Station Traders - closed loop, deliver Vs fetch etc

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donzi
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Station Traders - closed loop, deliver Vs fetch etc

Post by donzi » Tue, 19. Jun 18, 14:01

I've created a small group of stations in DV.MA..

- Solar Energy Farm (DV)
- Water Distillery (DV)
- Argnu Stockyard (AL)
- Spice Plantation (AL)

all set as such:

(primary setting) restrict faction: no
(granular setting) energy = yes
(granular setting) water = yes
..the other resources which I want NPC to deliver = no
..any remaining that I manually replenish = yes

In ~3.6x I remember having better luck with 'fetching' needs of the station IIRC.. But in 4.30 I am having some odd results when trying either approach.

The optimal scheme, having a energy trader assigned to the EC farm and a liquid trader to the H2O distillery kicks on, but then the trader simply tops of the first station they deliver to, forever.

gathering the traders into player squad and setting them instead to fetch (liquid trader assigned to spice plantation) results in searching for trades, presumably forever also.

I've yet to try a universal cargo trader like a Lyranea simply because it's kind of overkill for simple wares like EC and H2O in this tight loop.

I've tried a couple other techniques I remember like min/max sell/buy prices but figured that leaving those set to auto would be more suitable and perhaps prioritize the station delivery based on the auto prices.

Anyhow, it appears some new work-arounds may be needed or I've just neglected to set something properly. I'm pretty sure that I've given it time to 'kick in' and also have recalled and reassigned the traders a few times after watching/waiting.

I admit that the last approach of having a proper trade ship for each class of ware in/out I have not tried. I don't have that many ships and feeding the BTO in DV scanning arrays is a real PITA. Besides that, it makes more sense to have 1 delivery ship make the rounds than to have each recipient require their own fetching ship, at least in this simple setup.

I'll test with a couple Lyranea in a few just for kicks.

Anyone familiar with Vanilla XR 4.30 station trader nuances can clue me in or help point out flaws in my approach, I'd appreciate help getting this fairly basic stuff working.

Ezarkal
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Post by Ezarkal » Tue, 19. Jun 18, 14:58

I've yet to do some solid testing with 4.30. I took a break of XR for a while, and only got back to it recently, and I'm playing very much part time, with summer being shining outside and being so damn sunny and appealing! 8)

Please keep us up to date with your testings. It will be interesting info to have!
Humans are deuterostomes, which means that when they develop in the womb the first opening they develop is the anus.
This means that at one point you were nothing but an asshole.

Some people never develop beyond this stage.

donzi
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Post by donzi » Tue, 19. Jun 18, 22:54

I too should be enjoying the summer more, differently..

I took my two Lyranea and assigned them to the EC station. They so far have just both settled in on topping off with 2 or 3 digit amounts of EC to their respective 'partner' (two different stations being feed EC now) but the remaining station sits with a 20 Cr buy price, and ignored, not getting EC delivered.

Briefly I tried lifting all restrictions on the EC fab but was pretty much the same thing.. It's almost as if the station traders gravitate to the least profitable offers. I watched my trader jump to DV.GT to sell a pitiful amount of EC to RoC for a while, ignoring owned stations with better offers.

After a couple/few hours seeing all this, I've moved on to trying fixed prices. So far have set the EC manager to use a sell price of 20 Cr but this has yet to resolve on the active setup by simply changes to the sell price. Gave up and went to sleep. Maybe the continue/load of the game today will help. If not I'll shut it all down and see what happens as I focus on limiting visits/sales by price with a closed loop as in the OP.

I hate the last resort of just opening it all up to NPC and hope things get delivered and just sell off the trade ships I built to serve as station traders -- dealing with NPC in vanilla seems to lead to a more manager budget missions which gets awfully annoying when it can at times happen more than once within a minute or two. The NPC do this 'topping off' stuff too and it means a ton of little sales which send managers into below budget state... :evil:

Since I have about 150 hours in this game I'm not going to bail just yet playing vanilla since I'd hope there is just some 'trick' I've missed to get a simple closed loop working.

donzi
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Post by donzi » Wed, 20. Jun 18, 01:03

Well...

I set all stations for their managers to:

- ware prices based on stock (all reset)
- all restrictions = no
- all ranges = system

- revoked all assigned trade ships
- left the DV.MA sector
- gave all managers their budget money
- saved, exited and restarted

What I am seeing is my spice plantation have proper trade offers when checking via the 'show' button in the station details or by just using SHIFT+T, however there is nothing for the spice plantation's ~20 Cr offer to buy water, anywhere when using the SHIFT+Y trade deals. There is zero NPC traffic to/fro the plantation and I get the idea it'd because NPC traders use the trade deals script.. ?

The other stations immediately attracted NPC business and created the expected budget money missions. Whee!

This new issue of not seeing the clear DEAL of buying from my nearly full H2O distillery and selling to the starving Spice Plantation via 'Trade Deals' is one, new thing..

The other issue of constant top-off of a single station by trying a delivery approach, related, trade deals script issue?

This is beyond me, I reduced the possibility of settings as culprit I think..
I've also noticed odd "Planned Trips" info in the ship details when manual trading via trade deals, so I'm leaning towards some issue in that script or scripts.

As a sort of last resort I assigned a Lyranea to the Spice Plantation.. Nothing. Floats around where it was and continues to 'search for trades' for the next 10 mins -- which I sort of expected since feeling the 'trade deals' issue may be at the root of all this odd stuff.

Just for kicks I am going to recall the spice plantation staff and more or less shut it down and restart it to see if that helps. Given that the trade BUY/SELL offers are okay I am skeptical of being able to fix this new issue by just fiddling around in a running game.

Again, this is Vanilla XR 4.30 without either DLC active. I ran the steam 'verify' on the game just in case.. all A-OK by it's logic.

I'd guess core fixes wouldn't be propagated with DLC so I have not seriously considered activating the DLC as any sort of cure.

UPDATE:
1. with regard to the no restrictions and settings as mentioned above, before I swapped station management, I just did some manual BUY trades then SELL trades among my stations to replenish some of the resources.. Once I did this the NPC traffic immediately swarmed the zone.

I looked at the Trade Deals and it now shows the spice plantation.

While this is a step forward, I didn't have this particular issue with the other stations and thus the closed loop issue may be unaffected -- unless somehow this station's state was having negative impact on the other scripts that need to operate a closed loop.

The only thing that I can suspect as cause is the fact that I put initial EC and H2O into the station before any budget money was given to the station manager, hence the transfers were not technically 'trades'... perhaps what kept the station from being listed in trade deals.

2. over a couple hours watching over the regression to no-loop as in #1 above, I focused one a little oddity that I notice on the auto stock missiles for the spice plantation. Max is 1000 on the fully built station (5 vlaunchers -> 200 missiles per), well I had stuffed 800 in there through ship -> station transfer before I completed all stages of the station..
No trade offers were showing for buying the additional 200 missiles.

I turned off auto-resupply of ammo via the manager and transferred them out of the station to a ship. Turned auto-restock and the trade offer appeared. I had toggled auto-restock on and off before unloading the ammo and that didn't change anything.

This would seem to validate that there are 'issues' in this area with XR 4.30.. If they surface later (eg: using simple transfer but after the manager has actually had an account, sloshing money in) I can't say.

I frequently use both the trade method and the plain transfer method to move stuff. I have not examined it there are actually the same issues with the other stations which I have not noticed. It is possible there are remaining issues on other stations since I'd never (in prior XR versions) had any known consequences by seeding a station with resources before the thing was fully operational (funded manager).

* in regard to the main issue of the closed loop, I'm moving slow and have not tried station traders again at this point.

Ezarkal
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Post by Ezarkal » Thu, 21. Jun 18, 22:03

donzi wrote:
What I am seeing is my spice plantation have proper trade offers when checking via the 'show' button in the station details or by just using SHIFT+T, however there is nothing for the spice plantation's ~20 Cr offer to buy water, anywhere when using the SHIFT+Y trade deals. There is zero NPC traffic to/fro the plantation and I get the idea it'd because NPC traders use the trade deals script.. ?
I know you're no beginner, but I still have to ask: Did you make sure you have a ship able to carry liquid wares? Otherwise the "trade deals" will simply not show, unlike the "trade offers", where the wares will simply be greyed-out.

Otherwise, here's my understanding of the trade deal window:
It's sole purpose is to find single buy-sell deals that will give you the best profit, for each given wares.
Since trade deals listing depend on the profits you will get out of the transaction, and you basically get nothing out of selling to your own station, then these deals should not show (to the best of my knowledge). Notice how deals where you sell your station products always come out at the top of the list in terms of profits? That's because the game consider what you take from your stations as being free, when it comes from transactions to your wallet. Therefore, anything you sell to your station reap no profits and should not show on this window.


2. over a couple hours watching over the regression to no-loop as in #1 above, I focused one a little oddity that I notice on the auto stock missiles for the spice plantation. Max is 1000 on the fully built station (5 vlaunchers -> 200 missiles per), well I had stuffed 800 in there through ship -> station transfer before I completed all stages of the station..
No trade offers were showing for buying the additional 200 missiles.

I turned off auto-resupply of ammo via the manager and transferred them out of the station to a ship. Turned auto-restock and the trade offer appeared. I had toggled auto-restock on and off before unloading the ammo and that didn't change anything.

This would seem to validate that there are 'issues' in this area with XR 4.30.. If they surface later (eg: using simple transfer but after the manager has actually had an account, sloshing money in) I can't say.

I frequently use both the trade method and the plain transfer method to move stuff. I have not examined it there are actually the same issues with the other stations which I have not noticed. It is possible there are remaining issues on other stations since I'd never (in prior XR versions) had any known consequences by seeding a station with resources before the thing was fully operational (funded manager).

* in regard to the main issue of the closed loop, I'm moving slow and have not tried station traders again at this point.
The auto-resupply option should allow your manager to maintain a preset stock of missile (or drones). (800 in your case, I assume). If you want to initiate a new trade offer for that extra 200 missiles, you have to do change the minimum stock levels you want to get on your station via your architect. I think it's also available through the manager, though. But at any rates, you'll have to set a higher desired limit of missiles. Then after a few minutes the trade offer should appear.

Some other oddity I've noticed considering the supply trade offers is they don't go away until the trade has been completed, unlike for regular trade offers. (My last observation on this is prior to 4.30, though).
Humans are deuterostomes, which means that when they develop in the womb the first opening they develop is the anus.
This means that at one point you were nothing but an asshole.

Some people never develop beyond this stage.

donzi
Posts: 879
Joined: Mon, 12. Feb 07, 14:29
x4

Post by donzi » Fri, 22. Jun 18, 01:59

Yes, the ship I used to check everything related to trade was a Lyranea.

On the missile resupply, like the trade prices, I was allowing the manager to set all limits -- hence the missiles were 800/1000 but no trade offer of any kind for the 200 extra was being made.

I do think the gist of it I uncovered as described in the 'update' parts of the OP.

In a nutshell it appears initial stock must be acquired via a trade offer to kick things off.

I have since added in all the restrictions I wanted and all is working fine as a closed delivery type loop -- EC fab with an E trader, H20 fab with a L trader. They both make rounds now among all my stations based on how I specify.

During the time they were public, the NPC affected the prices so delivery was not so predictable and a lot of wasted time on my traders selling to NPC -- not a big deal at this point since I don't have that high demand on the EC and H2O delivery but as things grow I'll not want NPC deliveries by my ships delaying things or monkeying with the ebb and flow of the buy/sell prices among my stations.

ajime
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Post by ajime » Fri, 22. Jun 18, 09:14

Personally I simply set 1 product S tradeship and let npc fill my factories with the exception of plants that require resource gathering. I'll intervene only when the plants aren't getting their fill of resources. i try to avoid clicking to manually give money to them since personal stations tend to do transfer instead of sell even between internal stations. Which is a feature i adore in X3 since it reduces station money management.

donzi
Posts: 879
Joined: Mon, 12. Feb 07, 14:29
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Post by donzi » Sat, 23. Jun 18, 09:40

Where I've built, as you know, isn't the best place to wait for NPC to supply a wide variety, wheat, EC and H2O from DV with bits from the universe traders, but that is unreliable.

I added a new factory to the mix. There is more/less to the quirk I made the OP about..

In this case I didn't inject anything into the station via transfer. I fully funded the manager but then restricted EC, food remained open to NPC. I also allowed my EC fab to supply the CV -- this was set to restricted via the convo with the architect at the initial build phase.

EC were delivered to the CV but never to the station (a cell recharge fac). I watched my EC delivery guy for several rounds to all other stations.

The Trade deals and trade offers for the new station were all there but nothing. I decided to send a ship via that stations trade offers and sell a small amount to it and see what happened... That 'fixed' things and now the cell recharge fac is now in the delivery loop.

So, it now seems as if to avoid the issue I was facing one of two things seems to be the ticket:

A) keep the station as unrestricted until NPC swarm and make a trade (at least of the ware which player wants to restrict later).

B) player use the station's trade offer to make an initial sale of the ware when it's set to restricted.

In both cases, given the oddity I saw with the ammo previously, it also appears that it's best to just avoid manual transfers to start up a new station.

I am about to add another station and may try an recreate the issues based on what I believe are the factors.. but, it such a slow process.. I may just test A) above for good measure and be done with it.


In regard to the manager budget annoyances, I have found that giving them more than recommended now sets a threshold -- if they spend or make money via NPC it will pacify things well enough.


In regard to using Medium ships on these factories, it'd be a drain and nuisance since some of them would want to pass through fell affliction. I also hate some of the fixed waypoints s/m ships use. EG: watch extinct torch for a little while.

UniTrader wrote an extension that assigns managers to use the player account IIRC. If I weren't sticking to vanilla for now I'd give that a try.

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