Ai trader buy price and behaviour

[The Draf]

Hi

I have been trying to find out how the AI traders work. Does the AI ever buy low and middle tier products for more then avg price -1?

Does the AI trader ship have a home base or are they autonomous? What I mean is do they belong to specific stations?
Example: Ore mine Alpha has trader which get sent out to buy energy cells when stocks are below a certain %.

My theory is that AI traders are autonomous and spawns automaticly. Usually the amount of traders are insufficent which will allow the player to earn some money filling the needs which the AI does not cover.
Is there any information on how the spawning of AI traders is determined?

[pjknibbs]

I don't know all the details, but I can say for certain that the AI traders in X3 are not owned by a station. This is a change from the way X2 and earlier games worked, where stations owned their own trade ships and sent them out to buy the goods they needed. I think the scripts that run these AI traders in X3 are necessarily much simplified, and it makes it much simpler to make a profitable trade if you just look for below average at the source and above at the destination rather than having to remember what you bought the goods for, like a player-owned Mk 3 trader does.