Practical Limit for UTs?

lt_wentoncha · Post by **lt_wentoncha** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 06:07

Hi all,

Is there a practical limit for UTs? What I mean is, is there a point where having too many UTs actually undercuts player trading? I'm at 50 right now (it's a real PITA to set them up).

Thanks.

palenaka · Post by **palenaka** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 07:18

I've known more than 75 to be in use. It's a bit excessive for me

I guess it all depends on what you're after. I wouldn't rely on them as a sole source of income. A popular strategy is to use multiple STs as they are more easily controlled

One use I like to do is to setup a few EQ docks, home 2-3 UTs to each one, and a CAG to each one. The UTs will keep the credit account full on the EQ docks, and the CAGs can go out buying stuff to keep them full. It's a handy trick to gather centrallized stuff like missles, shields, etc so you don't have to bother with making so many factories to produce things.

But to answer your question, I don't think there's any hard limit you would notice. It would take HUGE amounts of UTs to fully satisfy every factory in the universe. Plus they like to stop and buy from your own factories, so you're kinda buying from yourself there. Even if you completely fill up all the NPC buying queues, the next time you load up your save game those queues will all reset to their default amounts.

jiman · Post by **jiman** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 07:21

mmm interesting strat...

Palladin888 · Post by **Palladin888** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 23:49

I have seen references to giving traders and stations credits many times and have no idea what people are talking about.

I have noticed that any time my trader.... yes i said trader as in just 1 ...I'm poor atm. Anyway I have never given my trader any credits directly. It seems that any time he makes a purchase the cash is taken directly from me.

I do not yet have any factories or stations to know how that would work.

Catra · Post by **Catra** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 23:52

when you assaign a trader to a station, itll start to use / deposit into that stations credit pool, not yours.

Palladin888 · Post by **Palladin888** » Fri, 2. Jul 10, 23:53

Catra wrote:when you assaign a trader to a station, itll start to use / deposit into that stations credit pool, not yours.

ahhhh that makes since.

Kor'ah · Post by **Kor'ah** » Sat, 3. Jul 10, 13:31

Running 40 caimen superfreighter XLs in commonwealth sectors currently pulling in 10M per game hour. I think another 10-15 can be added without them tripping over eachother.

patient zero · Post by **patient zero** » Sat, 3. Jul 10, 21:56

Kor'ah wrote:currently pulling in 10M per game hour.

I don't get it. I hear this a lot, but my 26 UTs only bring in 2-3 MCr. per hour. They spend most of their time stuck in a loop trading one bean or one missile on each run. Anyone know how to fix it?

NewtSoup · Post by **NewtSoup** » Sat, 3. Jul 10, 22:09

My experience is that any more than 30 UTs and they start sniping each others trade runs. In X3R I was able to raise half the asking price for Avarice with 20 UTs (the other half with stations).

I've seen (X3TC) UT's get stuck in the level 10-15 range doing stupid trade runs or spending a long time on standby. But after that they seem to pick up again.

UT's are notorious for wandering into pirate sectors and getting themselves killed. I reckon if you're running 30 or more then babysitting them is going to be a real chore.

If you run scripts then Lucike's Economy-Supply-Trader is worth a look in. Very configurable, reliable and most importantly - PROFITABLE.

foszae · Post by **foszae** » Sat, 3. Jul 10, 23:38

there's one sort of rule-of-thumb i have for deciding that i've got too many UTs: if i enter a sector i've never been to before, and suddenly three or four of my UTs have jumped in to capture newly discovered deals, then i've probably over-saturated the galaxy with them. ideally, if i discover a sector and only one of my UTs show up, then i've hit the sweet spot. if none appear, then i can probably afford to promote another ST or two.

brattbags01 · Post by **brattbags01** » Sun, 4. Jul 10, 19:54

Just on a side note to this, has anyone else got the problem of their UT's trying to sell Mosquito missles that no-one wants and spend all their time jumping from EQ dock to EQ dock.

Edit: Most of these guys are at level 25

Triaxx2 · Post by **Triaxx2** » Sun, 4. Jul 10, 20:11

Patient-zero: They've probably filled their cargo bays with items they didn't sell and now have no room for new cargo. Order them to trade manually to get rid of it, or stop them and jump to them and order them to dump the cargo.

SIMON POPPLEWELL · Post by **SIMON POPPLEWELL** » Sun, 4. Jul 10, 21:30

patient zero wrote:
Kor'ah wrote:currently pulling in 10M per game hour.
I don't get it. I hear this a lot, but my 26 UTs only bring in 2-3 MCr. per hour. They spend most of their time stuck in a loop trading one bean or one missile on each run. Anyone know how to fix it?

The easiest way is to send them several sector away from where they were trading then give them the order to start trading again, usually works for me.

softweir · Post by **softweir** » Sun, 4. Jul 10, 22:54

One of the limitations of running large UT fleets is that they can cause a global energy crisis by burning it jumping. This slows down the economy something shocking. If you fill-in with additional SPPs then that reinvigorates the economy, allowing a greater number of UTs to operate. If you notice that the price of energy is always above "average", then you are probably stifling trade.

garv222 · Post by **garv222** » Sun, 4. Jul 10, 22:56

It's a good idea to periodically check your messages. You wont get the flashing envelope button, but check them anyway when you get a audio notification. That's probably a UT notifying you it couldn't make a trade and it stops. Simply assigning it a UT command won't let it get rid of any cargo onboard. If you can't be bothered to deal with the cargo, jettison it out and then issue the new trade command.

palenaka · Post by **palenaka** » Mon, 5. Jul 10, 05:58

Palladin888 wrote:I have seen references to giving traders and stations credits many times and have no idea what people are talking about.

I have noticed that any time my trader.... yes i said trader as in just 1 ...I'm poor atm. Anyway I have never given my trader any credits directly. It seems that any time he makes a purchase the cash is taken directly from me.

I do not yet have any factories or stations to know how that would work.

Well, it's sort of a mid-game thing. When you get to the point you're buying ships in batches

Anyway, here's a few things I do (some repeat of the above)

I start out with a Teladi (or Argon) Trading Station in Home of Light. Relativly safe, plus your close to Jumpdrives 'TerraCorps HQ' I use Argon or Teladi because they can hold an unlimited amount of M3 and smaller ships. Careful with parking bigger ships there because it's easy to fill up the docking clamps. For M3s and smaller you can shove as many as you want in there. Falcon Haulers (M3) are a pretty nice 'trader' ship because they can haul 'XL' sized cargo.

- I train up 2-3 UTs and set their homebase to this station. The buy and sell using the trading stations bank account, so you want to give it a little to start off with.
- I set the station command 'Auto Transfer Money to ship account' to 50m. This will give a good slush fund for buying and selling.
- Next I buy around 5 Discoverers. I set them up like this thread here
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=277232
This will level up the CLS to max, so when you need a CAG (or a CLS) you can transfer the pilot to the new ship and start out with a 'Major Dealer' With 5 Discovers (any M5 will do really, but Argon Prime is pretty close so there ya go) I'm allmost never wanting for a maxed out CAG/CLS pilot. The salaries are so cheap (set them to pull from station account) you'll never notice. Although if I notice a maxed out CLS still flying around, I'll tell him to go home.
- Anyway, I'll manually put in stuff like 1 missle, 1 PBE, 1 25MJ shield, stuff like that. Buy a TS, transfer a CLS pilot to it and have it become a CAG (commercial agent) Read the instructions on CAG, it's pretty easy to use. The CAG will jump around and fill up your trading station with wares so you'll allmost allways have a good stockpile to pull from.

Doing the same trick with EQ Docks and you'll have a nice spot to equip your capital ships too. It's not so handy with guns and stuff (it can only hold 2 PBGs

) but it's easy place to jump in your capitals ships to pick up new missles and e-cells. Trading Stations and EQ docks suck for storage, but the e-cell and missle storage is kinda nice.

There's also a trick (I think) you can do using Dockware Manager. You can use TS ships (or TL?) to auto-transfer wares to and from a docked ship, which will in effect expand your storage for the station.

Anyway, it's a bit off the main point, but this is one of the neat things you can do with UTs. I find UTs fairly unreliable as a major source of income. That's just me tho, some folks like them. I guess my working theory is, I don't use UTs just to use UTs, I like them for augmenting other things I'm doing.

They're also handy for factories that aren't selling well. Normally I never move my prices from default. But if you have a factory not selling well, you can mark it's product price to -1 from default, and that should attract some UTs over to buy the product and sell it for a profit somewhere.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » Mon, 26. Jul 10, 00:37

I don't use too many UTs. I like to stick with just around five. Enough to carve out a significant profitsss, yet not enough to really have a big impact on the overall economy. I personally find that using too many UTs ends up in creating a constant connection of distant trade routes which I prefer to exploit by building local factories

They are especially helpful towards the beginning phases of the game when you are just building your first factories. Their profitsss will go a long way towards expanding that first factory into a budding empire

Cith · Post by **Cith** » Mon, 26. Jul 10, 00:57

In X3R I came to the conclusion that 20 UT's was the perfect amount to have out there. I don't remember why I settled with that number, but I think it had something to do with how hard it was to keep them out of trouble when I had too many. The whole 'automated' aspect of UT's kinda fades away when you have start micromanaging them to keep them away from pirates and bad sectors. I also had to check on them to see if they were keeping the same cargo for too long which would indicate that they were unable to sell it.

One thing you're going to notice often, as mentioned by others too, is that when you have too many UT's in circulation they're going to be chasing the same deals. This is also the reason why I never mix different type of freighters as the faster ones will almost always reach the destination first, retarding the slower and bigger freighters.

So after 20 UT's it was straight to complexes for me. Nowadays I don't really invest in UT's for the income, but rather to keep the economy in certain sectors flowing better. Imho this is their best feature, restrict them to a few sectors where you see the economy is staggering and they'll help out a great deal.

Twest09 · Post by **Twest09** » Mon, 2. Aug 10, 07:11

The correct answer is you can't ever have too many. Now I feel I must clarify why this is the correct answer.

1) The economy is semi dynamic and can adjust itself slightly.

2) You can always do build missions to create a larger economic web.

3) If you do in fact do a lot of build factory missions, then build your "mirror" to that factory and make a complex to feed it. That makes for healthy competition and can also cause them to overstock and sell on the cheap.

Anyway, at one point I had over 100 UTs and my games economy was actually still quite strong.... I can't remember how much money I had but I do remember that I had to start storing all my dough in station funds and buying Capital Ships and complete Fighter Wings to just throw into the Xenon sectors for the hell of it...

brattbags01 · Post by **brattbags01** » Mon, 2. Aug 10, 09:09

Ya, and besides, if you loose any traders to Pirates, Xenon or whatever (i do regulary) well, just buy some more. No big deal.