Trade subordinates, broken?

[Lord Crc]

So I got a station producing several wares. I've assigned it a few medium and large trade ships.

I've got automatic pricing set up and restrict trading with other faction enabled on all wares. Yet the only thing the subordinates wants to trade is energy cells. I got a large freighter about to dock to buy 80 energy sells to sell at some station. This is a four star captain. The station has hull parts and refined metals near max capacity, and several consumers buying >10k at good prices just a gate or two away, yet somehow 90% of the times I see the subordinates carry a hundred energy cells or so... wtf?

I guess I can fix this by manually raising energy cell sell price, but come on.

This being addressed in 2.6 or 3.0? Or is manual trading the only sane option?

[Imperial Good]

Might be getting addressed in 2.60 as someone did report some logical problem with auto trade logic.

However the main issue is that you are trying to sell energy cells in a saturated market using ships not designed for it. Raise the sell price to something high and possibly restrict trade for Energy Cells.

L transports will always have problems because the volumes they move are much larger than most NPC buy amounts. They need logic to collect traders together so a single full load results in multiple small sales. Until then they are best used manually, with S and M container ships making the best station auto traders.

[grapedog]

ECells are a hot ticket item....

Joking aside, i made most of my traders that can do advanced auto trading just not deal in any minor wares, like ECells, food stuffs, antimatter cells, stuff like that.... most of the base resources my traders are forbidden from trading. That leaves my "newbie" traders and NPC's to take care of that stuff.

I haven't looked specifically as well... but I don't think there is a "ware priority".... if a trade ship is available, and a trade is needed, it takes the trader, regardless of ship versus trade size requirements. So if someone wants 80 ECells, the first available ship will take the trade.

I think the best thing you could do would be to cultivate high skill traders, who can do the advanced auto trade, and put them into your biggest and best ships and deny them the opportunity to trade in small time wares like ECells. Station subordinates you can't do much about.

[Lord Crc]

However the main issue is that you are trying to sell energy cells in a saturated market using ships not designed for it. Raise the sell price to something high and possibly restrict trade for Energy Cells.

But how on earth is selling 80 ECells with 3 Cr margin each a better deal than selling 2k hull parts each at 100 Cr margin?

Surely it's not just picking random trades, it's supposed to be a bit clever, no?

[Imperial Good]

But how on earth is selling 80 ECells with 3 Cr margin each a better deal than selling 2k hull parts each at 100 Cr margin?

It is not a better deal. However it is a trade deal as opposed to no trade deal.

Surely it's not just picking random trades, it's supposed to be a bit clever, no?

Then it would prioritize always shipping some goods over others, to the point the factory stalls because all its subordinate traders failed to move the less profitable inputs to the factory which it requires to produce the very profitable outputs because they were too busy moving the very profitable outputs and making easy money until the factory stops working.

This topic has been much discussed in the beta forum, with many people proposing different priorities and solutions.

There are also performance considerations. As it stands the auto trade logic is quite resource intensive as it has to test potentially hundreds of stations.

[Buzz2005]

have been using that mule mode that does not look at prices at all

I put 5 hermeses on a wharf and shipyard exclusively supplying them, they did not loose any money at all, the profit just goes up with reputation and if you hack trade terminal but even in the early game always a profit, it was very small thou

but what Im trying to say is sometimes simpler is better

[Lord Crc]

It is not a better deal. However it is a trade deal as opposed to no trade deal.

Both deals were available at the same time.

Then it would prioritize always shipping some goods over others, to the point the factory stalls because all its subordinate traders failed to move the less profitable inputs to the factory which it requires to produce the very profitable outputs because they were too busy moving the very profitable outputs and making easy money until the factory stops working.

Internally distributing wares is indeed different from selling with profit. Maybe there needs to be two roles, not just one.

There are also performance considerations. As it stands the auto trade logic is quite resource intensive as it has to test potentially hundreds of stations.

That's a fair point, though I assume this is done similar to XR where the core game engine does it, not the script. In that case, going over a few thousand station-ware combinations and producing a sorted profit list shouldn't take more than a handful of milliseconds. My traders still use minutes to find a trade, so there's plenty of time there.

[Imperial Good]

That's a fair point, though I assume this is done similar to XR where the core game engine does it, not the script. In that case, going over a few thousand station-ware combinations and producing a sorted profit list shouldn't take more than a handful of milliseconds. My traders still use minutes to find a trade, so there's plenty of time there.

From what I can tell a lot of the logic is done in scripts. Hence the need for auto traders to do a lot of waiting around.

[Lord Crc]

So I caved and bumped the price of ECells. At least now they ship 350 rather than just 50...

I also noticed that my miners will mine both silicon and ore, but just sell one of them. So the cargo hold fills up over time. Yay.