Potential trigger for trading ship bug? (also a request to the community)

[Legionnaire]

I believe i might have uncovered one aspect of whats causing the trading bug where ships sit still doing nothing. In my game i can trigger it everytime, and in fact its currently triggered on one of my ships the Rahanas (container). This ship has a total of 22064 Food Rations aboard. The trade that is currently setup iirc is for 28,854 which is what the buy order was for, not the maximum on the ship. so if that is done, and not noticed before its finalized the captain accepts the order , and your bugged, doesnt matter what additional trade missions you setup, because it can't complete the first one it does nothing.

I have enclosed a link to where i have uploaded my savegame, However, It is a modded savegame, so i have also included the extensions in the 7 - zip file.

If anyone who reads this has a similar situation but unmodded could they post up a copy of the saves for the devs to look into please?

My Modded save http://www.mediafire.com/download/3ampc ... 0folder.7z

Legionnaire

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

After reading your OP a few times, I think you have raised a red-herring.

I have been quite happily trading in Energy Cells in my most successful play through buying 32500 (the maximum I can carry in the current configuration) and selling the entire load at stations asking for more than that.

The problems I have seen appear to be when a trade can not complete due to the station capacity/availability at time of docking being lower than expected.

[Legionnaire]

I'm actually wondering if there's a couple of issues in the two threads this one and the one about drones, So really I need to see if there's a way to easily see how much a station has in stock in comparison to total amount they can hold, unfortunately i haven't seen an easy way to find this, unless I'm missing something obvious.

Legionnaire

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

If you mean via the UI - For me, the setting up of the trade in the trade menu does not allow me to exceed the limits at the time of setup of the trade order.

For example: if I have 1 million credits and the trade ship is only able to carry 1 thousand credits (purchase price) of cargo because of carrying limits then it will not allow me to load up more than the 1 thousand credits of cargo. If I go to sell the cargo it will only take what I have and not what the station requires in total.

There is a bug where the trade menu gets confused if you double dip a station in the current trade queue (i.e. try to set up multiple runs of a ware between two stations). My workaround for this is to never add more than two trading orders to the trade queue. When the first order is complete I can add the third order which then appears as the second order in the current trade order queue.

[Legionnaire]

The situation I'm having is that the stations buy order is for a higher amount than the ship is carrying, when you set up the sell order, its setting it to the amount the station is asking for not the amount that is on the ship. This means that the ship is unable to complete the tade, and so sits there non-responsive. this then prevents it from completing any further trades, purchase or sell that may be setup, and it is possible that its blocking the tradeports for other ships. Hence why me posting this with a link to my savegame and unfortunately because I'm running with mods I've linked that folder as well, Hence the request to the community if anyone had an unmodded save that was showing the same symptoms to post it up for the devs.

Legionnaire

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

I have not seen that issue in regular trading. Are you talking about completing Trade missions? I believe I have seen something similar to what you are describing then (a game engine bug if you ask me).

[Scoob]

I've observed the issue Legionnaire is refering to. It's one of the reasons I always explicitly set a buy/sell amount, rather than assume the slider is "smart". Despite this, I still regularly get trades that stall.

For me, it's always the Drones that stop working eventually. Either they'll fly to the station, but not return (either buying or selling) or they will return, but not be allocated back to the free pool of available drones. Often this locks the ship in place, I assume it's still waiting for the drones to return, but they in fact already have. Some trigger is failing.

Sometimes it can look like you've "fixed" things, but doing a remove/add to squad. This can sometimes reset things, but you might loose cash. However, longer term your trade ship will still be stuck with some of it's drones flagged as in-use. If you have lots of spare drones, you might get away with "resetting" (via remove/add to squad) several more trades, before the ship thinks it has no free drones, and stops all together.

While buy/sell amounts are certainly problematic at times - the slider letting you select to sell more than you have - I think drones are a larger problem as I always explicitly manage ware purchase based on demand.

I wonder, if a station wants 50,000 food because it has space for 50,000 food before it's full. Surely other NPC traders would be filling orders during that time. So the player and an NPC might BOTH be delivering 30,000 food and whoever is second will have problems. I would have though the new economy would handle this automatically, as the SELL deal (so, amount and price) is agreed before either ships sets off. So, you may well have bought 30,000 food with the intention of sell the lot. But if, when you go to the Offers screen, an NPC has already taken his 30,000 offer, the new offer should be reduced to 20,000. You should never be stuck trying to deliver 30,000 when there's only room for 20,000. But I suspect a bug is allowing exactly this.

Doing both the Buy/Sell steps together, should pretty much eliminate the chance of being "beaten" and there's no way the value should be able to change after you've taken the Offer as that's a fundamental of the new system. To all intents and purposes, once you've accepted the Offer and agreed to deliver your 30,000 food, the Station in question should act like it's already had your delivery, so it should know if only needs a further 20,000 to be full. Obviously this would be revised only if the trade was cancelled / ship destroyed.

The trade system how it's designed to work should be fairly robust, but there's a problem with the implementation somewhere.

Scoob.