Nafensoriel wrote: ↑Thu, 4. Apr 19, 05:10
Reservations do not a live economy make unless they are part of a greater system. By reserving you force the economy to work at whatever speed that ship currently is operating at(I wont even discuss how lazy "warping" freighters are). This means ANY failure or delay in that ship's movements causes a stutter or flat out pause. While it's a great trick to fake a logistics chain it's not required nor is it very efficient.
The X4 economy is freeport visually. It is not an internalized logistical chain like we currently have. It's more like a premodern barter economy with credit in structure. As no dock refuses a trader and the player(and their underlings) can trade at any station at any time for any reason baring combat status. A reservation is a direct restriction on the economy. The current scripts also do not take into account distance efficiency. If a trader 5 jumps away gets the reservation the system doesn't care that it could have been filled locally far faster in my observations. If we were talking about reservations for XL sized ships in situations engineered to cater to xl size loads then the situation would be different.
As Roger pointed out large ships are pointless because of the small volume currently requested in trades. This is exactly the issue with having the same script deal with local and global trading. You will never achieve volume moves unless you create an economy that ALLOWs and REQUIRES volume movement. The current X4 economy is comparable to trying to supply every big box store in America across 50 states with TRUCKs only for the ENTIRE logistical chain. That is stunningly terrible and prone to all sorts of problems.
Even considering multiple reservations is asinine. So what that it calculates 3 trades before it performs one? All that is is waste. Trying to calculate the entire trade universe at once will universally trend to small packet trading.
The system must be segregated to allow large hulls to exist in a meaningful capacity. Without segregation, the current autotrade script will bluntly never work properly in this economy without magic sinks or being tuned to overperforming. There isn't enough movement and there isn't enough risk beyond ship destruction to the economy. Realistically consider it for a minute. Have you ever seen a logistics simulation game that didn't use tiered transport? Why on earth would you think one tier alone would work in a flat space game? Hell HOW many trade scripts were created for x3? All of them either entered the realm of stupidly overpowered or segregated the shipping tasks.
Large traders are not as useless as one would think since trade transactions with NPC stations are at the current spot price no matter how much or little you order in a single transaction. Since large trading ships make large transactions you can get good rates on such transaction and so make the most of current offers. It is extremely easy to manually control a large transport and make it operate very efficiently, assuming the player has not saturated all trade offers in the universe. A single trade can make several hundred thousand or even near a million depending on the product.
The problem is the current auto trader mechanics do not factor in that L and XL ships travel through gates much slower than S and M ships. It also does not factor in the hull capacity of a ship. It even does not factor in the usage pattern of wares.
Maybe universal trader is not the solution, after all long distances is bad for profitability. A better solution might be to offer various flavours of trade behaviour which the player can use to customize play styles and adapt to different economic patterns
One way to use a L transport for products with small buy amounts is as a huge mobile storage. A single buy order is made for a large volume of such ware at a very good price. Then multiple small sale orders can be made from the large storage volume at good prices. The ship can idle around holding on to the ware waiting for good offers to appear. It can also slowly roam around within a range, visiting various sectors and depleting all good buy orders of the ware in each sector as it goes. When low on product and there are no immediately decent buy orders available she ship can use this normally idle or roaming time to restock its held ware. Potentially ships could reserve storage for many different types of ware in different proportions at the same time, allowing many trades to happen per visit of a station. Wares where this trade pattern is good are foods, medicine and energy cells since each are used in small amounts by individual stations but entire sectors have large demand of such wares. A single L freighter could keep many sectors supplied like this and operate reasonably efficiently as a result. Assigned S traders could even be made to ferry smaller or single ware orders to and from the L transport to avoid it having to waste time docking. Since the L freighter is full of wares which will eventually be sold it is being used efficiently, and even moves those wares in bulk efficiently between sectors. This could be called "auto distribute" or something of the sorts.
Another way to efficiently use L transports is for bulky large volume wares that are moved in a chain. An example of such a trade is Silicon Wafers -> Microchips. Microchip factories need Silicon Wafers which are bulky and produce Microchips which are also bulky. Both of these also have good mark up and can make nearly a million profit each hop with some L transport ships. Current auto trade logic does not allow this to happen automatically due to limitations of being to/from a single anchor sector. Additionally a single destination might not be good enough to consume a full load of Microchips. Some kind of trade logic is needed to exploit such situations efficiently.
When a player is operating both S/M and L ships, one could run into the problem that the S/M ships start competing with the L ships since they are faster and so disrupt the profitability of the L ships. In this case there could be an option for the S/M ships to prioritize orders that are more suitable for their size. Hence S/M ships might leave large orders of Microchips and Silicon Wafers alone but instead work on fulfilling food, energy cells, or other low volume high value trades. Of course one can currently remove/add specific trade wares to the ships achieve this, however such logic is needed for station subordinates and potentially works well with some products like Microchips where some factories order little amounts (drone components) while others require lots (advanced electronics, claytronics).
A limit with the current auto trade behaviour is it is anchored to/from a single sector. A single sector might not produce enough demand or supply for a trader to operate very efficiently. Being able to anchor a trader to many sectors to check for import/export could reduce idle time or allow it to find better trade deals which more efficiently use storage. Using this approach even an L trader within a 2-3 sector radius should constantly find some deal to fully exploit its large ware volumes capacity.
