Can we get some control over station miners and traders?

[StormMagi]

As much fun as I am having with X4, I have been giving some serious thought to playing Rebirth (stopped before first addon due to campaign stopping bug and life happened so never restarted) or AP (since my X3 time was all in TC) for a year or so until first DLC is out and some QOL fixes are in. Which sucks because I am having fun in X4 but at the same time, there are many slight annoyances (that I am fairly sure will be fixed) that kinda add up.

I've pretty much been doing the same. I'll play X4 for an hour or two until the bugs, broken features, and lack of content get to be too much, and then I quit out and play X3 or Rebirth for a few days. Repeat every time a patch comes out.

There are a ton of fundamental things that simply don't work, but the station / auto traders part is what's killing me most. I'm tired of seeing trade ships with 12,000 m3 of cargo space only trading 50 m3 of wares to a station whose storage is nearly full, when meanwhile, in the sector next door, there is a shipyard whose production is halted because it is missing 30,000 units of the same ware.

I've tried every workaround suggested. I've tried auto-traders with one ware, but they never actually do any trade runs. I've tried dropping the prices of the ware, but my traders will still only sell 50 m3. I've tried using s-class cargo ships so they can complete the runs quicker, but when they finish the run, they sit idly doing nothing for 10 minutes, before loading up on, you guessed it, 50 m3 of wares.

At this point I more or less just farm ventures for paint jobs while playing Rebirth (since I had never beaten campaign), though I am using mods to cheat a bit with money there >_>

[ajime]

Was about to suggest something similar to what akeelah posted. If you want control over these miners, why assign them to the station in the first place? (Note that that wasn't a rhetorical question. i really would like to know what people think assigning something to be subordinate to something else means in the game.)

Subordinates allows for a nice "clean" owned property tab instead of a massive list of unassigned ships on autotrade, which can get pretty messy as your empire grows. It also helps a lot to keep track of all your ships thanks to the number of subordinates shown for each station on the property tab. It's just more efficient to have ships listed under the factory they work for.

This

[RegisterMe]

Was about to suggest something similar to what akeelah posted. If you want control over these miners, why assign them to the station in the first place? (Note that that wasn't a rhetorical question. i really would like to know what people think assigning something to be subordinate to something else means in the game.)

Here's an example from my last beta 2 H3 (deleted) game. I had set up a factory in Pious Mists II producing engine parts, hull parts and smart chips. As such it required hydrogen, methane, ore and silicon as base level resources. I assigned 1 L ore miner, 1 L gas miner, 5 M ore miners and 2 M gas miners to it. I do this for two reasons, the first being to reduce micro-management, the second to reduce HUD / list clutter. I had placed various resource probes around Pious Mists IV and XI which revealed a nice mix of the resources I required.

What I would expect is as follows:-

1. In preference they would mine resources to support production of the highest market value factory output. Failing this they would mine resources to balance production of the factory output. Failing this I should be able to influence what they mine.
2. They mine in the areas with the highest resource values uncovered by the resource probes I dropped.

What I experience is:-

1. They mine ore and hydrogen exclusively until some hidden threshold is reached (I'm guessing it's based on percentages of station storage used up).
2. They don't go to the areas I have covered with resource probes, instead they track off way to the east of the Khaak station (when the resource probes were way to the west of the Khaak station) to a location that not only I hadn't covered with resource probes, it was in fact still fog of war prior to the station's construction.

In addition to this I expect to be able to understand:-

1. What behaviour is being executed.
2. Why it is being executed.
3. What impact various captain and station manager skills have on all operations.

I'll keep this focused solely on station subordinated miners, but I have similar issues and frustrations with station subordinated traders and autonomous miners and traders. These issues have been exacerbated by the skill gating in beta 2 H 3.

I currently have no active game running. That's nearly two hundred hours of play on my part to give up in frustration at how buggy and obtuse X4 remains at this point.