My station traders keep buying wares without ever selling them

[Tamina]

Started a new game with 2.5 and built my usual Smart Chips factory. The factory has 9 M traders but when I keep them unwatched, after like 30 minutes or so, at least 3 of them have their storage filled up to the top with a for the production needed material but with no sell order
If they have some storage left they usually get sent to vuy 1-6 energy cells or so. I was hoping for them to sell their storage eventually but I fear when I leave them like that the whole station gets stuck.

I had the same factory in 2.0 and no such issues.

Anybody else with this problem?

[SPiDER]

I had this in 2.2 I had a selene Vanguard trading for 'Yard/Wharf complex and the damned thing always ended up with a hold full of e-cell's after a couple of hours..in the end I Unassigned it and used it elsewhere..it was the only ship that had that problem

[Karmaticdamage]

Not just e-cells, for some reason every station I have has a few traders full of food and medical supplies and never drops them off. I find myself going through all the subordinates to each station every once in a while to dump any excess wares being held onto. The only solution I've found to keep this from happening is to attach a solar power plant to every station, set ecells to restrict trade to other factions, and not attach a habitation module to the station.

[Imperial Good]

From what I can tell the bug is with station buy reservations being cleared when station storage allocation changes, e.g. as the result of a new module or even due to production batches finishing. As such they brought the ware to sell to the station but the station cancels its buy reservation from that ship causing the ship to buy the product and not be able to sell it to the station.

Technically the ships will eventually sell the wares to the assigned station, once enough production occurs that more buy orders for the ware are offered. The problem is that other subordinate traders compete with it to fulfil the buy order at the same time. Hence if the ship holding the ware is 1 out of a dozen or so idle trade subordinates then there is a high chance that one of the other idle ships will buy new ware to sell to the station and fulfil the buy order before the ship holding the ware has a chance to.

As throughput of the ware increases or available supply of the ware decreases this becomes less of a problem. For example a station consuming 100,000 energy cells per hour is unlikely to have problems with subordinate traders holding onto excess energy cells as there is always a good chance that a buy order for energy cells exists at the station.

For example my shipyard does not have problems with ships being clogged with Energy Cells since ship construction uses so many of them and is so frequent that there is as good as always buy orders for Energy Cells. On the other hand it has a huge problem with ships holding onto excess Plasma Conductors because not only is it building a lot of modules related to building or using those, but it is also as good as barely self sufficient so ships try to buy in Plasma Conductors just for the station buy reservation to be cancelled by either fresh batches of Plasma Conductors being finished or by changes in storage allocation. If I made most of the Plasma Conductors in another station for import this would not be a problem as the 20 odd consuming modules would assure near continuous buy orders for them.

[Raevyan]

Another example why we need control over traders and what they buy/sell. This happens in my game (1.0 start) too. Cycling through 200+ station traders/auto traders every once in a while is so tedious and time consuming.

Kinda lost the hope that egosoft will fix that since this problem exists since Rebirth and isn't new.

[Scoob]

Explicit buy / sell with Ware White / Blacklist is ESSENTIAL for all trade ships irrespective of Captain level. We need this. It would give us full control while things are a little clunky with AI ware selection and behaviour, as well as allow for us to manually control things if the AI were better behaved. This is an essential game feature requirement, it's so very frustrating not to have control. The thing is, the UI for this is already there, just not exposed to the player as needed. Simply enabling this for all ships home-based at a station would be perfect.

I want to build large multi-ware complex stations, however, due to the pain involved in Freighters simply NOT doing what's needed for said station, I now keep things fairly simple to a level the AI can (sort of) cope with) and I also build in a way that the station supplies everything it needs - purely as it's so unreliable buying what it needs.

The result is that I spend a lot of time, effort and credits building modules that produce stuff I should easily be able to buy from the local economy, purely because the AI is bad at shopping for multiple products.

All that said, I was quite impressed when I accidentally assigned a ship that already had cargo on board - not needed by the station - and it went off and tried to sell it. It took AGES and only sold very small amounts at a time, but it tried at least. Note: with ONE order I could have sold its entire load of Medical Supplies in minutes...yet the AI, though it did manage it, took hours.

I want to add that the stupid sector range nerf totally crippled the already slightly wonky AI behaviour. In a prior game I had a Microchip Factory doing VERY well with automated traders and mining ships. A simple station only needing Silicon as a resource. Assigned M-Class Freighters along with some S-Class Couriers were happily selling Microchips for good money. However, after the sector range nerf the factory stalled, the AI being unable to make trades due to the huge range restriction - my Pilots were all still a very low-level, despite having been working for many days.

Scoob.

[zarrazee]

OP. I've just had the same problem with Hull parts. I wanted my HP station in ARG Prime to sell exclusively to the SY in ANT Memorial. When my trade ships were assigned to the station, that sat around & did nothing even though I'd checked they had enough jump range to get to ANT M.

My solution was to:
"Remove assignment" from the station for the trade ships
Create an Activity AND Trade restrictions blacklists for the appropriate traders (the former tells them what sectors they can't trade in, the latter, which factions they can't trade with - so for Activity BL I selected all sectors apart from AP and ANT M. For Trade BL, I selected all factions except ANT)
Assign tailored BL to appropriate traders
Made sure the traders were still in Argon Prime and awaiting orders
Set them to Autotrade HP with buy gaterange at 0, and sell at max

As soon as I 'd done that, they started transferring Hull Parts from my station and selling them at ANT SY. I did this with 3 traders & checked in on them from time to time for about 2 hours. They continued doing what I wanted them to.

NOTE. In my game there are several ANT stations that buy HP in ANT M, however, all 3 traders chose the SY everytime. Highest price? Highest demand? SY right next to the jumpgate? Dont know. Might need a mod if the SY was 400km from the jump gate, had low demand and/or only paid 300CR per HP.

EDIT
I suppose you could set the Sell Price in the Logical Overview as low as possible and use Autotrade with a 0 Buy gate distance. Then use blacklists to further tailor your trading. Perhaps "trade for" <station> only works for buying resources, not selling them.

Does this answer your query?

[zarrazee]

<repeat post for some reason>

[LegionOfOne]

I made myself crazy trying to manage a network of stations with vanilla station-assigned traders and autotraders.
The only way I found of resolving the issues listed in this thread, like stations filling up with unsold wares and trade ships stuck with cargo the station doesn't want, is to reduce drastically the budget of the offending station.
Drop the budget to 10% or 5% of the 'required operating budget' listed by the manager, then most buy wares offers will dry up, and the station will finally concentrate on selling.
Also, that way the stuck trade ships will finally get a chance to sell their wares after a while.
You then boost the budget back up when necessary to replenish supplies.

But it is still far from perfect, which is why I'll advertise my mod, that I made precisely to avoid all that hassle : Mules and Warehouses.
Set up your Mules once, and watch them handle all the trade for your factories, shipyards, station build storages, and warehouses, quickly, automatically and in the smartest order I could program.