Station / wharf / shipyard supply and demand

[RegisterMe]

Has anybody managed to figure out how this actually works? From what I have observed the amount of available storage determines the stations desired quantities of the various inputs (including intermediaries) that it wants, and this in turn sets the price. In other words it is NOT based on "what do I need to produce x". Within that it seems to prioritise input wares in some way, but on a basis I haven't completely understood. An example - my SM Wharf had zero Smart Chips. My HQ in Grand Exchange had 25k Smart Chips. But all of the subordinate traders assigned to the wharf were trading e-cells, because it didn't have enough to meet its desired quantity. This is in spite of the fact that the wharf had 375k e-cells at the time.

This can lead to some quirky behaviour when, for instance, you add storage modules. All of a sudden all the desired quantities change and the station focuses on filling its needs, not across the board for all wares, but in some kind of priority list order? Needless to say this gums up production because you run out of a critical resource while the station concentrates on filling another resource requirement first.

I have no idea if station manager / subordinate captain skills influence this (imho it would be good if they did).
I don't know if price has any bearing on "internal empire trades".

Does this scan? Do other people think the same as me? Or have I missed something / misinterpreted it?

Cheers,


RM

EDIT: Added point about the wharf and how many e-cells it had on hand.

[RodentofDoom]

I've noticed my Wharf & Shipyard usually run a little low on 1-3 items at a time.
They don't always drop to 0 stock on them but after a little while the assigned trader and npc deliveries seem to solve low stock issues

So long as each has ~25m per L storage attached in the long run it self manages stock control even whilst constantly producing ships for the npc factions

[ballti]

Factory need a lot of smart chips, im not 100% if all smart chips going for building ships or manager seling them to other factions. Try to put few medium trader in system wher is factory, setup: buy 4 sector, sell 0 sector, only smart chips.
Depend of ship type there will be more heavy demand on few ware like, advance electronic, wepon component…. If you thinking big and you building solo factory, start to thinking about support factory.

[RegisterMe]

So long as each has ~25m per L storage attached in the long run it self manages stock control even whilst constantly producing ships for the npc factions

I have some saving to do then, I've been taking the cream off whenever > 20m . I have 9 L storage on that station so....... The only things it ever runs short of are e-cells (it now has five e-cell production units), smart chips and weapon components.

[Archaeosis]

Take a look at this thread .
The main issue is that station trader AI is still broken - selling a single produced energy cell will always take priority over buying needed smart cells. It's r******* and there are easy ways to fix it.

The linked thread is where a kind soul has been trying their absolute best to fix this for Egosoft but they just ignore it. 3.0 may help but they haven't confirmed and there's no changelog. I suspect we will get past two paid DLCs before station trader AI works properly.

Good thing the game isn't primarily a space trading simulator, or having broken AI this long after release would probably be considered a damning indictment of how badly the development process is going!