NPC's setting lower sell prices than I'm allowed to?

[Alareth]

I want to boost my sales income a bit by undercutting some other sellers by a few credits.

There's a HOP station selling Microchips for 786 Cr and I tried to manually set my price to 784 Cr by the game will not let me set a price lower than 805 Cr.

I understand setting some limits on pricing, but everyone should have the same base selling price. How can I compete if I'm literally not allowed to set a competitive price?

[Imperial Good]

I recommend you read the price breakdown while trying to trade for those microchips. This shows the reputation discount that applies to your faction that lowers the cost of the ware. It is this discount, or other such discounts, that result in the price going below the minimum price you can set. Station buy and sell logic, as well as the NPCs, use the actual set price between minimum and maximum so you do not have to worry about remaining competitive as the NPCs cannot sell cheaper than you. Of course you can exploit this discount to obtain wares cheaper than you might be able to make them from raw ingredients, but that is how trading works.

The only time this seems to be a problem is when using the repeat order logic to create a trade route. The buy and sell repeat orders use the final price and not the actual set price which can result in you being unable to sell or buy wares with NPCs when out of range. Most common example of this is trying to sell Nividium to trade stations when at +30 reputation with the owning faction since they will mostly be buying well below the minimum sell price due to nividium not being price locked and being a trade ware.

[Alareth]

Ok, that makes more sense. I wasn't even considering any sort of faction discount.

[Blackbirdx61]

Look, if the price says they are selling for 786, then that's what I expect them to be selling for, and if I am only allowed to go down to 805cr then I can't compete. And I really don't need to be told Oh but thats including a Faction Bonus; so they are not really outpricing you.

Seriously,
1. How do I know that, except I have your word on that point, not saying your being deceptive, but we don't really know just what is in the code.

2. We have way to much to micro in this game, to have to sit there with a Calculator on the side to figure out ok if ARG is Selling to metal at 71, and the lowest I can go is 90; I'm not competitive. Seriously, I'm supposed to reverse engineer, the prices of a Dozen Wares, and a Dozen Factions, so I can make an informed decision about pricing my goods.

Ok so as a prized investor I get 12% Bonus, there is another 39% bonus applied for "High Supply". So X-X(0.12)=71.24 Then X the Base is, 80.954545; Which is way lower than I am allowed go. So I am sorry, but you are incorrect, the NPCs can outprice the Player. As I cannot apply the High Supply Bonus only the NPCs can do that,

The Devs need to just post the base prices. If they want to calculate a bonus is the background great.
Otherwise how am I supposed to make informed Decisions, when there is a secret variable modifier being priced in that you don't know what it is, and you don't know what it will be an hour from now or tomorrow.

The OP may be Satisfied, but I have run into this problem quite a bit lately, and given my whole economy is based on Refined Metals and Silicon, it's really not cool when I cant match the NPC price. As I said its BS. Just let me see the same price anyone else pays, then I can make reasonable decisions, about how I price my wares. This is a Game after all, not a Math Class. Akkkkk

[blackphoenixx]

If you're competing with the NPC's for lowest price the trade isn't worth bothering with in the first place. You're just wasting your traders time for peanuts.
It also means you have a more serious problem and wouldn't have made many trades anway: The market is saturated, it's time to trade/produce something else.

If you've been flooding the market with refined metals the NPC economy is probably bottlenecking on graphene.
Or weapon components or advanced electronics or whatever, because in the end it all comes down to what shipyards and wharfs are short of - balance that and the more they have the more ships will get produced, otherwise the entire economy will bottleneck and stall out as factories begin to fill up because their products don't get consumed.

You can use the trade filters to see what's in high demand, or with a little more effort scan wharfs and shipyards until you can directly look at their storage and see what's short.

Also you can see what discounts apply to a trade in the trade window.

[LameFox]

That just sounds like you're frustrating yourself by trying to micromanage things on a level they don't need to be in the first place. I have never, once, in however many thousands of hours, needed to manually tweak prices on a basic refinery. Just set it up, give it what it needs, and let it go. The only thing you really need to worry about is producing so much of a ware there's nothing around to use it up anymore, in which case you either set up repeat orders to ship it far away or branch out into wares further down the chain and process it yourself.

[Blackbirdx61]

Re BlkP: Well given the NPC Economy is Broken on purpose, it is always bottle necked, for something. But as I don't have anything near infinite resources. I have to make do with my half dozen of so stations, and it takes time for those to pay for themselves. I am making a profit over all I am happy with that,

My Argument is with 1. The NPCs clearly can undercut a player, the Math above makes that clear. Even before we apply the Faction Bonus, they are selling for less than I possibly can by 12% And two Hiding this in the fine print is not cool either. Am I really supposed to pull out the Algebra Calculator every time I need to adjust prices on some goods. Why put the player through that, just post the Base Price, which at 80.95 is less than I can charge by a good bit. Fine but make that plain.

My Point is not about the pricing so much as, it is a bad design on the part of the devs to put us players in a position where we are making decisions, based on Obscured and Misleading information.

[TheDeliveryMan]

My Argument is with 1. The NPCs clearly can undercut a player, the Math above makes that clear. Even before we apply the Faction Bonus, they are selling for less than I possibly can by 12% And two Hiding this in the fine print is not cool either.

NPCs traders, including player automated traders, use the supply/demand based price. This price ranges between min and max price as given in wares.xml. For example Refined Metal

Code: Select all

  <ware id="refinedmetals" name="{20201,3201}" description="{20201,3202}" factoryname="{20201,3204}" group="refined" transport="container" volume="14" tags="container economy">
    <price min="89" average="148" max="207" />
    ...
  </ware>

has a price range from 89 credits to 207 credits. NPC stations cannot undercut this min price, if you see a lower price then there is discount, from good rep or signal leaks, on top of it.

There are indeed several reports where players are confused by obscure information:
viewtopic.php?f=180&t=456891
viewtopic.php?f=180&t=455644

[Ekino]

Hello guys. As this is only topic I have found about my problem, I'll ask here.
Im new to game and after few days, I have begin to build some production stations.
Started with microchips and resources needed for their production. As the stations are close to each other, I am using one ship with local autotrade to be able handle more resource types than one.
On my stations I have checked rule just for my faction, so the microchip factory wont buy materials from other traders. But as the minimum price for Silicon Wafers can be set to minimal value 180cr, and my advanced autotraders from near region keep bringing materials from NPC stations that are selling it cheaper. 143cr exactly and my stocks in refinery are getting full.
Is there any way to avoid this withour forbidding advanced autotraders to trade with this comodity, or building oversized stations with all type of production on it?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions

[Nanook]

It's not a good start to your forum posting career dredging up a thread from a year and a half ago. There have been several updates to the game since then and so info in this thread may be out of date. It's always best to start your own thread, which I suggest you do as I'm locking this one.