Creating a "Warehouse" station

[Scoob]

Hey all,

So, as I have little use for the "free" Player HQ station - certainly in its current location - I decided to simply add some storage and use it as a Warehouse, dropping off any looted goods I may have acquired. I've set up Sell Orders for many of these items and the station has sold them off for me. It's not big money, but it's still money lol.

My Warehouse had finally sold all the loot aboard - I'm not wrecking stations any more and picking up the drops, I was doing that to clear out some SCA stations, as the SCA pirated one of my stations when I could do little about it. So, the entries for those Wares has vanished from the Logical Overview screen

Anyway, I noticed that I could buy EC's for 10cr within two jumps - one of my Stations has an excess and there's a TEL SPP one gate away - and they could often sell them for 16 or even 20cr within that same range. So, I set up both Buy and Sell Orders at the station. My ships - two S-Class Couriers and four M-Class Transporters - are not very responsive, but they do buy cheap and sell high, which is good. However, there's one issue that's a major block to profits...they only buy a handful of EC's at a time. My Couriers - which can hold almost 2,000 EC's - buy 6, just 6 at a time. My Transporters - which can hold over 9,000 - buy just 200. That's terrible!

I've given the Warehouse 500k credits, allocated 150k storage and confirmed that EC's are available for 10cr within their working range - current two sectors. However, they're both quite unresponsive, sitting around "searching for Trades" for ages, then they buy tiny amounts. I'm not sure what's wrong here.

I've tried removing the Sell offer to have the Warehouse just hoard EC's - no selling - yet the ships still rarely make a trade and, when they do, it's for the aforementioned tiny amounts. I'd assumed that, keeping it simple, with ample funds, storage, assigned ships and a BUY order a station would, well, buy stuff until the storage is full. It's not doing this however.

Note: I popped this in the main forum, but I am currently using 3.0 Beta 5 HF1 and I'm unsure whether this is a bug, or if it's working this way in 2.6.

The UI gives me all the tools I need to set this up, and it works, but trade volumes are tiny. Plus ships just hang around doing nothing most of the time.

Note 2: This Warehouse has had various wares on it since I set it up, but ONLY Drone Components (for Defence Drones) and Energy Cells are left. However, when I add a ship to the Trade Group, it shows a list of 21 wares - including all of those that are long gone.

Regardless, something is stopping this from working, and I can't figure out what. I have a thread in the Beta Testing Forum discussing this and a related issue, but I wanted to open it up here too.

I'm sure others have tried making a Warehouse like me, have you run into this weird lack-lustre trading activity and tiny ware volumes too?

Edit: After some more testing, this is budget related, but not for a valid reason. With a 500,000cr balance my ships buy rarely and in very low volumes as described. If I give the station 5,000,000cr it buys 10x the amount - which still isn't much, about 10-15% of the ship's capacity. However, upping the station account to 50 MILLION Credits, sees the Trade ships all wake up, make trades more regularly and fill up their holds. So, that's the way to get this working, but why? With my initial 500k budget, the station could buy 50k EC's and sell them for a 60%+ markup. With a decent number of Trade ships working the station, this could mount up. So, for a minimal investment - the station was free, so just the Storage Module cost and some start-up capital - this station would make a decent, steady profit. With the need for a 50 MILLION Credit starting capital...well, that ain't cheap.

I've updated my Beta Forum post with this information - I wonder what the underlying calculations are doing to need 50 MILLION Credits in the station account. A bug of some sort, surely?

Cheers,

Scoob.

[ajime]

I play around with the storage / buy price for this. Generally i keep the storage size low (EC at 10k at most) and manually set the buy price high. Leaving stations to do it automatically tends to be questionable at best.

[Scoob]

There's something basically broken about this currently, assigned (and NPC) ships simply do not work properly with a station set up in this way. Adding an insane initial budget helps, but they stop buying stuff once the allocated storage is about 10% full. I can't explain it.

I hope this can be looked at and the devs can figure out what's going wrong. We REALLY need to be able to assign ships to duties manually - it's almost essential now to get anything remotely interesting working. If we can manually assign a ship to just buy or sell given wares and also have separate buy / sell faction restrictions, then we'll be able to have fully automated warehouses.

With how things work currently we have no real control over what a station-assigned trader will actually do. This simply cannot work with how things are implemented at the moment, it's very frustrating.

I recall in earlier X Games, station assigned ships were VERY limited, one ship per ware and only buy OR sell, not both. However, this gave great control over what was done. Later ships got smarter with more options, but we never lost the basics. Now, in X4, they've added super complex automatic trade commands, over which we have zero control, so things like this simply do not work.

I think this must be some sort of bug in the trade script. I mean, I have a station that NEEDS a ware, there are lots of stations SELLING the ware dirt cheap, I have LOTS of storage for the ware and the credits to buy them, plus there are several ships explicitly assigned to satisfy the station's needs yet they simply don't work.

Getting a functional Warehouse was a little project of mine, but I've proven it cannot work with the current restricted orders (i.e. ONE order) we have currently. I really hope the devs can build on this as, for a player who like tinkering with the economy via their own stations, the game is quite weak in this regard.

Basically, I need my station-assigned ships to do what their told, but I have no way to tell them what I need and their default "Trade" script when assigned to the station doesn't do the job.

Note: I've had this working GREAT in earlier game versions via mods. The functionality these mods offer (Station Mules as one example) really needs to form part of the base game, perhaps with a little tweaking for balance.

Scoob.

[kroobzh]

I support the foregoing. I would like to have a little more control over subordinate merchant ships. At least for those who sell goods and who purchase raw materials.

[Browser_ice]

Hi, could you add in your thread title that this is about Beta 3.*?

I was lead hear because I thought you were talking about the current 2.6 version.

[ubuntufreakdragon]

I wrote something about Warehouses in the German X4 Forum recently.
Atm the buy limit must be below the sell limit which makes it impossible to create an automatic Warehouse.
So we need a new toggle per ware in the logistical overview.
If on buy limit can be higher than sell limit but auto pricing is restricted to not cross the average value of a ware, so auto buy prices are between min and avg price and auto sell prices between avg and max price of a ware.

I also mentioned some changes that have to be made to the station's tradeship's AI.

[Nort The Fragrent]

I have on many occasions requested ES do a station Video showing how best to use the station overview.
As I find it bewildering,
Not only bewildering but as the OP, there seems to be little to no control over what the stations trading ships do, how much they carry. Usually only 10 items !!
I set up a trading station, buying low, and selling high. But no matter how I configured the pricing the station slowly ran out and lost money.

The station Trading / ship configuration is next to hopeless the way it is.

I doubt ES will do a video as even they don't know how to get it working !!!!!!

But then again if they do know the secret, please DO AN EXPLANATORY VIDEO

[pref]

There's something basically broken about this currently, assigned (and NPC) ships simply do not work properly with a station set up in this way.

I remember reading a similar post where a dev replied that player shouldn't expect station traders to be used like this, rather should employ autotraders in similar cases.
Never understood the thinking behind that, but i had much more success with ATs configured for specific ware(s).
Station traders probably have different logic/priorities/skill utilisation or whatnot.

So i'd just start an AT for ecells only, with appropriate prices and range/faction restrictions, and see how it goes. Range is compared to starting sector iirc so you can just start the AT midway between supplier and consumer and have an even higher range restriction (in case you just want to target that specific supplier).

This was on 2.0 so stuff might have changed since.

[Scoob]

It still strikes me as an odd choice that we get functionality that does so much, but tries to do it all at once - removing the players choice from the mix. I look back at the older X games, where the most basic Trade command was buy this or sell that. One ship. One ware. One direction (Buy / Sell). Simple, but equally giving such great control.

Gaining command queuing in X4 has been a huge leap and something people have asked about for years. Yet with this enhanced sophistication, we've lost the basic "Just Buy and/or Sell Ware X". Ship assigned to a station try to do everything and this has often caused problems. Originally, in earlier X4 versions and like X Rebirth before it, station-assigned trade ships would favour one ware over another, often leaving a station full of one ware while empty of another with production stalled. However, ES did make some improvements here so, with credits and enough ships a station-owned trade fleet would keep a station fed and its produce sold. Worked fairly well.

Then of course, ES fixed a "Bug" that largely broke the economic game in many ways. That "bug" was related to how far a Trade ship could venture from the station it works for. One update changed ships from roaming the galaxy to sell stuff - just like earlier games - to being limited to going just one sector away at low levels. This killed the economic side of one of my games in progress instantly. My ships couldn't supply their station with what it needed nor sell what it produced as readily - or at all in some cases. Even "levelled up" ships and managers were heavily restricted as they seemed to now not want to venture further for the deal, even if they had expanded their range over time. I.e. my trade ships NEVER selling to stations of mine, despite being both in desperate need (no high prices) and well in range - their trade offers are never attractive to the AI pilots of my own stations.

I just wish we could assign ships to a station under multiple trade roles. The current "auto trader" role, where they do their best to satisfy the station, as well as other roles where the player gains FULL control over what they do, with with it's own limitation. I.e. One ship, one ware, buy OR sell. Limiting as one ship can only manage one ware in one direction, but hugely powerful at the same time for the same reason.

Equally, things like repeat jobs, the queue system makes this simple. Order a ship to buy or collect a ware from station A and sell or transfer it to station B. Having a full "courier" type set up with one ship taking a ware, or several wares, and moving them to other stations would be trivial. Give the orders and tag a "repeat" order on the end. Allow the UI to set "supply to limit" and set whether it factors cost / profit / travel distance etc. and you've got some very powerful control.

Mods already add a lot of this and they're fantastic. Trying to do such things in vanilla though makes the game feel unfinished, like a feature simply isn't complete or is missing. My Warehouse experiment highlights this, it sorta works, but the AI is broken when it comes to volumes - because the player has NO control over what a station-assigned ship actually does. We can SEE the wares lists, but it's greyed out, impossible to interact with. Why? Why take control from the player like this?

X4 is improving over time, as is the norm for all X games that came before. However, one of its weakest areas is the lack of player control when it comes to trading in general. I'd say ES need to sort this, ideally they will, but modders definitely will. If modders can do it, I'd have thought the devs would be able to put in more elegant solutions themselves, being close to the code and all that - indeed, able to tweak the code to allow things to work better.

I know ES have their vision of one command (assigning a ship to "Trade" duties) covering EVERYTHING, but it doesn't really work well as robs the player of control. That's a shame.

Scoob.

[Nort The Fragrent]

I am playing Elite dangerous, I can not be bother with X4 as it is, It's not ready, Fractured, and needs a lot of work.
I will come back to X4, but not for some time to come, It is too simple, with fundamental stuff missing. Trade control !!!!