How do I see the price I paid for an item in my hold?

[oddible]

I'm probably overlooking it but I'm trying to find out what the cost of goods I've purchased in my hold amounts to. If I have 100 ore I can't seem to see the price I paid per item so I have a sense of whether I'm making a profit or not. If this isn't something that is shown by default (which every other trading sim most certainly shows as an essential part of the game) then is there equipment or a mod which will show it?

Thanks.

[Timsup2nothin]

Nope. Just buy low and sell high. The encyclopedia will give you high, low, and average price for the item. Stations where you buy and sell inform you of their relative price with the inventory bar. If their inventory is low their price will be high and vice versa.

Most econ sims do show you an average item cost in your inventory, but that is actually misleading because it totally ignores opportunity.

If you are carrying something that you paid ten credits for, but you could have sold it for fifteen credits, then selling it for twelve isn't really profitable. In the real world whenever I failed to sell something I always changed my cost to whatever the best offer I got was, and if I eventually had to sell for less than that I acknowledged the loss.

[oddible]

If you are carrying something that you paid ten credits for, but you could have sold it for fifteen credits, then selling it for twelve isn't really profitable. In the real world whenever I failed to sell something I always changed my cost to whatever the best offer I got was, and if I eventually had to sell for less than that I acknowledged the loss.

However if you are carrying something you paid 10 credits for and you don't remember how much you paid for it and you sell it for 9 then you just botched it big time. Seems a rather egregious oversight that a future setting game requires you to keep your excel spreadsheet outside the game.

Is there an in-game notepad I can use to jot things down?

[Timsup2nothin]

Yeah you can make log entries in your log. If you want to keep notes on purchases you can certainly do so.

I still think 'buy low sell high' is pretty easy to manage. I just follow two simple rules; never pay above average price for anything, and never sell anything for below average price. So I make a profit on every deal. The trick is knowing what not to buy no matter how cheap it is; but that you have to learn from experience. But as a head start, do not buy argnu beef under any circumstances unless you have somewhere to store it forever or some sort of plan for getting rid of it.

[Rapier]

If you bought it, you bought it. It doesn't matter what price you paid for it, the wares are only worth what you can sell them for. If the price you can sell them for isn't as much as you want, you have to decide whather you go searching for a better price or whther you could make better use of an empty hold and the capital from sale at thecurrent price.

[CBJ]

The situation is somewhat more complicated than your description of the supposed "oversight" implies. If you have 100 units of something in your hold then you could easily have bought them 10 at a time in different locations and at different prices. If you sell 20 of them, which 20 have you sold? Aside from the fact that the game can't track each individual unit of a given ware, just of the quantity you currently have, different players may well have a different ways of apportioning the value of sold items, e.g. selling most expensive first, least expensive, calculating an average of some kind, and so on.

[oddible]

The situation is somewhat more complicated than your description of the supposed "oversight" implies. If you have 100 units of something in your hold then you could easily have bought them 10 at a time in different locations and at different prices. If you sell 20 of them, which 20 have you sold? Aside from the fact that the game can't track each individual unit of a given ware, just of the quantity you currently have, different players may well have a different ways of apportioning the value of sold items, e.g. selling most expensive first, least expensive, calculating an average of some kind, and so on.

Nearly all other trading sim games show an average price - very simple - gives you a general sense of whether you are making profit or not. Lets you know whether it would be wise to fly to the next sector with it or not.

[CBJ]

I think you might have missed the point slightly. The average of what?

Let's say you buy 10 units at 40Cr, 10 more at 42Cr, 40 at 45Cr, 20 at 47Cr and 20 at 50Cr, then you sell 20 at 51Cr and 60 at 52Cr, then you buy another 40 at 48Cr and 40 at 46Cr and you scoop another 40 from a container, then you sell 60 at 49Cr and transfer 20 into another ship.

At the end of that you have 60 units left in your cargo hold, but what is a meaningful figure for what you paid for them? Even if the game could track each individual unit, which it can't, you'd still have the problem that different people would want different rules applied about which ones were sold or used first, with those rules potentially differing under different circumstances.

[Timsup2nothin]

While I am not feeling any sense of 'this is missing', it is true that most trading sims would just take the total you spent on ware X, subtract the total you've received from selling ware X, and divide by the amount of ware X you still have. The ones you 'scooped from a container' count as free. The ones you transferred to another ship would carry with them the average cost at the time of the transfer. This gives you a 'break even price'. If you sell whatever you have left for more than that you make profit on the ware.

I suspect that this would be a much more difficult thing to have coded in than it would seem, given that most games have it. Most games do not have the vast numbers of player owned traders that X3 potentially has. Tracking the average cost of the items in the Freelancers hold is pretty simple. Tracking the average cost of the goods in the holds of my ten trading fleets plying the Caribbean in Port Royale 2 is ten times harder. In my current game that is less than fifty hours old I have somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty traders running, and anticipate that I will stabilize with somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand in fairly short order.

[OniGanon]

Teladi Equipment Docks sell the Best Buy and Best Sell Locators.

Once installed, pressing 6 brings up the Best Buy screen. It lists all the products available in your current sector, from all the stations you have mapped in that sector. It lists the prices they're being offered at, and it shows the difference between that price and the Average Price.

Pressing 5 brings up the Best Sell screen, which lists everything you have in your cargo hold. If there are any stations in the sector that take your items as a Resource, it will show the highest price offered, and the difference between that price and the Average Price. Otherwise, it will say No Buyers.

Let's say you're using the Humble Merchant start, so you're in core Argon space. You can actually pick up the Best Buy/Sell at the Terracorp HQ in Home of Light. With that, you go to Ore Belt or Herron's Nebula, press 6, check on the prices of Ore. If you see a mine selling for 50cr (78 cr difference), snap that up. Then you go to a weapons/tech producing sector like Argon Prime, Red Light or Cloudbase Southeast. Press 5, check if anyone is buying at around the 200cr mark (or roughly 70 difference). If so, select that station and sell. If you still have Ore left over, press 5 and see if there's another buyer willing to pay high. There you go, much profitsss made.

Note that some products such as weapons will ONLY ever sell at Average Price.

do not buy argnu beef under any circumstances unless you have somewhere to store it forever or some sort of plan for getting rid of it

Black Hole Sun, Cloudbase SW, Home of Light. Not that hard.

You want a product that's really hard to move? Maja Snails.

Silicon is pretty hard too. The Keris factory in Mars seems to be the only place reliably empty in the whole universe (because there's no Silicon Mines in Terran space!).

[Tabs]

Is there an in-game notepad I can use to jot things down?

Ummm, try pen and paper?

But seriously, just never buy goods at above average prices and never sell below. Guaranteed profitssss.

[OniGanon]

I think his problem is that he doesn't know what the average price is.

[oddible]

I think you might have missed the point slightly. The average of what?

Let's say you buy 10 units at 40Cr, 10 more at 42Cr, 40 at 45Cr, 20 at 47Cr and 20 at 50Cr, then you sell 20 at 51Cr and 60 at 52Cr, then you buy another 40 at 48Cr and 40 at 46Cr and you scoop another 40 from a container, then you sell 60 at 49Cr and transfer 20 into another ship.

At the end of that you have 60 units left in your cargo hold, but what is a meaningful figure for what you paid for them? Even if the game could track each individual unit, which it can't, you'd still have the problem that different people would want different rules applied about which ones were sold or used first, with those rules potentially differing under different circumstances.

Quite simple really. In the securities world (stock trading) there is a concept called 'cost basis' and it is the measure by which you can evaluate profit or loss. Selling items doesn't change the cost. And while the tax man wants to see your profits per individual cost basis of every purchase, trading sims don't require this so simplify 'cost basis' into a running average. A simple cost average would suffice to give a quick eyeball of whether I'm making profits on the things in my hold that I haven't sold yet.

The point is that you really only need the total number of units (which you already store as data) and the total cost of those units (including 0 cost items like those salvaged). X3tc saves the first value but doesn't seem to save the second (unlike most trading sims) and therefore requires players to use pen and paper or some other external tool. From a UX perspective it would be a pretty simple thing to add to significantly improve the user's overview (future games of course).

[Timsup2nothin]

X3tc saves the first value but doesn't seem to save the second (unlike most trading sims) and therefore requires players to use pen and paper or some other external tool. From a UX perspective it would be a pretty simple thing to add to significantly improve the user's overview (future games of course).

As I said, it may not be so simple, due to the unlimited number of player owned traders.

[oddible]

As I said, it may not be so simple, due to the unlimited number of player owned traders.

I think the way other sims handle it is to make the cost average relative to the stock holder (ship, station, etc). So if you have 10 of something that have an average cost of 40cr in one ship and you transfer 5 to another ship that already has some you just factor the averaged cost into the new ship.

[jlehtone]

Ok, I buy one Ecell at 12cr. Then I eject it. Scoop back in. Is this now a 12cr or a 0cr Ecell?

[Timsup2nothin]

As I said, it may not be so simple, due to the unlimited number of player owned traders.

I think the way other sims handle it is to make the cost average relative to the stock holder (ship, station, etc). So if you have 10 of something that have an average cost of 40cr in one ship and you transfer 5 to another ship that already has some you just factor the averaged cost into the new ship.

No doubt...but once again you aren't acknowledging the key point. Many trading sims are like Pirates...you move around and make trades. Some trading sims are like Port Royale...as you progress you control additional 'captains' that operate with varying degrees of independence, in the case of PR2 this tops out at ten.

X is not like either, in that there is no limit on the number of traders you can have in the universe. So, do you want to know the price you've paid for e-cells in all of your holds combined, or do you want to see the price paid for the e-cells in each trader's cargo? Ultimately, you are wanting the program to track this average price paid per unit of each ware in the hold of each trader...when there may well be thousands of player owned traders operating.

A 'quick little algorithm' to adjust your price paid on the goods in the hold of your little Mercury whenever you make a transaction becomes an overwhelming demand on CPU power when you have thousands of ships making transactions. And trust me, CPU power is not in unlimited supply. No matter how strong your machine is, I can build a trading empire that will break it...without tracking any additional data.

[oddible]

Actually I'm a complete newb so I only have the 1 little mercury. My request isn't to know the prices of my global empire, I just want to know the cost of things in my hold as a new pilot that is just starting out with the game. At the point that my trades are being automated by AI pilots, the cost basis is less relevant to me.

[bad email]

Actually I'm a complete newb so I only have the 1 little mercury. My request isn't to know the prices of my global empire, I just want to know the cost of things in my hold as a new pilot that is just starting out with the game. At the point that my trades are being automated by AI pilots, the cost basis is less relevant to me.

I get it.

(I'm still Timsup2nothin by the way, just having an e-mail crisis)

Thing is, the programming won't change as you progress from a single trader newb to a galactic mogul of epic proportions...and it won't take long. Well, galactic mogul of epic proportions will take a while, but you should expect to have multiple traders very quickly. In fact since you have a Mercury it's reasonable to guess you started as 'humble merchant' so technically you already have two...though the disco isn't exactly a major hauler.

[jlehtone]

That is logical. However,

Lets track wares of the personal ship only. Buy something. However, the Humble Merchant starts with two ships. Swap to the other ship. Keep tracking the other ship, or stay "personal only"? What if this ship already had non-tracked wares?


Plan B:
This game has a fixed base price for each ware. It is referred to as "average". Each ware has its own variance; how much actual price can be below or above the base price. Players have set up info resources to tabulate all ware-average-variance.*

Ingame the Best buy and Best sell Locators (upgrades, not cheap at start) and adjusting your own Stations (not at all cheap at start) shows the same data. Does not help at start.

If a Factory is full of product, the price is at bottom.
If a Factory is practically empty of product, the price is at maximum.
If a Factory is full of resource, the price is at bottom.
If a Factory is practically empty of resource, the price is at maximum.
Quite widely around half stock the price is about average.
The stock-price relation is an S-shaped curve.

Docks (Equipment, Trading, Military) have price fixed at average. (There are couple exceptions.)

The starting rule: Buy from Factory that is full and sell to Factory that is empty. No Trading Extension is required in order to see from far away how station stocks are.


* Variance of products and of primary resources. If Factory has secondary resources, their variance is usually different (and more narrow) than the primary variance. (Applies to X3R,TC,AP. X2 was different.)