How can egosoft make autotrade better?

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

If you do "remote contact" the dock and hold the inventory space its NOT a live economy.

Not true, this is exactly how the X-Rebirth/X4 trading system works in essence - based on both incoming and outgoing order reservations. You can cue up multiple orders between different stations.

If the associated ship gets destroyed or the order gets cancelled then the reserved inventory/space becomes available again.

As far as I am aware, the only direct cancelling of trades is effectively from the ship responsible for said trade - gazumping of trades is essentially not implemented. IMO this is one of the major benefits to the new trading model in X-Rebirth/X4 and should not be changed.

As for this not being a "live economy" that is utter nonsense.

In the context of the autotraders, I have found there is currently little point in assigning ships bigger than a Transporter since the extra space is rarely if ever used - even larger transporters can end up with lots of unused space.

IMO the auto-trader mechanic it self should probably remain on the most part unchanged, the ONLY change I would add would be to add something akin to a trade manager that could operate from a freighter/carrier/destroyer/miner with multiple smaller vessels that operate trades to and from it - buying wares below a maximum threshold and selling above a minimum threshold. If the larger ship finds a good deal, it could also sell/buy wares directly itself but the subordinate trade fleet may be able to do things more efficiently. This would notionally work in a near identical way to the current intermediate wares mechanics with the player able to leave the ware pricing either completely automated or perhaps specify their own fixed thresholds.

Trade manager kinda like rebirth?

Not quite - I will try and explain it better later today.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

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.

L-size trade ships make excellent MORTS but the auto-trader mechanics seem to only plan a single trade run between two points and tend to not use the full available capacity available to larger vessels (at least most of the time IME). It has little or nothing to do with how long L/XL ships take to travel between those points.

[nickolaiproblem]

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.

L-size trade ships make excellent MORTS but the auto-trader mechanics seem to only plan a single trade run between two points and tend to not use the full available capacity available to larger vessels (at least most of the time IME). It has little or nothing to do with how long L/XL ships take to travel between those points.

So then would you see it as more beneficial to create mutiple sector jumps programed into autotrade for large ships

[nickolaiproblem]

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.

Perhaps we can go by ranks and ship sizes larger ships have different anchor point and hit mutiple sectors smaller ships are a point a to b kinda deal.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

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.

L-size trade ships make excellent MORTS but the auto-trader mechanics seem to only plan a single trade run between two points and tend to not use the full available capacity available to larger vessels (at least most of the time IME). It has little or nothing to do with how long L/XL ships take to travel between those points.

So then would you see it as more beneficial to create mutiple sector jumps programed into autotrade for large ships

In an ideal world maybe, but in practical terms no... the problem is the anticipated computational cost of doing this (we are not talking a simple search space) as the complexity of finding the best value trades automatically is likely to increase significantly and could create other issues with the in-game economy anyway.

For the larger ships, it would probably be best to have them work both as auto-traders (using current single run logic) and kind of mobile trading stations with logic akin to the following:-

1. Are there any good trade runs I have space for, if so identify the best run.
2. Do I have cargo not reserved for sale by a subordinate, if so can I make more profit (v. acquisition cost) selling it?
3. Execute the best of the two options.
4. In the mean time, trade role subordinates execute buy/sell runs for the parent vessel (using the vessel as the pick-up/drop-off point) based on thresholds (similar to intermediate wares on stations).

The larger vessel would be running an auto trade type command and subordinate traders would be feeding off the parent ship auto-trade configuration. This would notionally require a 4/5 star captain, maximum trading range of subordinates from the ship could be dictated by the L-ship captain's skill.

This principle could be applied to AI L/XL-size ship traders too.

[nickolaiproblem]

L-size trade ships make excellent MORTS but the auto-trader mechanics seem to only plan a single trade run between two points and tend to not use the full available capacity available to larger vessels (at least most of the time IME). It has little or nothing to do with how long L/XL ships take to travel between those points.

So then would you see it as more beneficial to create mutiple sector jumps programed into autotrade for large ships

In an ideal world maybe, but in practical terms no... the problem is the anticipated computational cost of doing this (we are not talking a simple search space) as the complexity of finding the best value trades automatically is likely to increase significantly and could create other issues with the in-game economy anyway.

For the larger ships, it would probably be best to have them work both as auto-traders (using current single run logic) and kind of mobile trading stations with logic akin to the following:-

1. Are there any good trade runs I have space for, if so identify the best run.
2. Do I have cargo not reserved for sale by a subordinate, if so can I make more profit (v. acquisition cost) selling it?
3. Execute the best of the two options.
4. In the mean time, trade role subordinates execute buy/sell runs for the parent vessel (using the vessel as the pick-up/drop-off point) based on thresholds (similar to intermediate wares on stations).

The larger vessel would be running an auto trade type command and subordinate traders would be feeding off the parent ship auto-trade configuration. This would notionally require a 4/5 star captain, maximum trading range of subordinates from the ship could be dictated by the L-ship captain's skill.

This principle could be applied to AI L/XL-size ship traders too.

So all l/xl class traders would be parent ships/motherships to smallers traders in a fleet style situation? Is this required is this required for autotrade to work if the player has only small and medium ships? Intriguing idea would love to hear more about it.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

...

So all l/xl class traders would be parent ships/motherships to smallers traders in a fleet style situation?

Not quite - it would be an entirely optional feature and not restricted to particular ship types per-se. The principle could be extended to miners so smaller mining vessels could continuously sell the wares that a larger miner is collecting (or visa versa).

Is this required is this required for autotrade to work if the player has only small and medium ships?

Nope - auto-trade currently works for S/M vessels. The only sting in the tail in the current implementation IME is the combined pilot/morale requirement.

Overall, the only change would be for L/XL craft since they would notionally not just trade directly but have trading subordinates working for them as well. A simple concept overall but the complication may be with the configuration screens for the larger traders. This principle could make the idea of using Carriers as traders quite appealing.

[Nafensoriel]

/snips

The current system is a single shipper. Period. This means no matter what happens to the universe it will always favour a very narrow part of the shipping fleet because its logic is only considering one spectrum of the entire chain. In X4 egosoft assumed that all freight movement can use identical logic.. they cant. A long haul trucking company vs a short haul require significant changes and often the definition between them is less than 100km. Yes, that is the real world but the logic in why they are different doesn't really change.

To explain it better a short haul(single system for all purposes a gamer cares about) shipper is focused entirely on their tiny portion of the universe. Their customers(the factories) don't give a rats ass what is happening in a city 1000km away unless it stops their primary need(resources) from arriving or leaving.

A long haul shipper generally doesn't care about the local economy as long as it's active. Their goal is efficiently moving massive amounts of goods between supplier to warehouse and warehouse to a distribution centre. (Yes a warehouse and a DC are different)

What does this mean for X4? It means you have short-haul shipping mentalities and you just can't make a logistics chain work that way without it being a hack job. Hell even in a city simulation game like Skylines you have to plan for long and short haul logic when building a massive city and that game has more wonkiness than you can shake a stick at. X4 is no different economically except for the fact that just about EVERYTHING in space is an industry of some kind. It makes it even MORE important to segregate the logic used to supply that industry.
Idleness is also not really a bad thing. Trade should be cyclical. It enhances how pricing works and stops an economy from entirely stagnating. Penny trades and low margin environment are BAD in every possible way for X4. It's boring as sin for one. It's potentially catastrophic if player actions or random chance kill the wrong station otherwise.


@Roger
Which uses more resources?
1 trade script that scans 700 stations every time it executes(assume a true universe trader here)
or
2 scripts where one only executes on local stations (5-20) and one executes on 15-50(whatever the sector count is when development stops) multiple times at a far slower interval.

Personally, I'd put both at dead even. The bonus is you could actually REDUCE the total number of trade ships required by the AI to maintain the background economy by designing it around volume warehouses and DC logic and have them handle more stations than the current rabbit stampede.

Your last solution is just segregation at the script btw. Doing it at the ship class itself arguably makes more sense and actually adds more to gameplay by expanding trade rather than expanding your ability to issue orders for trade. Not a bad idea though.

----------------------------
The size inefficiency isn't about speed directly but speed plays a role here. The inefficiency comes when a large ship takes a while. It might be moving at the same cargo/time EFFICIENCY as a smaller ship but the receiving and sending factories are not going to get a HIGHER efficiency from a slower ship unless it is a regular run. A factory without resources waiting on a large ship to arrive will enter operation later than one with 3 small ships attempting the same volume of resupply.
We can't do regular runs. This means in every single case an L trader is a bad option. It also makes a healthy LOOKING economy actually a very bad economy without any real telltales that we would get in real life such as workers getting a pay cut or laid off due to intermittent supply issues.

Trade docks need to have a 200-500% increase in storage capacity and the logic needs to be separated. There might be a case for 1-3 jumps as a "local limit" but without that buffer and without the price swings from goods movement the economy will always reach a dead stick point or be one small station away from being crippled. Honestly, we also need a non-war consumer as well. Trying to balance this whole shebang on destructed ships is going to always be an issue.

[nickolaiproblem]

/snips

The current system is a single shipper. Period. This means no matter what happens to the universe it will always favour a very narrow part of the shipping fleet because its logic is only considering one spectrum of the entire chain. In X4 egosoft assumed that all freight movement can use identical logic.. they cant. A long haul trucking company vs a short haul require significant changes and often the definition between them is less than 100km. Yes, that is the real world but the logic in why they are different doesn't really change.

To explain it better a short haul(single system for all purposes a gamer cares about) shipper is focused entirely on their tiny portion of the universe. Their customers(the factories) don't give a rats ass what is happening in a city 1000km away unless it stops their primary need(resources) from arriving or leaving.

A long haul shipper generally doesn't care about the local economy as long as it's active. Their goal is efficiently moving massive amounts of goods between supplier to warehouse and warehouse to a distribution centre. (Yes a warehouse and a DC are different)

What does this mean for X4? It means you have short-haul shipping mentalities and you just can't make a logistics chain work that way without it being a hack job. Hell even in a city simulation game like Skylines you have to plan for long and short haul logic when building a massive city and that game has more wonkiness than you can shake a stick at. X4 is no different economically except for the fact that just about EVERYTHING in space is an industry of some kind. It makes it even MORE important to segregate the logic used to supply that industry.
Idleness is also not really a bad thing. Trade should be cyclical. It enhances how pricing works and stops an economy from entirely stagnating. Penny trades and low margin environment are BAD in every possible way for X4. It's boring as sin for one. It's potentially catastrophic if player actions or random chance kill the wrong station otherwise.


@Roger
Which uses more resources?
1 trade script that scans 700 stations every time it executes(assume a true universe trader here)
or
2 scripts where one only executes on local stations (5-20) and one executes on 15-50(whatever the sector count is when development stops) multiple times at a far slower interval.

Personally, I'd put both at dead even. The bonus is you could actually REDUCE the total number of trade ships required by the AI to maintain the background economy by designing it around volume warehouses and DC logic and have them handle more stations than the current rabbit stampede.

Your last solution is just segregation at the script btw. Doing it at the ship class itself arguably makes more sense and actually adds more to gameplay by expanding trade rather than expanding your ability to issue orders for trade. Not a bad idea though.

----------------------------
The size inefficiency isn't about speed directly but speed plays a role here. The inefficiency comes when a large ship takes a while. It might be moving at the same cargo/time EFFICIENCY as a smaller ship but the receiving and sending factories are not going to get a HIGHER efficiency from a slower ship unless it is a regular run. A factory without resources waiting on a large ship to arrive will enter operation later than one with 3 small ships attempting the same volume of resupply.
We can't do regular runs. This means in every single case an L trader is a bad option. It also makes a healthy LOOKING economy actually a very bad economy without any real telltales that we would get in real life such as workers getting a pay cut or laid off due to intermittent supply issues.

Trade docks need to have a 200-500% increase in storage capacity and the logic needs to be separated. There might be a case for 1-3 jumps as a "local limit" but without that buffer and without the price swings from goods movement the economy will always reach a dead stick point or be one small station away from being crippled. Honestly, we also need a non-war consumer as well. Trying to balance this whole shebang on destructed ships is going to always be an issue.

I can definitely jump on board more resource sinks and more economic oppurtunities for the player.

[Imperial Good]

The resource sinks should in theory be enough, if everything was working correctly. The idea being that numerous stations get destroyed and rebuilt like with ships constantly fuelling demands. Of course the problem is this does not really happen, for example in over 12 hours of playing 2.00 and later only 2-3 stations have been heavily damaged (not even removed from the map) by the entire HOP with PAR conflict on both sides. All player built stations, parts of mission request, appear to remain forever with little threat of any of them eventually being destroyed. The only things getting destroyed are ships, which the AI will happily pay overly inflated prices for with a smile.

Trying to have a realistic approach to AI that stale mates without player intervention might not be desirable to achieve this. If the AI destroy too many stations one side would lose very fast, while if they do not destroy enough one gets a constant inflation of station numbers as the universe ages.

Having some kind of master plan engine which writes the history of what happens by setting up for the desired outcomes might be a better approach. For example it could plan that a faction should lose a specific sector to another faction. To achieve this it instructs the attacker faction to build a larger and powerful enough fleet to trash the sector while holding back orders for the defending faction so they will lose. Since the engine manages all factions it can plan carefully such that core sectors are not lost and that no faction is passively driven to extinction. When sectors are taken over new stations can be built creating constant demand for station related wares. When attacking or defending sectors lots of ships are lost constantly creating demand for lots of ships.

The player of course can fight against the will of the master plan engine and even cause outcomes to deviate from what it planned. For example they could stop a sector being lost to Xenon by personally dealing with the Xenon using their fleet. They could drive factions to extinction by personally destroying their last sectors. Even missions could be given more value as fleet assembly missions actually give the faction those ships to use against the other factions while defence stations can help defend sectors potentially changing outcomes.

That said I would not mind having non military resource sinks. For example civilian orientated economies. Instead of supplying just food and medicine, one could potentially supply them with more complex goods manufactured from other materials. This could be kept separate from simple population for production boosts, but rather be its own type of habitation. Such civilians might want to travel so it opens the potential for new classes of ships to accommodate such activities. However I am not sure the developers share such vision of a game since one must remember they primarily make space combat games as opposed to space city builders.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

@Roger
Which uses more resources?
1 trade script that scans 700 stations every time it executes(assume a true universe trader here)
or
2 scripts where one only executes on local stations (5-20) and one executes on 15-50(whatever the sector count is when development stops) multiple times at a far slower interval.

Personally, I'd put both at dead even. The bonus is you could actually REDUCE the total number of trade ships required by the AI to maintain the background economy by designing it around volume warehouses and DC logic and have them handle more stations than the current rabbit stampede.

Your last solution is just segregation at the script btw. Doing it at the ship class itself arguably makes more sense and actually adds more to gameplay by expanding trade rather than expanding your ability to issue orders for trade. Not a bad idea though.

There is no difference in my solutions - they are the same thing in essence.

The overriding point is to NOT focus too much on large transactions (unlike what some seem to want) but keep the vast majority of transactions deliberately small so as to allow for notionally optimal trading and more even distribution of wares while making a profit at the same time. The current trading logic would require very few changes to support this in theory - the main problem would be the UI elements. The approach itself is unlikely to significantly reduce the number of trade ships, the only difference is L/XL size ships used for trade will most likely make more efficient usage of their available cargo space. If anything, the opposite may actually happen.

The concept of a warehouse type station is already feasible for more than half of the wares by building minimal production chains into stations that consist of mainly storage (esp. since the introduction of player owned facilities for ship maintenance and fabrication) - my Player HQ station supports trading and production of most wares (exc. illegal wares only).

The OP of this thread also seemingly focused on free roaming trading rather than trading in general. In that particular context I would suggest an update to the auto-trader UI to allow for the ware trading restrictions for auto-traders to be optionally specified as a black list of wares rather than just a white list of wares. For example allowing the player to tell an auto-trader to just ignore spaceweed, spacefuel, and maja dust as opposed to having to select all wares except these.

[Nafensoriel]

/snips

Small trade systems have a very negative effect. They remove profit. With "live" pricing from stations both player and AI you will not get much margins. Getting 2c per EC sale eliminates that really as a profit angle from ECs.
Larger movement means larger margins with existing logic. Heck, even if you expand a production stations cargo you can see greater price swings and thus profit potential. Getting to the "critical" price points earlier WITHOUT bottoming out the factory is the ideal point for "trade" players.

The ideology for small is best works from a programming logic point of view but is very bad from an economic point of view. In this case, it's actually the worst of all worlds because it can rapidly end up killing the system. A good "game" economy has to be both large enough and volatile enough for a player to interject themselves inside of it without overriding it or being a prohibitive cost(time) wise. X4s economy doesn't allow for this and the autotrade scripts are partially to blame.
This is also critically important to a free roam trader be they player or AI. If the goods movement is to small to allow for consistent margin swings tramp trading becomes unfun in a hurry. In most other 4X games the economy is simulated with random "price crash/boom" schemes though these are obviously simulated hackjobs not an actual live economy that knows how many goods it has at any given time. It's not ideal to create artificial master plans or price events and the good news is x4s economy has the ability to do this just fine with a few changes!

So let's get into the logic first so we end up on the same page as to why large trades matter in some situations but not others.
Let's assume a simple logistics chain to explain as well:
---Producer:
Non-factor in X4. They should be simple stations but there is an important reason they never act like real life. Producers don't set pricing in X4.. warehouses do. This is weird but without a regional price scheme its also a very good idea. X4 doesn't really need a hardcore regional price system.
---Warehouse:
The first point of the X4 chain that mimics real logistics. Pump and dump. A warehouse doesn't sell goods. It packages them for transhipment. Low price for owners. High price for customers. Yes, X4 players can make superstations of doom with everything and the kitchen sink for sale but the majority of the economy is far more sane and limited. This class of logistics exists only to buffer producers into efficiently shippable packages. In real life, they'd do things like take the combined production of the paper industry so Walmart doesn't have to deal with one giant shipment of Toliet paper vs a mixed load of paper. Since X4 doesn't handle multi-good trades all that well we only care about volume and price at this point.
---Distribution Center:
This is what people think a warehouse is usually. It's actually a trade hub. A DC is focused exclusively on getting the lowest possible price before shipping to endpoint consumers. DCs create margins by design. Where a warehouse will store limited numbers of goods a DC will store everything and the kitchen sink and try desperately to sell it as fast as possible for as many units as possible. Turnover of space is king. In x4 these don't exist. They need to exist to balance and buffer production. Without them, goods in temporary overproduction can lose profits by becoming idle and goods with problematic supply have no way to exist. If a system trade hub could store engine parts between major faction wars it would go a long way to keeping the economy moving forward.
---Consumer:
Right now ship construction and factories to facilitate ship construction. Idealists will think enough ship destruction would be enough to support an economy but unfortunately, we need a background economy like the typical bric-a-brac system. In any system with an infinite resource generator, you need to have an infinite resource sink. Planets need to be able to consume a product to ensure the economy can continue to flow even during downtimes. This doesn't mean planets need to consume engine parts but rather consumer goods or energy cell class products. Food for one would be awesome for this both in a logical and gameplay sense. They trade cheap enough per volume to not overshadow higher tech goods and since their base consumption product is infinite its a good safe way to introduce newer players to trading and station building as well.

Right now with the game, we have a max class cargo range of 1000/3000 > 7900/18000 > 22000/55000 roughly which is actually terrible. Good sizes range from 1 to 38. I haven't done an average but I'd ballpark it at two peaks around 7 and 20.
Let's pick on a low tier... Ice. Max volume per hour produce is ~40k. Mid-Tier High Tech hull parts are 22k. The ubiquitous Engine Parts are ~14k.

Water produces 1320m3 every 2 minutes. (For a note it takes 2 minutes of production to power a meat farm which cycles every 7 minutes)
Hull parts produce 5500m3 every 15 minutes.
Engine parts produce 3600m3 every 15 minutes.
Silicon Wafers are 2160m3 every 3 minutes.


Notice how no factory can produce enough to single trade any single good for volumes over 10k? Actually, for the standard trade cycle time, it's under 5k.
Notice how almost all of them can be handled completely but slightly inefficiently by a medium ship?
Notice again how for lower tier goods they produce at seemingly insane rates for what they provide?

It's a great case of "technically a good idea but not in practice". The economy needs buffer points that allow resources to collect so large volumes can shift. If it is all small volume then any hiccup to something like hull parts or engine parts bring the universe to a screaming stuttering halt and remove an entire class of freighter from viability. Since these factions are at war with each other this happens in pretty much every single playthrough. Ideally, those buffer points would actually adjust the price as well. Local goods should be cheaper at a trade hub while imported goods should have a price premium. This is just to simulate regional pricing and wholesale. Things we don't have or probably want in X games.

Logistical segregation is critical to a functioning economy like this. You can hackjob it all you want with a single "truck" system but at the end of the day, you'll either create a world where the player is required to participate or where the player cannot participate meaningfully. As this is a 4X game the argument of "combat first" needs to be considered. If the game IS combat first... why waste your time on a living economy? Simulate it as every freelancer/elite game has. If you want to satisfy the "trade" component with a living economy some things need to be addressed.

The first step is ensuring gluts and droughts happen without negative production.
The second step is ensuring market segregation triggers the above with actual large volume moves of goods.
The third is to eliminate packet trades on a global scale. Packet trading an entire universe is a BAD idea and will never be balanced well without fakery.
The fourth step is to ensure all stations have enough volume and JUST enough volume to handle typical trade cycle times by the AI. We don't need water factories constantly full of water. You can just eliminate water at that point and give it directly to the infinite resource generation of the miners.

[nickolaiproblem]

@Roger
Which uses more resources?
1 trade script that scans 700 stations every time it executes(assume a true universe trader here)
or
2 scripts where one only executes on local stations (5-20) and one executes on 15-50(whatever the sector count is when development stops) multiple times at a far slower interval.

Personally, I'd put both at dead even. The bonus is you could actually REDUCE the total number of trade ships required by the AI to maintain the background economy by designing it around volume warehouses and DC logic and have them handle more stations than the current rabbit stampede.

Your last solution is just segregation at the script btw. Doing it at the ship class itself arguably makes more sense and actually adds more to gameplay by expanding trade rather than expanding your ability to issue orders for trade. Not a bad idea though.

There is no difference in my solutions - they are the same thing in essence.

The overriding point is to NOT focus too much on large transactions (unlike what some seem to want) but keep the vast majority of transactions deliberately small so as to allow for notionally optimal trading and more even distribution of wares while making a profit at the same time. The current trading logic would require very few changes to support this in theory - the main problem would be the UI elements. The approach itself is unlikely to significantly reduce the number of trade ships, the only difference is L/XL size ships used for trade will most likely make more efficient usage of their available cargo space. If anything, the opposite may actually happen.

The concept of a warehouse type station is already feasible for more than half of the wares by building minimal production chains into stations that consist of mainly storage (esp. since the introduction of player owned facilities for ship maintenance and fabrication) - my Player HQ station supports trading and production of most wares (exc. illegal wares only).

The OP of this thread also seemingly focused on free roaming trading rather than trading in general. In that particular context I would suggest an update to the auto-trader UI to allow for the ware trading restrictions for auto-traders to be optionally specified as a black list of wares rather than just a white list of wares. For example allowing the player to tell an auto-trader to just ignore spaceweed, spacefuel, and maja dust as opposed to having to select all wares except these.

I actually wouldn't be against that update if devs decide to make ui kinda like taters. I am a okay with that option. Warehousing is another great idea for long haul trading.

[nickolaiproblem]

/snips

Small trade systems have a very negative effect. They remove profit. With "live" pricing from stations both player and AI you will not get much margins. Getting 2c per EC sale eliminates that really as a profit angle from ECs.
Larger movement means larger margins with existing logic. Heck, even if you expand a production stations cargo you can see greater price swings and thus profit potential. Getting to the "critical" price points earlier WITHOUT bottoming out the factory is the ideal point for "trade" players.

The ideology for small is best works from a programming logic point of view but is very bad from an economic point of view. In this case, it's actually the worst of all worlds because it can rapidly end up killing the system. A good "game" economy has to be both large enough and volatile enough for a player to interject themselves inside of it without overriding it or being a prohibitive cost(time) wise. X4s economy doesn't allow for this and the autotrade scripts are partially to blame.
This is also critically important to a free roam trader be they player or AI. If the goods movement is to small to allow for consistent margin swings tramp trading becomes unfun in a hurry. In most other 4X games the economy is simulated with random "price crash/boom" schemes though these are obviously simulated hackjobs not an actual live economy that knows how many goods it has at any given time. It's not ideal to create artificial master plans or price events and the good news is x4s economy has the ability to do this just fine with a few changes!

So let's get into the logic first so we end up on the same page as to why large trades matter in some situations but not others.
Let's assume a simple logistics chain to explain as well:
---Producer:
Non-factor in X4. They should be simple stations but there is an important reason they never act like real life. Producers don't set pricing in X4.. warehouses do. This is weird but without a regional price scheme its also a very good idea. X4 doesn't really need a hardcore regional price system.
---Warehouse:
The first point of the X4 chain that mimics real logistics. Pump and dump. A warehouse doesn't sell goods. It packages them for transhipment. Low price for owners. High price for customers. Yes, X4 players can make superstations of doom with everything and the kitchen sink for sale but the majority of the economy is far more sane and limited. This class of logistics exists only to buffer producers into efficiently shippable packages. In real life, they'd do things like take the combined production of the paper industry so Walmart doesn't have to deal with one giant shipment of Toliet paper vs a mixed load of paper. Since X4 doesn't handle multi-good trades all that well we only care about volume and price at this point.
---Distribution Center:
This is what people think a warehouse is usually. It's actually a trade hub. A DC is focused exclusively on getting the lowest possible price before shipping to endpoint consumers. DCs create margins by design. Where a warehouse will store limited numbers of goods a DC will store everything and the kitchen sink and try desperately to sell it as fast as possible for as many units as possible. Turnover of space is king. In x4 these don't exist. They need to exist to balance and buffer production. Without them, goods in temporary overproduction can lose profits by becoming idle and goods with problematic supply have no way to exist. If a system trade hub could store engine parts between major faction wars it would go a long way to keeping the economy moving forward.
---Consumer:
Right now ship construction and factories to facilitate ship construction. Idealists will think enough ship destruction would be enough to support an economy but unfortunately, we need a background economy like the typical bric-a-brac system. In any system with an infinite resource generator, you need to have an infinite resource sink. Planets need to be able to consume a product to ensure the economy can continue to flow even during downtimes. This doesn't mean planets need to consume engine parts but rather consumer goods or energy cell class products. Food for one would be awesome for this both in a logical and gameplay sense. They trade cheap enough per volume to not overshadow higher tech goods and since their base consumption product is infinite its a good safe way to introduce newer players to trading and station building as well.

Right now with the game, we have a max class cargo range of 1000/3000 > 7900/18000 > 22000/55000 roughly which is actually terrible. Good sizes range from 1 to 38. I haven't done an average but I'd ballpark it at two peaks around 7 and 20.
Let's pick on a low tier... Ice. Max volume per hour produce is ~40k. Mid-Tier High Tech hull parts are 22k. The ubiquitous Engine Parts are ~14k.

Water produces 1320m3 every 2 minutes. (For a note it takes 2 minutes of production to power a meat farm which cycles every 7 minutes)
Hull parts produce 5500m3 every 15 minutes.
Engine parts produce 3600m3 every 15 minutes.
Silicon Wafers are 2160m3 every 3 minutes.


Notice how no factory can produce enough to single trade any single good for volumes over 10k? Actually, for the standard trade cycle time, it's under 5k.
Notice how almost all of them can be handled completely but slightly inefficiently by a medium ship?
Notice again how for lower tier goods they produce at seemingly insane rates for what they provide?

It's a great case of "technically a good idea but not in practice". The economy needs buffer points that allow resources to collect so large volumes can shift. If it is all small volume then any hiccup to something like hull parts or engine parts bring the universe to a screaming stuttering halt and remove an entire class of freighter from viability. Since these factions are at war with each other this happens in pretty much every single playthrough. Ideally, those buffer points would actually adjust the price as well. Local goods should be cheaper at a trade hub while imported goods should have a price premium. This is just to simulate regional pricing and wholesale. Things we don't have or probably want in X games.

Logistical segregation is critical to a functioning economy like this. You can hackjob it all you want with a single "truck" system but at the end of the day, you'll either create a world where the player is required to participate or where the player cannot participate meaningfully. As this is a 4X game the argument of "combat first" needs to be considered. If the game IS combat first... why waste your time on a living economy? Simulate it as every freelancer/elite game has. If you want to satisfy the "trade" component with a living economy some things need to be addressed.

The first step is ensuring gluts and droughts happen without negative production.
The second step is ensuring market segregation triggers the above with actual large volume moves of goods.
The third is to eliminate packet trades on a global scale. Packet trading an entire universe is a BAD idea and will never be balanced well without fakery.
The fourth step is to ensure all stations have enough volume and JUST enough volume to handle typical trade cycle times by the AI. We don't need water factories constantly full of water. You can just eliminate water at that point and give it directly to the infinite resource generation of the miners.

Do you think they could add all of this in a new update or do think something like this will take time?

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

/snips

Small trade systems have a very negative effect. They remove profit.

False - they may limit profit but they do not remove it. If they eliminated profit as you claim then no profit would be made from the current auto-trade scripts which is demonstrably and a factually false assertion.

Yes, more profit can be made by performing large trades using MORTs but if large trades were the norm there would be another problem - very few trading opportunities because most stations would start running at a loss.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

/snip

Do you think they could add all of this in a new update or do think something like this will take time?

Essentially, what they are pushing for is a complete rewrite of the X4 economy model - short answer, almost certainly aint going to happen.

[Nafensoriel]

/snips

Small trade systems have a very negative effect. They remove profit.

False - they may limit profit but they do not remove it. If they eliminated profit as you claim then no profit would be made from the current auto-trade scripts which is demonstrably and a factually false assertion.

Yes, more profit can be made by performing large trades using MORTs but if large trades were the norm there would be another problem - very few trading opportunities because most stations would start running at a loss.

Pendantic.
A profit is generally considered to be a "worthwhile investment". Time is always a factor. If you make less doing a task per hour even if the physical margin looks good it's not considered "profitable". X4 is penny packet trades that can be handled by S class ships for the most part. I did that as a fun experiment. Try it. Make 50 s class freighters. They'll make almost as much Cr per hour as a medium fleet and they are totally inefficient for the job.

Also no you are flat out completely and totally off base in assuming I want an economy rewrite. It's not needed. All the changes I want are effectively a code nudge not a whole mountain to climb. In fact, I point blank said multiple times there is a physical limit to how far X should head into "true economy" territory. Regional pricing, for example, is great in economic simulator games.. it's not really needed and a complete waste of time for X4. You can SIMULATE it however with a simple "check system producers > adjust price -2% else +2% price logic modifier". Many of these very helpful systems can be simulated very easily and actually add depth to the "Trade" part of 4X. It would also drastically improve the stutter-stop economic model currently used. I value SIMPLE changes that have effective results. You yourself admit the current model is penny packet trading. So why have it? What's the excuse to having a trading system so inept it can't even produce what games from the 80s did with hackjob fake modifiers just so it can run on one script for no good reason? If you are going to advertise "true economy" then it should be accepted that you need segregated shipping tasks. To do otherwise is just really terrible as we can see in the current state of the economy. Almost ALL of the problems with it are based on the asinine single truck system.

I want bluntly:
1 script which limits trades of S ships and all small grade M ships under 15000m3 to 1-3 sectors. This is basically the current autotrade script with an extra check for what hull it's on. Not rocket science.
1 script that runs on M ships over 15000m3 and L class ships which only considers trades from stations flagged as "trade hub" and makes multiple checks and reservations once it selects its first trade destination. Again mostly the current script. Not rocket science.
A Trade station with 250k m3/per max resource storage. I can do this in minutes. Take a trade dock or an equipment dock. It doesn't have to be fancy.
A tweak to the AI map to spawn more trade stations/relablled equipment docks. Preferably 1 station per 2-3 sectors. After thinking about what Imperial wrote a bit You could probably get away with 3 sector trade circles and it would probably make the economy more "safe" from casual destruction.

True I would like a rebalance pass on ware m3, cargo m3, and production per hour but that's a want. It's a want I'll probably do as a mod whenever I'm not in the middle of timbuktu. I might even release it this time .
Hell even making bric-a-brac isn't rocket science. Use food. Done. Make new "food" using low tier goods. Reuse station modules. Bribe some poor brat college kid into doing crappy art for you. How damn hard is it to make a dock labelled "planet drop off point" and have it reduce its current inventory on a regular tick? Not hard. Not illogical either since, again, the game is based off infinite rock generation.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Small trade systems have a very negative effect. They remove profit.

False - they may limit profit but they do not remove it. If they eliminated profit as you claim then no profit would be made from the current auto-trade scripts which is demonstrably and a factually false assertion.

Yes, more profit can be made by performing large trades using MORTs but if large trades were the norm there would be another problem - very few trading opportunities because most stations would start running at a loss.

Pendantic.
A profit is generally considered to be a "worthwhile investment". Time is always a factor. If you make less doing a task per hour even if the physical margin looks good it's not considered "profitable". X4 is penny packet trades that can be handled by S class ships for the most part. I did that as a fun experiment. Try it. Make 50 s class freighters. They'll make almost as much Cr per hour as a medium fleet and they are totally inefficient for the job.

Not pedantic and while Rate of ROI may be factor it is not what determines whether something can be ultimately considered profitable - providing credits are generated then profit is being made ergo being profitable in nature (i.e. not running at a loss).

Worthwhile investment is a relative and subjective term, there are no hard and fast rules that define it. In the context of X4 specifically, you have to consider the way the overall economy is balanced and how profit from specific activities maps on to that.

In order for the economy model in X4 to be stable, the "penny packet" trades (as you put it) are the only viable option for the mainstream automated trades due to various factors. Bulk trading in X4 is too biased in favour of the trader and without major changes to the underlying economy model making bulk trades the norm would be a disaster due to the way prices are automatically balanced overall. In order to avoid the issues, bulk trades would need to be more expensive per unit than the smaller trades and the price management would need to be coupled to ware production/acquisition prices rather than based purely on stock levels as it currently is. Something I can not seen happening nor being universally popular.

If you want to make the larger profits in X4 then you need to operate one or more stations - rank and file free trading is just a small step along the path in the context of X4. The main profits come from operating stations and the biggest profits come from operating ship fabrication and maintenance facilities - both in terms of reducing own fleet building/operating costs and in terms of selling ship fabrication/maintenance services to the AI. Manual ware price management at those stations is also key to ensure they do not operate at a loss, especially if you operate open loop complexes allowing trading in intermediate wares.

As for S-traders v. M-traders, S-traders may execute smaller trades than their M-trader cousins but that also means a notionally lower risk from trade ship losses too. The current economy model is balanced for M-traders, that much is clear both from a free-roaming auto-trader perspective and a station supplier perspective. The main economy role for L traders is station construction and MORTS - there is nothing wrong with this, and it is consistent with the precedent set by previous X-games too. The fundamental role of the legacy X1-X3 TL class vessels is split between the L-Freighters and the XL-Builders. UTs/STs were historically TS class vessels which map most closely to the M-transport/S-Courier vessels.

[EDIT]FTR I disagree that auto-trader trading range should be inherently limited by ship type, the player should perhaps be able to have (entirely optional) tighter control of their station traders. For example, if you have a station that produces illegal wares, you should be able to tell your own traders not to trade in those wares.[/EDIT]

[pref]

Imo profit is much less important then the inability to use the wares produced in a meaningful, planned way.

ATs are mostly fine for some generic income.
What the game lacks a LOT is a script which allows defining supply routes, or ware/resource flow. I find it really sad that in an economic sim we only have a single less advanced tool for fire and forget money printing.
And nothing that allows for having a purpose regarding production and trade.

There should be at least 1 more command which lets us tell the pilot what wares should be moved between what entities, with a price/storage level setting so it works for both player and NPC complexes.
I'd prefer this to work for ships, as that is easier to implement and more flexible to use then XR like warehouses, or any kind of logistic centres.

It could even be the same AT script with more parameters, like a list of suppliers and consumers with price or storage setting to sell/buy - that would also take care of cargo utilisation.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Imo profit is much less important then the inability to use the wares produced in a meaningful, planned way.

I think I can go with what you are saying but...

It is not entirely true now we have player owned ship yards and equipment docks. Even before that, a good portion of the wares would be used either in the operation or construction of stations. As it stands, the only wares that really do not have a direct use are space weed, space fuel, maja dust, and nividium. These four exceptions are seemingly just sinked by the economy in X4 - all other wares are a means to an end.

We do have the ability to make huge self-sufficient complexes which does kind of make any direct supply chain commands moot, although I do agree that it would be a nice feature to have.

Arguably, this would ideally be addressed by adding the ability to set preferred suppliers/customers for given wares at given stations thereby indicating to the manager that their traders should pick particular stations over all others for sales/purchases. In the short term, adding the ability to auto-repeat a particular MORT/Ware-Exchange order would perhaps suffice (if less than ideal IMO).