4.1 Mass traffic stuck

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Mon, 4. Sep 17, 21:56

I had setup my own zone in Ascendancy with 5 stations:

Energy Array
Foodstuffs Supply
Cell Fab
Metalworks
Crystal Supplier

I was thinking the mass traffic would take care of trade issues making this group self sufficient once given mining ships. This seemed to be working fine until I added the 4th station at which point everything started running out of energy cells.

I thought maybe I didn't give enough cargolifters to keep up with the extra stations so I added more bringing each station up to at least 15 (I think Food had 20 and Energy 30). I've since tried to bring each to 30 but still no apparent change.

When I look through usage I see Energy manager reporting trading with food stuffs and foodstuffs with energy. Energy has 15 drones in use and foodstuffs has 5. It has stayed this way for quite some time and I keep seeing log reports of foodstuffs buying 0 ECells for 0 credits (but also some normal purchase messages too). I do see other stations report that they are buying ECells but there is no drone usage to show that it is actually happening. For the second time the stations are running out of ECells without any new transfers after I gave them each 20k with a cargo ship when it first happened.

It seems like these two stations are stuck somehow. Assigning trade ships still seems to work correctly but I was trying to avoid that for anything but selling products, any suggestions?

Post by **Alan Phipps** » Mon, 4. Sep 17, 22:22

Mass traffic small/medium ships shouldn't need the use of drones as they notionally 'dock' instead. They have no drone bay or port. Adding cargolifter drones to your stations should make capital trade transfers go faster though.

The 0 for 0 Cr sale probably reflects a failed trade elsewhere in which the tradeship failed to buy the wares at the expected price (or through reserved/no stock situations) and so had nothing to sell when it arrived at your station.

Pirate/Xenon attacks can really mess up trade cycles if they destroy or damage NPC station storage modules and maybe spill station wares into space.

Obviously your station managers should be addressing some of this with repeated or replaced offers - but that can sometimes just bump up the reserved stocks held back and actually make trade harder. You really need good prime stats for your managers (and a healthy Cr budget) and also need the Relay Station module on your stations for out-of-zone/sector trading offers for their freighters.

Oh wait, you are trying for self-sufficiency. Hmmm. I wonder if your station managers are actually working against you there and looking for better deals with the NPC stations rather than keeping it all in-house?

I think I'll move this to X Rebirth Universe (gameplay) where more trade-heavy players will see it.

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Mon, 4. Sep 17, 22:49

I should have mentioned that I restricted faction on all wares that other stations in the zone can provide (though I was still allowing those to be sold from producing stations) and have no trade ships assigned.

The managers are max skill or missing one star.

RAVEN.myst · Post by **RAVEN.myst** » Mon, 4. Sep 17, 22:51

BGrey, are your station managers restricting trade to outside factions? Given that you are going for self-sufficiency, it may be necessary to do this, in order to prevent your managers from trying to shop abroad, as Alan suggests above. (I am speculating here, but it seems plausible enough to me to warrant checking it out.)

Failing all else, you could assign a handful of assorted M-size freighters to sort out the local trading - they really shine in short hauls, as they are much faster than capital freighters, don't require drones anywhere, and dock and load/offload almost instantaneously. Of course, I understand that this would undermine the purism of your "mass traffic as conveyor belt" paradigm.

EDIT: Heh, I see you answered my question even as I was typing it...

Post by **Sparky Sparkycorp** » Tue, 5. Sep 17, 00:41

Hi BGray,

It sounds like you know what you're doing with regards to settings in order to promote use of station cargolifters for trading via mass traffic.

On the off chance something could be helpful anyway, here's a Wiki link to my understanding of Manager settings.

Are the stations that need E-Cells willing to pay enough credits compared to the sell price at the Energy Array? I can't check at the moment but I think player stations need to buy from each other.

Regards,
Sparks

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Sun, 10. Sep 17, 20:14

So I let these stations sit and used my ships to supply them until they were full of everything. I ended up doing this manually since the managers seem to like moving tiny amounts for some reason.

Still have 15 cargolifters in use by energy array and 5 by foodstuffs and had them listed as trading with each other.

Removing managers and putting them back set it to searching for trades but no change in drones.

Out of curiosity I tried to pull the drones off the station, it lists the full amount of drones when showing transfer but does not work unless taking less than the total drones - in use drones, so it seems they are off doing something.

Is there a way to find them in sector and kill them... because I don't know what else might fix this.

Random other things:

Traders swarmed my energy array driving into the structure at the Admin dock, not sure why since they were all trying to sell to a construction vessel in a different zone...

Warehouse CV with 15 drones only used 1 to build the radar section, which took forever...

And for the possible mod question, I am only using:
Show Skills
Capital Ship Bridge

Raevyan · Post by **Raevyan** » Sun, 10. Sep 17, 20:38

In zone Cargo Drone Trades can take a very long time depending on how far the stations are away from each other. You'll better off not equipping drones but instead use M sized ships. They are much faster, can carry more wares and are much more reliable.

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 06:53

I caved and tried using M ships assigning what was needed to sell the products of each station to the others, at this point I have a few stations in two directly adjacent zones including a warehouse.

I was thinking I would use the warehouse to skim off full stations to keep things producing.

The M traders don't seem to pick the highest price buyer among the stations and they rarely fill their hold, sometimes only moving a handful, even when the the buy order is larger than they can carry. This is with the producing stations full of goods and more credits on the managers than they could use.

Whats the deal.

Meanwhile the cargolifters continue their Odyessy.

RAVEN.myst · Post by **RAVEN.myst** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 09:20

If you are using those small freighters exclusively for intra-zone trading, you might consider setting their trade range to 'zone' in order to prevent those freighters from being "distracted" by trade offers farther afield - however, unfortunately there is no way to do this selectively, you can only do it all of a station's trade, or none of it, so if you have other freighters at those stations that trade farther afield, they will also be affected, so it's an all or nothing proposition.

As to why they are carrying partial loads and not fully filling orders: I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect it has to do with the timing of changes. For example, the manager updates trade offers at intervals rather than in true real time (I suspect the intervals are shorter the higher the manager's skills, but are never completely eliminated) - so, it could be that when a freighter comes in to collect wares for delivery, it is acting on old information that has been "locked in" - as it's picking up the wares, the manager makes a deal with the client station (whose buy order may be out of date in the same manner, between offer updates) and then by the time the freighter gets there with its cargo, the information may have changed yet again - therefore, it's possible that by the time your freighter is arriving to offload, the trade info is 2 or even more updates behind. I'm only theorizing here, though...

Ezarkal · Post by **Ezarkal** » Fri, 15. Sep 17, 14:20

BGrey wrote:Warehouse CV with 15 drones only used 1 to build the radar section, which took forever...

CVs will only use drones that are on board when the build order is given. If your CV only used one, it means you passed the order too quickly after the previous stage, and the drones used to build the previous stage didn't have time to dock back to the CV. Thus, they were not on board when the build started, and were not counted as available for building.

Yeah, it's weird that way.

Building OoS is the best solution for that.

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Sat, 16. Sep 17, 20:16

RAVEN.myst wrote:If you are using those small freighters exclusively for intra-zone trading, you might consider setting their trade range to 'zone' in order to prevent those freighters from being "distracted" by trade offers farther afield - however, unfortunately there is no way to do this selectively, you can only do it all of a station's trade, or none of it, so if you have other freighters at those stations that trade farther afield, they will also be affected, so it's an all or nothing proposition.

As to why they are carrying partial loads and not fully filling orders: I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect it has to do with the timing of changes. For example, the manager updates trade offers at intervals rather than in true real time (I suspect the intervals are shorter the higher the manager's skills, but are never completely eliminated) - so, it could be that when a freighter comes in to collect wares for delivery, it is acting on old information that has been "locked in" - as it's picking up the wares, the manager makes a deal with the client station (whose buy order may be out of date in the same manner, between offer updates) and then by the time the freighter gets there with its cargo, the information may have changed yet again - therefore, it's possible that by the time your freighter is arriving to offload, the trade info is 2 or even more updates behind. I'm only theorizing here, though...

I don't think that is the case since Ive seen it do that for new orders as well. For example the warehouse has an order for 14k some spacefuel and has never had a lower amount. The foodstuffs is full of space fuel and its stopping production. It decides to trade to the warehouse.... and loads up 143 units.

This just seems broken but I don't seem to see mods mentioning anything like this, only stations limiting sales when below certain stock levels which clearly shouldn't be what is going on here. I've since tried the station push wares mod but that doesn't seem to change this behavior.

Ezarkal wrote:
BGrey wrote:Warehouse CV with 15 drones only used 1 to build the radar section, which took forever...
CVs will only use drones that are on board when the build order is given. If your CV only used one, it means you passed the order too quickly after the previous stage, and the drones used to build the previous stage didn't have time to dock back to the CV. Thus, they were not on board when the build started, and were not counted as available for building.

Yeah, it's weird that way.

Building OoS is the best solution for that.

Odd, Ill have to watch out for that.

BGrey · Post by **BGrey** » Fri, 22. Sep 17, 02:21

Congo line I had mentioned going to my energy array:
https://i.imgur.com/uiNlae1.jpg

Traders must have some neurological disorder prompting them to head press on my energy array before going about their business:
https://i.imgur.com/mwWaR9d.jpg

They are trying to trade with a CV in the adjacent zone... no idea what they are doing. Energy Array is restricted and has been full constructed for ages.

Post by **eMYNOCK** » Fri, 22. Sep 17, 02:53

from what i have read you are trying to trade between your own station with lifters exclusively... am i right?

you have wrote that you have equipped between 15 and 30 lifters for each station... that are by far not enough lifters to keep up with all the stations demands.

afaik lifters can only carry 2000m³ universal and they are extremely slow.

when you seriously want to focus on lifters for in zone trades you should at last equip all related stations up to 75% with lifters. (that are around 80-120 per station)

more drones = more cargo transported at the same time... keep in mind that lifters only travel at 44m/s and they have to complete a full MTN cycle regardless.

in the worst case they are trying to dock at their destinatin but are caught in a clipping error (this will force them to bump into the dock and get thrown back... and the cycle begins anew).

if this is what happens just leave the zone for about 10 or 20 minutes and they should be okay again.

last words... if you really want to find your lifters just follow the mass traffic lines... and i truly mean follow all lines... they are out there.. and you will fnd them.

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4.1 Mass traffic stuck

4.1 Mass traffic stuck