needed by other player producing stations are delivered, using blacklists on both raw material mining stations and raw material trading station)
d2) However c) simply does not work as expected. Instead of selling raw materials to NPC station for max/nearly max price in one/two sector jump distance, 90% of the time the raw material trading hub assigned ships rather carry ~100 raw material units to already 99.9% filled player stations with cargo limits of 100k units). This is either the mentioned "default" player station priorisation ignoring prices or a bug leading to ignoring those prices.
e) If c/d would strictly following buy/sell prices for each ware without weird player priorisation, it wouldn't be neccessary to create a same-sector blacklist at all and the above mentioned usecases could be executed sufficienlty, albeit maybe not 100% as efficient as I wish.
