Why would this fail to find trades?

[LameFox]

I have assigned my Erlking (3 star captain) to trade for a build storage. The build storage has no money, but it's only "buying" from me. The wares are set to max price in "plan build".

In the system I have stations providing all the required wares, with automated pricing and storage allocation. I also have a warehouse that buys overflow from those stations. That too uses automated pricing and storage. There are plenty of wares in both the production stations and the warehouse to build the station. The wares are available for sale to my faction and are not reserved. The build storage also doesn't have any incoming reservations from ships assigned to the stations.

What I expect to happen: the Erlking "buys" all the wares it needs and takes them to the build storage.

What actually happens: it buys and delivers some, then says it can't find trades. It will eventually find some again, if left alone.



What would cause this? It looks to me like with the automated pricing on the stations, the ship refuses to accept any trades until more wares have been produced and the price has gone down again. This would explain why it stops and starts like that. But why would it do that when the price is set to the highest possible in the build planner? Shouldn't it buy any available wares for sale, no matter what they cost?

EDIT: ok, so it turns out it was doing exactly what I thought, because the global price modifier setting had unchecked itself at some point, and the individual prices were set up very weirdly. Not sure what to make of that. I don't think I've ever used them before, and always just had the global modifier at 100%. Now I am curious where that is stored—surely not part of the save, because I don't normally have to interfere with it no matter how many new games I start. In the construction plans file maybe?

[db48x]

As long as the build storage has no money, it has no valid buy orders for the trader to fulfill. You can manually use “Transfer wares” orders to move goods into the build storage, but the trader reacts to buy orders only.

[LameFox]

As long as the build storage has no money, it has no valid buy orders for the trader to fulfill. You can manually use “Transfer wares” orders to move goods into the build storage, but the trader reacts to buy orders only.

This does not appear to be true. It does work now that I've toggled the global price back on (and it worked before, just intermittently because the prices it had reset to were quite low).