[AP/TC] NPC Station Price Scaling

[Manks]

Does anyone happen to know off-hand how ware prices at stations scale with stock? It isn't linear, but appears sigmoidal. Basically, I want to know what price a station will offer at the ware level it requires to run a cycle, so I know how bad a deal I have to accept to automate the whole thing.

Edit: Er, not just one factory. Any factory. I'd rather not have to make a sample sale every time I want to hook up a factory to my distribution network.

[Sabrina Bergin]

Use Cag software it will take care of the details for you.

[Manks]

Trying to use CLS2 this time. In a different game I setup a trading system with CAGs and docks that touched every sector, but now I want to try something new. Also, CAGs can't take care of the details of selling wares to stations all the way up to the price needed to run a cycle.


An example:

The Queen's Retribution area is starved for BoFu (well, Bio Gas mostly, but same difference). Without player intervention, you can almost always find a place where you can sell it near the max price of 394. I built some facilities, started moving 'fu at around 388 and business was good.

Now there's a CIG forge in Menelaus' Oasis that I want to keep running. A lot of the time I'd check in on it to see that it was stalled due to not enough BoFu. Turns out, that forge needs 343 food to start a cycle while it has a storage space of 832. At 0 stock, it charges max price. At full it charges min, which is 190. If price scaled linearly, I would need to sell BoFu at around 309 to guarantee that it runs.

If I start selling BoFu at that price and assuming that I've balanced supply and demand, using CAGs I'm going to make a lot of crap sales elsewhere just to keep that one forge running unless I manually starve stations down. The price doesn't actually scale linearly, but the point stands that it is somewhere considerably south of what I can get selling to other stations.

Alternatively, I can wait for an NPC to take care of it, which means trucking stuff in incredibly slow ships from very far away. Or I can figure out the price to stock curve and use CLS2, which is what I'd like to do.

[Masochisto]

Instead of focusing on the price it needs per cycle I focus on the amount of inventory it needs. You can use the [sell ware up to] command to sell to a station with a more generous price to give it just enough to start a production cycle, then sell ware for max price - 1 to max volume just after it within the same cls2 waypoint.

[Manks]

Er, good point. Sell up-to includes price controls I suppose. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Timsup2nothin]

Instead of focusing on the price it needs per cycle I focus on the amount of inventory it needs. You can use the [sell ware up to] command to sell to a station with a more generous price to give it just enough to start a production cycle, then sell ware for max price - 1 to max volume just after it within the same cls2 waypoint.

When I started posting about CLS networks this is exactly what I was hoping for. You hit on a solution to a problem that has nagged at me for a long time...never really nagged enough to get to the top of the 'must solve' list, but was just one of those things that was somewhere out there bothering me because I knew I was leaving credits on the table. Thanks for bringing another point of thought to bear on improving the concept and producing a very elegant solution.

Now I will try to add a little bit to it.

Instead of sell, max price, max cargo on the second transaction, how about setting the volume to an even multiple of the production cycle...specifically the largest even multiple that the empty station can hold. That way the production cycles will eat the entire inventory and you won't have to sell any at less than max on the subsequent sale.

[Manks]

Instead of sell, max price, max cargo on the second transaction, how about setting the volume to an even multiple of the production cycle...specifically the largest even multiple that the empty station can hold. That way the production cycles will eat the entire inventory and you won't have to sell any at less than max on the subsequent sale.

Is this for using a freighter to sell the wares or delivering to parked ships selling at a fab? In either case, I can see it increasing the number of trips made as you'll have loads that aren't multiples of the hold size. That or just waiting for the original waypoint to sell off the excess, and then you'll be back where you started, albeit with an extra max-price deal.

Anyhow, having thought about it some more, I guess my original question still applies on the other end of things. Some times it is nice to know what price to buy at so that you can free up enough storage in a station to squeeze in that last cycle. Recon drones are probably the most pathological example, but they produce 12 per cycle and the station only stores 20. Fortunately, no NPCs seem to buy them so now that I've got it bouncing between 8 and 20 it should be good to go. And, that being said, there aren't a lot of stations where you're guaranteed a minimum price deal if you manage to finagle things just right.

[Masochisto]

it works better with a parked seller, as you'll be more likely to monopolize the sales, but it can work well with either.

It may be good to have a fast smaller ship to sell stations enough of a ware to start another cycle, and a larger slower ship configured to sell a large batch.