Need help managing PHQ

[SaltyBrit]

For the life of me I cannot figure out how to make a profit with my Station.

Without going into too much detail, I am producing Energy Cells, Water, Meat, Wheat, Spices, Medical Supplies, and Food Rations. I have x4 medium miners, x1 large miner, x1 medium trader, and x1 larger trader. I have plenty of storage space (liquid, solid, and container), x1 regular dock, and x1 3-dock T pier.

My first problem is that my station was buying Ice even though I had my miners collecting it. I think I solved this by restricting trade with other factions (which I have done with all goods), lowering my Buy offer to 0 and raising my Sell offer to max. I also assigned the miners to Mine for Station directly by right clicking on the PHQ. Its been slow going but I think it might be working. I am noticing some miners just sitting around as if waiting to dock for long periods of time, and also noticed that the commands I gave them previously to stay within the sector havent stuck but that could be the PHQ manager assigning new orders. Is this the right set up?

My second and notably worse problem is that I cannot get my traders to sell my products. As with the miners they are assigned to the station, but they tend to just sit there. I tell them to AutoTrade Medical Supplies and Food Rations but they will go to vendors to BUY those items not SELL the ones that I have produced. For the life of me I cannot figure out how to make them load up my supplies and sell them to others. Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

[Baconnaise]

Have you tried the blanket export wares from sector command? Select all the traders shift+click then right click on the sector and choose the option export. That might help or work for you. I generally only use those two import/export commands with smaller trade fleets while building stations. It works quite well in that regard. I would also check and see the behaviors for your ships and make sure they aren't backed up with other orders. I've had it happen to me where another order get's queued up like fly and wait among others. Click the X remove the order and it should resume default behavior you have set.

[Konradius]

I'm having similar problems, but with the starting factory from the other start option.
However I'm thinking that slow dock speeds for medium ships may be a bottleneck (and ships claim buy/sell orders beforehand, so that could also be backing up the line)

[SaltyBrit]

Oh man this issues keep getting worse!

I noticed that the Drill Miners were just sitting around not doing anything so I checked to see if there were orders lined up conflicting with their trader but they were all pretty standard, Dock, Trade. Then I noticed one was just circling around the PHQ logo, turns out he was stuck within the asteroid itself and I had to give it new orders to move. That seemed to allow the other miners to execute their orders, guess they were waiting on him. But that is going to suck if I have to keep checking back to see if they have gotten themselves stuck.

Likewise, the miners keep using a jump gate to get from Grand Exchange I to Grand Exchange III to mine Ice despite the fact their their order are set to Max distance to Gate = 0. Very frustrating.

With the export wares option is that not a one time use? Im looking to have the manager use these traders for Food Rations and Medical Supplies only but I dont want to have to keep ordering them to do it myself. If left to their own devices, they go out and pick up all sorts of wares from the galaxy and bring that back to me. I want to be an exporter not an importer though.

[Arze]

Units eventually figure out how to get out of the roid. On my day 1 save I have a bunch of basic and even more luxury 6s 3m docks built to cope with any bottlenecks. Considering that I manufacture almost everything, except race specific stuff and drugs I need a lot of space for docking. In fact I go with at least 4 basic docs on every new start after a few hours of crystal mining. But I do agree that the PHQ causes much more problems than what it solves, were it not for research I would ignore it in every save.