Does Auto Trade Really Work and even worth the risk / reward as Mining?

[StoneLegionYT]

I have not really seen much growth to Auto Trading in Fact I had them running for a day doing transactions and I think I made like not even 1 Million with 20 ships. On the other hand 20+ Miners can make many millions and there is no risk as their not having to buy cargo to sell.

It just seems something is broken with Auto Trading even after all the updates. Or at least seems to have next to no real value.


I really miss X Rebrth trade system. You hit 1 hotkey and you could manually do it and at least see you just made a 5 million profit.

[Iosevus]

My medium traders tend to do pretty well, not to mention they keep the economy moving so stations have resource demands, but the miners do perform a bit better. Especially the new nvidium miner.. which probably needs to be looked at, 300k per run seems a bit easy mode.

[StoneLegionYT]

My medium traders tend to do pretty well, not to mention they keep the economy moving so stations have resource demands, but the miners do perform a bit better. Especially the new nvidium miner.. which probably needs to be looked at, 300k per run seems a bit easy mode.

Trust me that Miner will not last long. It's because they got 0 in stock and feels up quite rapidly.

[Iosevus]

I hope so, but it's been going strong for about 5 hours.

[otto_deluxe]

I think the problem with traders is still tied to the slow economy. There just aren't any good opportunities left for trade ~10 hours in, since a lot of stations are full and the market is saturated. At least that was the case in my game(s). At the very start, my M traders actually made some decent profits, mainly hauling medical supplies. They sure are pirate fodder, though, and the default of "attack" does not help the case. First thing I always do is set the default to "escape", and pray
Im my experience, miners also tended to perform much more consistently. Another thing with traders is: I don't know if the auto trader will trade with stations you have not discvered yet, so unless you explore a lot beforehand and drop sats at every station, they might just not find any trade offers (and then there are the bugs and problems that were mentioned in the patchnotes...)

[fcth]

My traders seem more profitable in general than the miners (I haven't actually exported logs or anything to verify). The miners bring in ~20k credits per run. The traders do make a lot of low profit runs, but they also routinely make 100k runs, and I've seen some 500k runs. One thing to note is that having a well developed satellite network (or a trade offer subscription?) seems to really help them. Without being able to see deals in other sectors, they'll just hang out where you start them, probably making low profit runs. More satellites seems to let them spread out to more profitable endeavors.

[fcth]

the default of "attack" does not help the case. First thing I always do is set the default to "escape", and pray

Escape doesn't work very against Behemoths from what I can see, missiles seem quite able to mess up fleeing ships quickly. I tried changing to comply, but it's not clear that that did anything useful either.

[zakaluka]

Yeah autotraders seem to drive farther than autominers and only really get decent return with a huge amount of capital risk. At least with autominers you can keep them in a limited area and you're only really risking the hull.

But still, the absolute best use of resources is manufacturing and you just kind of need your base storage to keep emptying. So, there are a few things you can do.

A big one is to just set them trading resources that shipyards are getting bottlenecked on. ((Hull parts)). So just use them to plug gaps in the economy simulation or keep your own bases from filling up on production.

[pref]

I found trading is X4 is much more to my liking then that of XR.
The map is way better to do manual runs then that excel like table XR had for trades, and my autotraders bring a really nice income - i could start another M trader every 10-20mins when i had like 4-5 traders only.
I only needed to ensure that i always have like 500k available for them to operate smoothly and not running around with 1% cargo space occupied, and had to deploy a few sats here and there.
Plus they stimulate the economy which will mean more stations and even more profits in the end. Lightyears better then the stale XR system.

Mining just allows certain stations to produce wares, but those will stop when there is no demand for their products. It is a sure low income, but will not allow for economic expansion, while autotraders do.