[Suggestion] - Remove offers for intermediate wares

[Phezzan]

Ice -> Water -> Food
Ore -> Refined Metals -> Hull Parts -> Weapon Components

I would like the option to remove either or both offers (Buy and Sell) for Water, Refined Metals, and Hull Parts

Benefits
- Buy offers for intermediate wares result in inflated budget requests (especially if you built L storage)
- less load from traders looking for trades, as offers must be evaluated (#traders * #offers)
- less management fuss - you don't have to set dozens of buy#, buy$, sell#, sell$, nor set two custom trade rules for each ware.

Bonus:
- a global (Player) option that suppresses intermediate offer generation by default for new player stations

[Sutopia]

NPCs don’t do mega factory thus don’t have this issue.
It’s also a more or less one time set up marking them as no trade items (ban all factions from trading including self), I see that as a small price to pay for a player to be more efficient than NPCs. The budget is just a suggestion after all.

[Phezzan]

NPCs don’t do mega factory thus don’t have this issue.
It’s also a more or less one time set up marking them as no trade items (ban all factions from trading including self), I see that as a small price to pay for a player to be more efficient than NPCs. The budget is just a suggestion after all.

NPC complexes do build intermediate production modules. I don't care whether they do or don't use this feature - I still want it.

So do you recognize the value of saving factory designs despite those being 'one time set up'? You have literally exactly the same 'set up' costs here
you have to come back after construction and modify the settings for each ware in each station

budget throws nags on my screen and a sound reminds me that each station wants ~100 million
even for my Terran Trading stations despite their very limited ware lists (but L storage modules) want 30+ million

[donzi]

It is confusing by these offers automatically created,enabled and permanent.

Being an intermediate ware, it would seem the optimal default would be to have no offers, buy or sell to seed/populate the logical overview... with of course the option for player to create & destroy buy/sell offers for these wares.

I can't think of any obvious reason(s) why there are different levels of player control among ware offers.. but there must be some reason I guess.

perhaps:
- some form of 'helper' for new players?
- NPC station + manager uses this and player adopted the method/script(s)?

The work-arounds are welcome, but.. why are they needed?
Does the need for these auto created, permanent offers (whatever reasons there were/are..) still exist?

I would also prefer not needing to defer desired operation of the ware offers to global [x]lists as an opt-out task.

[Valkertok]

When you dig deeper you start wondering "why is it like that?" about a lot of systems in this game. And I'm not talking about things that weren't implemented because they didn't have time to do it.

[donzi]

Very true.

I think more than one of those moments for me eventually revealed that a lot of consideration was given it's mechanics which I'd not thought about, known or needed to know about I guess.

However, foraging for bugs and trying to repo things to help, tears away that 'need to know' veil somewhat.

[jlehtone]

I think more than one of those moments for me eventually revealed that a lot of consideration was given it's mechanics which I'd not thought about, known or needed to know about I guess.

X2 and X3 had a different trade system. To me it was clear (albeit not "perfect"), but some users were loudly "confused" by some aspects. Whether the desire to help those users did affect in the making of X4 or not, X4 has what it has.

The Station Manager looks like re-implementation of an idea that earlier games had in third-party script (that was in some Bonuspacks). (To me that idea/script was more "ethical" than the ruthless efficiency of some other trade scripts.) The point is that among the considerations there has apparently been cherry-picking thoughts from user community.

Therefore, I'm inclined to blame users for what I don't like in the game.

[Hector0x]

The intermediate trade offers make perfect sense if the goal was to maximize stability and robustness of the overall economy (which it probably was).

Think about it. If the Weapon Component factory has too much refined metals and a nearby Hull production has too little, then it makes sense for the overarching economy that the refined metals get taken away from the Weapon factory, even when they are consumed by it.

In theory this system maximizes the runtime of all factories and distributes the resources perfectly. In practice its not perfect due to various other bottlenecks. But from the perspective of the station this idealistic economic distribution mechanism is the reason why these trade offers exist.

[donzi]

Yes, I like the ability to compensate for my station production being whacked most of the time by offloading intermediate wares by outright selling to NPC or to one of my other stations.

The confusing part IMO is simply the difference in offer configuration between intermediate and final products. They're all essentially products.

I've been messing around with trade stations and simple factories that don't produce intermediate wares. Kind of fun and interesting trying this approach. However I'm more used to making just a 1-stop shop factory out of the HQ, but that become a bit harsh on my old system.

[MakerLinux]

Although it might involve a food amount of manuak work, can't you get the same effect by creating a trade list that removes everyone including you, then going to the logical overview and create buy and sell manual orders using this list as override to the default? Then no one will be able to purchase or sell that item to the station.

[donzi]

I tried that approach to work-around an earlier issue (RE: [1982][7.0 Beta 1] Station Drones REMOVED when adjusting amounts (Save) with the 'station supply' automatic offers..

IIRC it helped tame the issue but ultimately was a typical kludge and not the solution.

I can't see myself trying to mash 'trade wares' config with these auto generated orders to try and compensate.. also would add a bit more frailty to a station config which can be daunting enough.

I am experimenting some with just eliminating intermediate wares via other means, but mainly just for science. Not sure it'll be practical or even desirable.


On the topic about the auto generated offers, came across this which Scoob points out, seems to be collateral damage caused by these kind of forced offers.
RE: v710b537045 - unsatisfied upkeep mission with scrap processing factory