Repeater station (storage only station for extending trade range)

[Miravlix]

With the latest and greatest features, it seemed fairly simple to setup a X hops away Trade Station that my guys would forward goods to, to extend the reach of the factory.

The Trade station buy from own faction only and I have some traders on the factory that focus on trading with faction only (The new stations manager isn't good enough to reach the factory himself yet, when he get's better I think he will take over grabbing goods)

The three traders sees the trade station and picks up factory goods and fly on over and then sits with some goods in storage at the trade station, only selling a few, I've checked the amount the trade station buy and it's way higher than the amount the traders can carry, like the station sits at 0 goods, accept 20000 and the trader delivers 200 out of 800 he carries, didn't check, but I assume the trader slowly empties it's cargo.

I can't figure out why the traders think he can only sell some of the goods, when the purchase price is maxed, the goods amount accepted is way higher than a traders full cargo amount.

[zakaluka]

trade stations are funny. Have you manually set the "sell until" amount in your logical overview? Some people set it at 1, but I find that's a bit of a problem - because then the "amount to buy" cannot be set above 1. So your supply transports will only make small deliveries.

It would really seem intuitive if you could set "sell until" to 1 and "buy amount" to the max, then your traders would happily fill supply first, then move on to selling as much as they can. But that's just not how it works.

To me it seems like player trade stations are dependent on NPCs to come buy your goods. It doesn't seem to work right if I want my own traders assigned to the station as traders, fulfilling both supply and then trading the goods out from there. It should work if you have autonomous autotraders with settings that force them to only buy your goods, though.

Set "sell until" and "buy amount" to about half the storage capacity, or leave it on automatic, see if that helps you.

[grapedog]

I made my first trade station out of my PHQ, and it only trades in ship building wares, plus a few extras like claytronics and other high priced items.

For each ware i set the buy price to about 1/5th if max, and sell price to 3/4ths of max. I gave it 25 mill to start and assigned 5 M frieghters to work with it.

It is making money right now, but not a lot, maybe 1-2 mill per hour. Ive had it operating for about 10 hours now, and i kind of ignore it. I haven't looked at my traders, but ill have to see what they're doing. Right now it's profitable enough for me to do it again in another playthrough. Or i might make another one that focuses on cheap stuff like food/meds and their base products. In my mind it's operating like an auto trader, just moving goods around to keep the economy flowing. I have 4 or 5 complexes in Nops Fortune, so its probably interacting with those, but i haven't limited it at all for who can tradw with it, im just kind of experimenting with it.

Seems interesting, and it isn't losing money... ill keep experimenting.

[Miravlix]

Factory forwarding to Trade Station seems wonky, still can't figure out how to not get the traders stuck, because they only want to fill the huge station cargo with 1/5 of what they carry.

Things get kinda interesting when the trade stations manager grew up, I no longer use storage on the trade station at all, the traders go to the factory and goes directly on to selling to a NPC station that is within the 5 tile range of the trading station.

Though when they run out of NPC's maybe they will use the player trade station storage. Going to be quite a few hours before I reach that point, if ever, the factory shouldn't really be big enough to supply all the wares that the number of sectors the two station combined can reach, each has 5 hops away from the other station and 4 between them, so a rather big range of 14 hops worth of zones.

The Traders seems to work like it was traders ON the factory so far, just with a different center, so I kinda have station traders with 9 hops reach. (Could be 10, but Teladi lost Bright Prospect and that is a highway system, so I made the trade station in it and capped the zone. Luckily the game has no real diplomacy, I wonder if the Teladi AI even knows it lost the zone, it did start a defense station and finished building it after me, so the contested mechanics is in play, but since the Teladi and I has this swarmy lovefest going, they just check in with a big fleet and say HI FRIEND, could you tell us why we are here, we seems to have forgotten why we visited.

Kinda not a repeater station to cover the universe with a central factory zone hidden away with all the big clucky stations, at least it is going to take way more production and trade ships to make them start storing stuff on the trade station and perhaps create a situation where a second trade station could use the first trade station as source of wares.

PS: Every station cost X amount of items that is "ignored" because they need to be filled up to create the dynamic sale price. So you could have quite a sink for goods that just need to exist to make the auto average sale price finding work. The microkings could set it manually, but that is not my cup of tea, I need automation dammit.

[Miravlix]

Factory has been doing fine, raking in the cash by selling wares either to NPC ships or with the stations traders.

Now I added scanning arrays as I got enough money to do it, but now all trade ships behavior setting is ware "scanner array" and nothing else, so storage is full and nothing is getting traded.

The game is simply not designed to work this way, it allows a lot of things because it's used in small ways, but the core design intend for one station to make one product out of the wares it has interest in, so focusing "scanning arrays" make sense since if you have none, it would kill production as it would be one line.

My factory is multi line, so I have many wares not getting sold, because I just added scanning array (It's used by turret and drones, that was the factories latest expansion).

The workaround is the Trade Station, the Trade Station sells wares the same way a trader ON the factory can do, but it can't see the scanner array emergency and won't stop trading all wares. It's a lot of work to configure the logi page, but you go from an army of stations to two station (factory + one or more trade stations)

This is kinda EgoSoft main problem they keep creating a "RIGHT WAY" to play the game, but they keep allowing us to do things that is more open and we end up in conflict with rules that only make sense if you follow the "RIGHT WAY". It was seen at the release too, us that figured out the "RIGHT WAY" had a almost bug free product, but for most? it was buggy, because they kept being able to Zig Zig Zag, but the right order to get a result was Zig Zag Zig. (See the problem? The number of bad options is quite big, "Zag Zig Zig", "Zag Zig Zag", etc. all result in the boarding mission failed, with only one "RIGHT WAY".)

[grapedog]

You could just let your factory take care of the scanning arrays "problem" on it's own. After an hour or two whatever emergency purchases shouod be completed, and back to business as usual.

Though I am not understanding how you added a scanning array production fab to a factory and your traders are trying to buy them, unless there is some other final product that needed scanning arrays for... then I could see them buying them. If it's not an emergency, just reduce the buy price to minimum and your traders won't buy many, or reduce the buy order to one and they won't buy any beyond a single scanning array. Problem solved...

Or, just build from the bottom up. If you want to make turrets and drones, build scanning arrays first, then turrets and drones. Then you will never have emergency purchases from your management and traders, who see final products that cannot be made and producti9n modules sitting still...

You created your own "problem"...

Use a station calculator, build the station in it, then look on the right side at the list of items needed, and build your station modules from the top of that list down in that order roughly, including storage and habitats as required, as you go...

"Problem" solved...

[sh1pman]

I can't figure out why the traders think he can only sell some of the goods, when the purchase price is maxed, the goods amount accepted is way higher than a traders full cargo amount.

It’s because the buying station doesn’t have enough money to create buy offers for full volume of every ware. That’s why the manager is listing *actual* buy offers for just a fraction of what the station can really buy to fill its cargo to max. Just transfer more money to the station. I give my warehouses 100M credits each, that’s enough in my experience.

[Miravlix]

It’s because the buying station doesn’t have enough money to create buy offers for full volume of every ware. That’s why the manager is listing *actual* buy offers for just a fraction of what the station can really buy to fill its cargo to max. Just transfer more money to the station. I give my warehouses 100M credits each, that’s enough in my experience.

I find that a bit silly of a solution. Now that the Trade Station manager can reach the factory, moving the traders to the trade station result in everything working perfectly with 0 credit on the trader station.

The idea of using the drag and commit interface a billion times pr. game session makes my brain cry, if we could give the manager a number ONCE and then he would take or give money to the global account, that would be amazing. Going into my factory and dragging the bar to 0 and clicking commit every once in a while, is not ideal but it gets the job done, if you want me to hit a random spot to give the station some money, but not to much 100 of times pr. game session that is just awful. At the moment all my stations works by zeroing the accounts, easy with the trade station as the manager is completely clueless on them and ask for 0 credits, I was actually hoping I could move the cash to the trade stations, but I'm not sure what is going on as the factory withouter traders still is way way way ahead of the trade station accounts.

Not sure if the trade station traders uses the trade station for range, but gives the money to the factory, they do seem to ignore the trade station completely and trade directly from the factory to the buyer.