[X3 AP] Sector Trader help

[Plasmaball]

With Rebirth coming up, I fired X3 once again, and I completely forgot how everything works.

I did some stock trading until I had a few millions. Now I'm trying to turn Aladna Hill into a training area for traders. It has plenty of factories and a solar plant, and missing only food.

So I built a Cattle Ranch L and a couple of Cahoona Bakeries M. Equipped a Mistral Super Freighter with all upgrades that can be found in the area from Legend's Home to Seizewell. Gave him an order to "Start sector trader" in Aladna Hill, without a home base set.

He's always on standby, even though he could buy Argnu Beef or Meatsteak Cahoonas from them and sell it in the nearby stations. What am I doing wrong?

The prices and settings seem to be fine:

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And here is a station that could buy my cahoonas at 73 credits per unit :/

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[beckett_p]

I think one problem is that low level sector traders in particular will only trade with basic wares...energy cells etc. But think they should trade the Agnu Beef.

Also you are selling Agnu Beef at 111 and the station will buy at 120 so theoretically the trader will make 9cr per unit BUT if I recall correctly the sector traders works from avg price so your Agnu Beef sell price should be a max of Avg-1 (103 in this case).

Its a little while since I've looked at sector traders but I think this is at least part of the problem.

[Plasmaball]

Ok, I tried setting the buying brice of everything to average+1, and selling at average-1, but it's still idling. Meanwhile, NPC ships are happily selling me stuff at those exorbitant prices:

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I hate this about this game, 24 hours later I still can't do a basic thing that other trading sims have made easier than anything.

[Vim Razz]

Sector traders are a really bad way to try and manage your own stations. They're just not designed to "think" that way.

If you really want them to tend these stations, you'll need to set "trade with other races" to No, and set your buying/selling prices to react to station inventory levels with the station manager, so that it provides trades that are obviously "good" from the perspective of the ST.

Also note that STs will look a quantities available as well as prices, and will insist on having the buyer lined up and ready before it makes it's purchase.


I get that you're trying to avoid assigning a ship or three to each station, but that's really the only reliable way to do things if you're not going to complex them together.

[Nanook]

...
I get that you're trying to avoid assigning a ship or three to each station, but that's really the only reliable way to do things if you're not going to complex them together.

From his first post, he says he's trying to create a training ground for sector/universe traders, using his own factories. The problem is, as you pointed out, that doesn't work so well. Prices generally need to be a bit more extreme than 'average +1' or 'average -1' to buy or sell, respectively, from your own factories. It's generally a whole lot better to find a sector with a good mix of NPC factories if you want to train up that rookie sector trader.

[Infekted]

Long story short no or low level Mark3s are really bad and only seem to be able to reliably trade energy to gain levels to the point where they are actually useful.

Vim's advice about disallowing NPC traders and creating good trade opportunities for your LTs is the way to go. Particularly for buying energy from the local SPPs.
You may also want to investigate/map how the energy is flowing around in that sector. It should have two M sized SPPs by default. From my experience at least one of those often disappears quite early do to lack of demand.
Almost definitely due to the huge number of SPPs just next door in Akeela's Beacon.

[Vim Razz]

From his first post, he says he's trying to create a training ground for sector/universe traders, using his own factories.

Ah, good call. I guess I read through it a bit too hastily earlier.

well, two things come to mind, then:
1) you're going to need a heavier price differential if you want to attract the attention of your newbie ST pilot.
2) If you want him to move constantly in a ship that size, you're going to have to bump up demand artificially somehow -- like having a CLS 2 freighter hauling beef from the bakery back to the cattle ranch, so that your ST can buy it from the ranch and sell it to the bakery again...

maybe three things:
3) block NPC traffic from trading with your training stations. There's no reason to allow them to dock and interfere with this kind of operation.

[Plasmaball]

I tried blocking NPC traffic by transmitting friend-foe settings from my global commands, but that didn't really work either.

I suppose it's time to stop fighting the system, and set homebases for my ships. Those work fine

[Infekted]

You block NPC traders by going into the settings for each station and setting "Allow NPC traders" to no =}

Using FoF settings will probably result in unintentional war with races you do not want to be at war with!

[Plasmaball]

You block NPC traders by going into the settings for each station and setting "Allow NPC traders" to no =}

Using FoF settings will probably result in unintentional war with races you do not want to be at war with!

I read that station setting blocks your own UT/ST ships as well, so not sure about that.

There's an option to transmit your global settings only to your stations in a specific sector though, and it supposedly prevents them from landing on those stations. So you can have both the "Allow NPC traders" on yes, and let your traders land at the same time.

(although the traders don't seem to be landing anyway)

[Infekted]

I do not think it does. You have to use the blacklister to stop them.
Maybe wrong on that, it's been a while since I used them tbh.