How Trade Works, so we can get the best out of it (1.32)

[Miravlix]

AutoTrader optimization

AutoTraders buy from one station and sells to one station, they don't seem to consider the amount or how much the ship can hold, so a large ship will go buy 10 of and item and then go to a station to sell it, even if it leaves 99% of it's cargo hold empty.

That means we want fast ships, so even if it picks up and complete small amount trades it completes them fast.


Size of wares

Wares come in different sizes, so you might be able to trade huge amount of energy cells in a ship, but only a few engine parts in the same ship.

How many of an item exist on each station
You have to consider the average amount available of an item on each station, buying a Shuyaka isn't overly useful as it need huge amounts of items to fill it's cargo and it can't use the super highway to move around the universe, so it moves really slowly, I think someone also figured out that the price of cargo space in a single ship is worse than many smaller ships with the same space.

My ship building stations has a shortage of engine parts, an item that is really big, even the L traders can only move 1K-2K of them, so maybe that is one of the items you want to move with a large trader, but I'm not sure having something like 5 M trader (to get the same space as a L) could do the same job faster and they are less likely to get stuck with less than a full cargo hold.


AutoMiner

Here Large ships seem to perform better than as an autotrader, but you still run into the problem of them having a hard time moving from the mining spot to the station and I think the price of the cargo hold is better spend on many smaller ships with the same cargo space, because they can use the highway and move faster.

You don't want to supply faster than the demand, because the trader only hit's one station to sell, so it's important that the station can buy the full amount.

My universe has something like 100K ore demand, 30K silicon, 80K Ice, Nividium seems to have a demand at the start of the game (allowing you to make around 40m creds selling it), but after supplying that, it seems like it regenerate extremely slowly or NPC traders is supplying it, because all I can find is a demand for less than 10 Nividium every time I check. So rush miners, focus on Nvidium, then switch to the other types.


Station Trader

You only want one trader for each station, the station seems to sent all the ships to buy the same items, without any coordination, so say the base need 100 food, then all the ships will go buy 100 food, but only one of them can offload.

Speed seems to win over Cargo Space. The shorter the time between runs the better it can adjust to change in demand at the station.

Auto Miner

Life is a bit simpler for a miner, it goes to mine it delivers, still buying a L miner does come with the alreay mentioned problems of bad cargo to price point and it has a hard time traveling, also it can barely dock if you are in the same zone. So M miner, though I feel it's okay to focus on cargo space over speed.

[ApoxNM]

AutoTrader optimization


Station Trader

You only want one trader for each station, the station seems to sent all the ships to buy the same items, without any coordination, so say the base need 100 food, then all the ships will go buy 100 food, but only one of them can offload.

But this, in my opinion, is either terrible game design, or a bug.

[thanos]

They also prioritize buying food & medicines over selling product. And they keep buying food & medicines until storage is full. Which, for an L-sized storage, is...a lot of stuff.

Because of this, I don't build habitats on stations.

[ApoxNM]

They also prioritize buying food & medicines over selling product. And they keep buying food & medicines until storage is full. Which, for an L-sized storage, is...a lot of stuff.

Because of this, I don't build habitats on stations.

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/106

That's the fix I use, the only way to actually controll wares.

[Notak]

You don't want to supply faster than the demand, because the trader only hit's one station to sell, so it's important that the station can buy the full amount.

I need clarification on this... my traders trade with multiple stations for buy and sell actions... in which situation does what you describing occur?

[Notak]

They also prioritize buying food & medicines over selling product. And they keep buying food & medicines until storage is full. Which, for an L-sized storage, is...a lot of stuff.

Because of this, I don't build habitats on stations.

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/106

That's the fix I use, the only way to actually controll wares.

How can you mod a game so early on at least play the game as the devs intended xD

honestly mod if you want to just amazed ppl are playing modded games so quickly xD

[ApoxNM]

They also prioritize buying food & medicines over selling product. And they keep buying food & medicines until storage is full. Which, for an L-sized storage, is...a lot of stuff.

Because of this, I don't build habitats on stations.

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/106

That's the fix I use, the only way to actually controll wares.

How can you mod a game so early on at least play the game as the devs intended xD

honestly mod if you want to just amazed ppl are playing modded games so quickly xD

I have about 12 mods running, because I quite frankly think many things were very bad design choices and many things are missing and broken. I paid, I want to have fun, I don't care what the devs intended.

The fact that you can't control your traders or asign specific tasks (like in previous X games) is unbelievable. They dumbed down many aspects of the game for a broader audience I suppose. While some features might be better than before, the game is too buggy right now. weapon balancing sucks, AI pathing sucks. Turrets don't work. Mods fix it, why wait if modders are faster in fixing minor things, while egosoft is focsuing on the hardcore issues with crashes and black sreens?

[cTrix]

Should be noted that stations are currently bugged in how they buy wares, Fix is announced for 1.5

[cTrix]

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/106

That's the fix I use, the only way to actually controll wares.

How can you mod a game so early on at least play the game as the devs intended xD

honestly mod if you want to just amazed ppl are playing modded games so quickly xD

I have about 12 mods running, because I quite frankly think many things were very bad design choices and many things are missing and broken. I paid, I want to have fun, I don't care what the devs intended.

The fact that you can't control your traders or asign specific tasks (like in previous X games) is unbelievable. They dumbed down many aspects of the game for a broader audience I suppose. While some features might be better than before, the game is too buggy right now. weapon balancing sucks, AI pathing sucks. Turrets don't work. Mods fix it, why wait if modders are faster in fixing minor things, while egosoft is focsuing on the hardcore issues with crashes and black sreens?

In how can you not control your traders? What are you trying to do?

[ApoxNM]

How can you mod a game so early on at least play the game as the devs intended xD

honestly mod if you want to just amazed ppl are playing modded games so quickly xD

I have about 12 mods running, because I quite frankly think many things were very bad design choices and many things are missing and broken. I paid, I want to have fun, I don't care what the devs intended.

The fact that you can't control your traders or asign specific tasks (like in previous X games) is unbelievable. They dumbed down many aspects of the game for a broader audience I suppose. While some features might be better than before, the game is too buggy right now. weapon balancing sucks, AI pathing sucks. Turrets don't work. Mods fix it, why wait if modders are faster in fixing minor things, while egosoft is focsuing on the hardcore issues with crashes and black sreens?

In how can you not control your traders? What are you trying to do?

I want one station trader to only sell one ware while another one buys a specific ware. I don want all trader selling energy cells, 80 pieces at a time. Very bad design choice that they share a pool of orders and go do the same thing. It's either bugged or badly designed.

[Miravlix]

But this, in my opinion, is either terrible game design, or a bug.

That is completely irrelevant and doesn't matter, all that matters is how the game works so we can do the best possible job.

They have bug forum if you want to complain about the functionality.

[Invasion]

Some solutions:

I just set all my stations to restrict faction trading for energy cells with maxed out sell price. This way none of my traders (both assigned and autotrade) will get sent to deliver a few energy cells per trip. IMO energy cells should NEVER be traded. They are always ordered in small quantities and worth so little. Do not allow your traders to trade in energy cells because the factions are a-holes trying to waste your trader's time. Time that can be used to trade in more profitable wares.

Wares that one of my station needs but is produced by another of my station, I restrict faction trading and max the buy price. I then set an autotrader to deal only on those specific wares and buy from the sector of the production station. This way it will only buy from my production and be inclined to sell to my station that needs the item (because of the high buy price)

Also I fully produce all my wares from the ground up, so all station assigned traders are set to buy from 0 gate distance. This way they are pretty much forced to only sell what my stations produce, instead of getting sent to buy intermediate wares. I don't need the intermediate wares from other factions because I produce them myself.


Observation:

The part where you want more smaller and faster assigned traders is true though. The AI is not smart enough to pick your larger traders to deliver bulky items. There is no loss to using smaller traders because it is still efficient storage space per $. The only worry is that it could impact sales quantity. If the manager is dumb enough to only sell X because "the trader can only carry that much" instead of apportioning the fully desired amount across multiple traders. This is why I still assign M traders to my hull/engine parts facility.


Suggestion/Opportunity:

L class ships as it currently stands, have no place in trading. Simply because of how slow they travel as a subordinate, and the inability to sell on their own accord. L class needs to be treated as a trading station on its own (a traveling trade station) and use its docking pads and cargo drones to transfer wares directly to buying ships. For example an L miner can be placed in a rich asteroid field and use mining drones to gather the stuff. And at the same time, offering to sell neatly packaged Ore/Silicin/Ice/gasses directly to faction trade ships. This way you can make an earnest profit and alleviate other factions' need to send their own small miners. Think of them as independent trading mobile oil rigs. Such an operation would naturally require the captain to have both piloting and management skills.

[Arghan]

My current plan - S class container ship for station for running ever small chore station manager think is necessary.

Multiple M ships with standing order of Distributing Ware (one product per ship) to sell products of my stations.

Any other way of trading for me ends up completely inefficient or micro heavy.

I will possibly have one or two L ships for transporting massive amounts of goods (if shipyard got stack on low engine parts, etc), but i will have very limited amount of them.

[ApoxNM]

But this, in my opinion, is either terrible game design, or a bug.

That is completely irrelevant and doesn't matter, all that matters is how the game works so we can do the best possible job.

They have bug forum if you want to complain about the functionality.

Irrelevant? I don't think so!

Believe me, I use the bug forum all the time.

[Baconnaise]

They also prioritize buying food & medicines over selling product. And they keep buying food & medicines until storage is full. Which, for an L-sized storage, is...a lot of stuff.

Because of this, I don't build habitats on stations.

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/106

That's the fix I use, the only way to actually controll wares.

How can you mod a game so early on at least play the game as the devs intended xD

honestly mod if you want to just amazed ppl are playing modded games so quickly xD

Personally, I find it more shocking that you play without mods. This is an X game and it's necessary to have mods installed. It's crazy to play vanilla X IMHO (any of them). I assume you are new to Egosoft and the series.

[ApoxNM]

Personally, I find it more shocking that you play without mods. This is an X game and it's necessary to have mods installed. It's crazy to play vanilla X IMHO (any of them). I assume you are new to Egosoft and the series.

Yea me too

[Lyth]

Station Trader

You only want one trader for each station, the station seems to sent all the ships to buy the same items, without any coordination, so say the base need 100 food, then all the ships will go buy 100 food, but only one of them can offload.

Speed seems to win over Cargo Space. The shorter the time between runs the better it can adjust to change in demand at the station.

Apologies if someone else mentioned this, I have 50 traders for my stations, all ranked 3-5 on a rank 5 manager, selling and buying multiple goods simultaneously.

Also Vanilla.

- I assume the ability to micro manage is based off the managers rank but the simplest answer is that they are trying to fulfil a trade ticket the manager has identified that requires multiple trips to complete so it sends out multiple ships.

[Kalantris]

Station Trader

You only want one trader for each station, the station seems to sent all the ships to buy the same items, without any coordination, so say the base need 100 food, then all the ships will go buy 100 food, but only one of them can offload.

Speed seems to win over Cargo Space. The shorter the time between runs the better it can adjust to change in demand at the station.

Apologies if someone else mentioned this, I have 50 traders for my stations, all ranked 3-5 on a rank 5 manager, selling and buying multiple goods simultaneously.

Also Vanilla.

- I assume the ability to micro manage is based off the managers rank but the simplest answer is that they are trying to fulfil a trade ticket the manager has identified that requires multiple trips to complete so it sends out multiple ships.

Nah, it's not connected to managers. I have 5 star managers on my stations and it still works the same way. The problem seems to appear more if you assign multiple ships to the station at the same time. If you wait for the previous one to get its orders, they don't usually do the same thing. But build a new station and assign five trading ships simultanously. They'll all go, fill up with food rations and med supplies and will then bug out, hover over the station and do nothing with their cargo holds full of useless supplies the station can't even store.

The only reason I use L traders is to put them on manual trading and sell all my produce from stations that way. It's one run per hour or so instead of five. It does however force me to micromanage stations, because they constantly lose money (since the wares go to my wallet rather than the station's wallet).

[Lyth]

I dump all my on at the same time,

Something you should look at the next time you see 4 or 5 go to the same station, you will observe that the ships are carrying multiple wares. I went in to double check my ships just before I posted that above, had 5 going to argon prime, 2 had spices, 1 had wheat and the last 2 had food rations.

I have plenty individually operating ships doing single tasks though so not sure why we are getting different results.

- Pure guesswork and trying to make sense of stuff: If anyone can shed any light.
I haven't looked at the scripts yet, guessing the manager selects the station to deal with for most profit, not the ware - something that makes sense based on how badly I have failed at setting up any kind of logisitcs system in the game with a large scale operation made up of stations focusing on specific parts of the supply chain.

Using AutoTrade, choosing only the base goods I need and setting the range to 0 with all stations in the same system, they just will not budge until the profit margin is high, so it does work but involves lots of idle time for the station and given 2 stations both requiring silicon wafers it always chooses the station with the most trade goods even though storage space for each is the same and the price of silicon wafers is the same, making the other station wait even longer once completed with the other task until the profit margin has returned.

Chances are it's just a little buggy.

[Varien101]

This is NOT a troll post, just my personal experience from bleeding fingers microing my trade fleets.

Sell all the transports.

Buy miners. All there transactions include full hulls, they don't stop trading because 5 of your ships all tried to fill the same order. This list goes on and on lol.

My enjoyment has increased by 110% and my bleeding fingers are happier.

Transports are super fun though, but if you really want to get your value out of them, we need some more patches =P