[X3 AP] Changing from UT to CLS2/CAG

[Alexeiy]

Hello everyone,

I have 270 ut's in my current x3ap game and I apparently reached the point were all their trades are +-1the average price of a good and therefor providing bad profits.

The universe itself is doing very well with occasional zeta stations (can they get higher?) and I wanted to switch my trade in the commonwealth region to a simple trap/cls2/cag system centered in/around the hub.

In this regard I have 2 questions:

1. When I've set up everything and change the buy prices to average and sell prices to below average, would my mk.3 trader cease working when I cover everything? And would that be the point were I can freely destroy every race trading ship without the fear of having them respawn by GOD?


2. It's a commonwealth start, so I don't want to use the PHQ as the main trading stations due to the limited amount of docking bays. What are good alternatives, should I go with a 3-4 factory complex per 12 cls2/cag ships?

[jlehtone]

1. The GoD maintains a certain amount of NPC Free Traders. Period.

[Timsup2nothin]

The NPC traders can't be eliminated. They can be driven into distant corners of the universe. Your UTs are going to be a problem though.

Say you have all bio products in Argon Prime and Kingdom End regions trapped on the low end, meaning you are keeping every buyer supplied at average price.

The suppliers will produce wheat, beef, bogas, and plankton until their price gets below average and is attractive to an NPC bio hauler. When that hauler makes a purchase they have nowhere to sell it unless they leave the region. So they will. When they unload they will look for their next purchase and most likely find something closer to where they are, so they don't come back to "your" markets. That cuts off the suppliers in your region and allows you to buy from them at very low prices.

But when the prices get very low they do attract haulers from further away...and if those haulers have jump drives, ie they are your Mk3 traders, they will be jumping in to grab the stuff before it gets as low priced as it otherwise would. I think in AP you can blacklist the sectors to keep them out, but I usually consider Mk3 traders to be incompatible with monopoly systems.

[RAVEN.myst]

It's a commonwealth start, so I don't want to use the PHQ as the main trading stations due to the limited amount of docking bays. What are good alternatives, should I go with a 3-4 factory complex per 12 cls2/cag ships?

My usual first choice is to use the Hub for this. It has a decent number of docking bays (25 if I recall correctly) - if your freighters are moving goods constantly, a small proportion of them should ever be docked, therefore you shouldn't get congestion problems. The single capital dock also provides useful utility.

Complex hubs can also make decent trade hubs, as they offer 20 sub-capital docking ports - this means that each complex can actually support far far more than a dozen traders, so long as the wares are being moved and therefore keeping your freighters in flight as much of the time as possible. Also, it helps to disallow NPC traders from docking, to prevent "parking congestion" and also so that your wares are being bought and sold optimally, and not at prices marginal to the single price set for the complex. The constraint here is that you need to build your complex out of factories that will use or at least involve wares you want to trade, and any resources you want to re-sell have to be sold by CLS2, while any products you want to buy for resale have to be fetched by CLS2 - this "hybrid" system works very well, and in fact I use it in every game these days early on to allow me to trade ECs and ore, using two L-size ore mines plexed together.

Incidentally, your decision to not use the PHQ for this is also good for another reason: UTs wreak havoc with storage space at PHQ because they can disobey the player-set stock limit (and once the stock limit is exceeded, CAGs also disobey the restriction, and then that ware starts filling up out of control), which then means you have to blacklist the sector the PHQ is in to prevent your UTs from trading with your PHQ.

PS: If your username is your first name, then it's the same as mine

[Alexeiy]

My usual first choice is to use the Hub for this. It has a decent number of docking bays (25 if I recall correctly) - if your freighters are moving goods constantly, a small proportion of them should ever be docked, therefore you shouldn't get congestion problems. The single capital dock also provides useful utility.

Complex hubs can also make decent trade hubs, as they offer 20 sub-capital docking ports - this means that each complex can actually support far far more than a dozen traders, so long as the wares are being moved and therefore keeping your freighters in flight as much of the time as possible. Also, it helps to disallow NPC traders from docking, to prevent "parking congestion" and also so that your wares are being bought and sold optimally, and not at prices marginal to the single price set for the complex. The constraint here is that you need to build your complex out of factories that will use or at least involve wares you want to trade, and any resources you want to re-sell have to be sold by CLS2, while any products you want to buy for resale have to be fetched by CLS2 - this "hybrid" system works very well, and in fact I use it in every game these days early on to allow me to trade ECs and ore, using two L-size ore mines plexed together.

Incidentally, your decision to not use the PHQ for this is also good for another reason: UTs wreak havoc with storage space at PHQ because they can disobey the player-set stock limit (and once the stock limit is exceeded, CAGs also disobey the restriction, and then that ware starts filling up out of control), which then means you have to blacklist the sector the PHQ is in to prevent your UTs from trading with your PHQ.

I didn't even consider the hub as a trading station.

So, if I want to use CAG to sell all goods, I will need a complex for each resource?

I guess I will use these to clog up the npc system and ensure a min price-slightly above average price profit margin on all transferred goods.

The mk.3 blacklist functions in X3AP, so banning my 25 springblossoms into terran space won't be a problem and the other mk3 trader get sold(I started to hate them since I get an error message every 10ingame minutes ).

PS: If your username is your first name, then it's the same as mine

No, its not my first name, it acutally comes from a character in Starcraft: Brood war.

[RAVEN.myst]

So, if I want to use CAG to sell all goods, I will need a complex for each resource?

Not necessarily. For starters, if you use the Hub, then CAGs are all you need (plus a couple/few CLS2s aggressively fetching ECells for jump-fuel - I *strongly* recommend NOT selling ECells from the Hub or other main trade dock, as it complicates the jump-fuel situation, and shortages can kill your economy, and your freighters.) However, if you want to use complexes to trade goods (instead of simply producing), then all, you need to do is include factories in your complex that use or produce the wares you want to trade. Any of those wares that are "intermediate" can be bought and sold by CAGs. Any that are only products, you can buy from other stations and bring in using CLS2; any that are only resources, you can sell off using CLS2. You can even produce at that complex, which then adds a bit more value-adding, but I recommend not doing so at first - initially, I find it better to turn off the factories, and let the stock levels and trade stabilize. I only start turning on factories (gradually, one by one) once I have a surplus of freighters, more than I need for trading (well, there's really no such thing as "too many for trade" - the more freighters you have, the more goods you move, so long as the market can support it), I start turning on factories. If I find that stock levels and movement stays stable, I leave it on, and then try turn on another; if stability is not maintained, I turn a factory off again, and possibly try later.

The mk.3 blacklist functions in X3AP, so banning my 25 springblossoms into terran space won't be a problem

Yes, but if I remember correctly (I could be wrong - I stopped using UTs years ago, as I found Hub+CAG to be much more effective and controllable, and then adding CLS2 in the right places improved that even further), the Mk.3 blacklist system allows to block sectors - CAG allows blocking of individual stations, which can be handy, in some rare cases (such as forbidding trade from a station that is close to a gate to a Xenon sector, so that your CAGs don't jump into the middle of a Xenon pack.)

PS: If your username is your first name, then it's the same as mine

No, its not my first name, it acutally comes from a character in Starcraft: Brood war.[/quote]
Ah, OK - the UED second-in-command, if I recall correctly. He appears to "betray" his commander, but actually is the only one to recognize a deception and sacrifices himself to foil the plot, at which point the captain realizes that he was loyal after all, and hunting him down had been a terrible mistake...

[jlehtone]

My usual first choice is to use the Hub for this. It has a decent number of docking bays (25 if I recall correctly)

I remember seeing only 5 clamps in the Xenon Hub. Could be memory or eyeball failure.


Equipment Docks have some 15 clamps and can host any and every ware. Pathetic stock sizes and thus not suitable for "bulk resource" wares.

[Killjaeden]

*can be modified to be significantly higher in Globals.txt

[RAVEN.myst]

My usual first choice is to use the Hub for this. It has a decent number of docking bays (25 if I recall correctly)

I remember seeing only 5 clamps in the Xenon Hub. Could be memory or eyeball failure.


Equipment Docks have some 15 clamps and can host any and every ware. Pathetic stock sizes and thus not suitable for "bulk resource" wares.

The clamps are in odd places, so can be hard to see (some of those "odd places" make personal undocking at the Hub VERY hazardous, as they eject the player in dangerous directions relative to station walls.) My recollection of the Hub's docking capacity is from the X3 Wiki, but I see the page has been changed since last I checked it (a reference to the Hub is still there ["its high but not unlimited capacity" - how's that for vague, hahah], but the specific entries have been removed, except for the single capital dock. *shrug*) However, I can definitely verify that there are well more than 5 (or even 10 or 15) such clamps, from occasions when large bunches of my CAGs have taken simultaneous lunch-breaks while docked at home, and with traffic still coming in and out at the time.

EDIT: Incidentally, I have on numerous occasions based CAG fleets numbering 60-70 plus several fuel tanker ships; my record has been around 80-85, before I stopped bothering to add any more - I was already making way more money than I had use for, at that point.

[ajime]

My usual first choice is to use the Hub for this. It has a decent number of docking bays (25 if I recall correctly)

I remember seeing only 5 clamps in the Xenon Hub. Could be memory or eyeball failure.


Equipment Docks have some 15 clamps and can host any and every ware. Pathetic stock sizes and thus not suitable for "bulk resource" wares.

it was only recently i used tim's tank concept on the docks itself to expand EQD and trading station's capacity usefulness with the help of CLS2 of course. Slap in an almost dead hulk but tuned to max cargo