X3AP Make CAGS only trade with my stations plus other CAG questions.

[Sicnarf]

I had more questions than I though this got a bit long, also playing a non modified game don't want to add scripts or mods.

I am trying to keep the AI's grubby hands off my Crystals as Silicon is precious to me. I have some Crystal Fab complexes and have set them not to trade with AI however my CAGS are still selling it off to any station who will pay. I don't want to manually set up CLS to much manual work for the scale i want to go for.

Is their a setting to make them only sell to my stations?
Can I make them only buy from my stations also?

Additional
I pushed out a global command to my CAGs to change their auto naming to version 9 but none of them changed name, the setting for them changed but it did not update the name I have to go in and set it manually to get it to take.
1)Is their a way to get them all to update at once?
2)Can i make all new CAG auto use version 9 naming or do i have to set it manually every time?

3)If CAGS are equipped with jump drives but in the general command window they are set to "no" for Jump drive will they still use it if you have it set to "yes" in the CAG Jump Drive settings?
4)Once they hit level 4 will they start using the jump drive regardless of if it is set to on or off in the CAG settings? It's off by default.
5)Also if in the general command settings you have jump drive energy set to 20 jumps and then in CAG Jump Drive you have it set to 500 will the ship use one over the other for the energy amount it stores or will it add them both together? That could be a waste of space.

Sorry for the annoying questions but I'm going to be adding lots more CAGS to my growing empire and I find it discouraging to have to go through the following with each one after i set their home base.
General commands make sure Jump drive is Yes, Jump range 0 now go to CAG settings. Change name version to version 9, set jump drive to on, activate CAG.
Doing one is not a bother but after doing it two to three hundred times you start to think their must be some way to set this as the default for every CAG as this sort of admin work is not the fun part I'm playing for.
Because this is fun, I'v only played this series as the combat person collecting bounty's for cash but playing the economy guy for the first time is way more fun than I thought.

[Timsup2nothin]

I am far from an expert on CAGs, but...

I think that your only option would be to assign the CAGs at the crystal fabs to buying resources only, and have the CAGs from your other fabs handle buying and transporting the crystals. That way the "only trade with my own" setting would keep others away from your crystals, but they would still get to your plants.

The buyers would also buy crystals from other sources when they were cheaper than whatever price you set, which might be a plus.

[ancienthighway]

Use CAG to buy resources only as Tim suggested.

Use CLS1 to trade your crystals with your stations/complexes. Much easier to set up than CLS2 and CLS1 properly handles who to deliver to so one station isn't working with a large surplus of crystals needed at another station. You can set up CLS1 to move your crystals for no charge or set a price and transfer credits from one station to another.

CAGS tend to buy only when product stocks are high and station funds are low. CLS1 will keep stocks low and if you transfer funds, will keep your crystal fabs in credits.

[Snafu_X3]

I have some Crystal Fab complexes and have set them not to trade with AI however my CAGS are still selling it off to any station who will pay. [...]
Is their a setting to make them only sell to my stations?
Can I make them only buy from my stations also?

I don't think so other than setting suitable prices; better ppl than I may have other ideas..

Additional [..]

Can't help, sorrry

3)If CAGS are equipped with jump drives but in the general command window they are set to "no" for Jump drive will they still use it if you have it set to "yes" in the CAG Jump Drive settings?

My understanding is that the CAG/CLS script trumps the (vanilla) JD script, so CAG fuel settings will always be preferential

4)Once they hit level 4 will they start using the jump drive regardless of if it is set to on or off in the CAG settings?

No; you have to explicitly command the CAG to enable use of the JD (unlike Universal Trader AKA Trade mk3). OTOH you /can/ enable that setting before the pilot is trained to use it

5)Also if in the general command settings you have jump drive energy set to 20 jumps and then in CAG Jump Drive you have it set to 500 will the ship use one over the other for the energy amount it stores or will it add them both together?

I haven't tested, but I expect that given (3) above, the default would be to autostock the CAG amount of ecells. Possibly if the vanilla jump range was set higher it may stock up to that limit (I think that unlikely), but in no way do I expect the two limits to be summed as you suggest

Sorry for the annoying questions but I'm going to be adding lots more CAGS to my growing empire and I find it discouraging to have to go through the following with each one after i set their home base.

That's why the save/load (CAG & CLS) profiles were added: Make a default setup then tweak it as you wish (with CAG/CLS profile saves as you see fit) for specific CAGs They're separate from the game profile & each other (& can be given meaningful names), so can be tweaked/used as necessary, but sadly cannot be carried from <gamestart> to another <gamestart> without mods or manually sodding about with files

[RAVEN.myst]

Actually, there IS a way to specify only your stations, but it's about as convoluted as using CLS2. What you need to do is change your sector list to Trade List (instead of blacklist), add the sectors with your crystal consumers to it - the CAGs will only trade with those sectors now. However, if there are NPC stations that would buy Xtals in those sectors, you need to list those to block your CAGs from visiting them (this is counterintuitive, because even if your sector list is set to Trade List, stations are ALWAYS blacklisted). Also, another complication here is that your CAGs will now be restricted from buying resources, so you will end up with separate CAGs for buying and selling, which makes them rather pointless.

I think your best option here is what ancienthighway mentioned: rather use CLS1, which is the best option for handling moving of a ware from up to several sources (suppliers) to many consumers within your economy. You can decide whether to have the stations pay each other as normal or whether to move the stuff for zero-creds (if your stations at either end trade with the outside world, you'll want to leave your internal trades as normal sell/buy transactions for credits, usually for average price is OK.)

Regarding jumpdrives, it's as Snafu says: the CAG will use the CAG settings preferentially over the defaults, both in terms of whether or not to use the JD and how much fuel to reserve. The fuel amounts do NOT get added - as Snafu says, again the CAG settings take precedence.

Once you start using the feature for saving and loading CAG/CLS configurations, you will wonder how you ever got on without them. This is particularly useful for maintaining sector blacklists, especially in X3AP where you have to also add some of the War Sectors to the no-fly-zone (my sector blacklists in X3AP usually end up around 20 sectors long - key war sectors plus all Xenon-adjacent sectors). Very handy is to have a 'tainee' and a 'graduate' version of each homebase's standard CAG - the trainee version would be limited to a trade range of 2 or 3, and maybe more heavily emphasise buying over selling (by tweaking storage and station credit balance thresholds), while the level4+ graduates can get their range expanded and their duties tweaked to sell more aggressively (by, for example, raising the station credit threshold.) When a CAG hits level 4, you then simply load the "adult" version of its config, instead of manually making all the adjustments (and perhaps, sometimes, forgetting something by mistake.)

Also, there is a command that you will want to set a hotkey for: Commercial Agent Administration. Unfortunately, this command is only available while in flight (ie. not while docked), but it's extremely useful - for starters, it allow you to control ALL your CAGs at various stations from one centralised menu. Perhaps more importantly, though, you can also use it to selectively copy a highly customisable portion of any saved CAG configuration to a selection of CAGs at another station, in a particular sector, or to all CAGs. This can be useful, for example, if you add a new sector to your blacklist - you add it to one CAG, update that particular config slot by saving it, then transmit that change to all of that homebase's colleagues, for example, or to all your CAGs (if they share the same blocklist.)

The above may seem a bit overwhelming out of context, but once you take a look around the save/load function, and the CAG Admin command, it will all make sense. I promise. I hope

PS: Regarding auto-naming, I'm afraid I don't know. Despite the fact that I've used CAG very very extensively, that's one aspect I never bothered with - I simply name the ships as I buy and assign them, usually with a 'TRAINEE' designation suffix, which I remove when they reach level 4 and I give them their license to range far. (I actually often use other suffixes in other phases of setup, but that's neither here nor there...)

[ancienthighway]

Autonaming will carry into Save Data and Load Data. Otherwise, they have to be set per ship.

Take a close look at how much information the designated names provide and how much you really need. Take into consideration how much you retain about what the various positions mean and can decipher the abbreviations. I've limited myself to variants 2 and 4, but 2 has the information I'm really interested in.

Timsup2nothing has a nice naming scheme for his CLS2 fleet that could be adapted easily to CAG or CLS1, but it is completely manual.

[jlehtone]

Is their a setting to make them only sell to my stations?
Can I make them only buy from my stations also?

The CAG has two main purposes:

1. Keep your station running
2. Generate credits

Credits appear only from interactions with the NPC. Shifting ware/credits between your stations will not increase them.

Lets say that you have a Farm and a Cahoona. If you merely haul Beef between them, you gain 0 credits. That is the baseline.

If the Farm sells the Beef to NPC and the Cahoone buys same amount Beef from NPC, you can gain (1) the price difference in credits, (2) Trade Rank increase, and (3) Race rank increase. As bounty hunter you surely did notice that clients are more willing to trust reputable operators. With pricing you can ensure that you always do better than the baseline.


The CLS Mk1 has an another name Internal Logistics. Its purpose was to haul wares between your stations. (Internal to your company.) If the stations are within same sector, then one could use Complex Construction Kits instead of a ship.



(Naming, I use option 7.)

[Sicnarf]

Thanks very much for all the answers their is some really good info in there.

Setting them to only buy is perfect for my needs, found the setting under trade Duties, set the CAG to shopper, problem solved.
Don't need a buy only from my stations which is good as that is not a possible setting it would appear. Would have been interesting for a non complex build.
The Save/Load settings is perfect it even includes the naming convention so all I have to do now is load the default config and boom all done.

As for jump drive energy and settings I got off my ass and did some testing and got a little surprise.
If you have values in both the energy settings(command/CAG) it will use the highest of the two. Normally CAG is higher for me so not a big deal.
However if your CAG is not set to use jump drive or is simply not high enough level and you have command jump drive energy levels set it will stock up on the necessary energy despite having no intention of using it until it gets to level 4.
To make that above mild annoyance slightly more annoying, the CAG jump and command jump are effictvely the same switching one switches the other. So lets say you like me buy you TS ships in bulk and jump 30 of them to a central stock pile for later use at which point you turn off jump, then when needed I load up the CAG profile for my newbie which has "CAG uses Jump" set to yes(command menu jump just switched on as well). Well my new level 1 CAG is going to run around with 250 energy in it's hold that it wont use for the 4-6 hours it takes to level up. As I had the jump energy set to 25 jumps so that I could get it to this shipyard for storage, woops. Not a huge deal with 5k cargo space but a little annoying.
Moral of the story set new CAGS command menu energy to 0 jumps, don't worry about the CAG menu energy setting that does not kick in until it is high enough level to use it. (Imagine making this mistake with Split Caiman and it's tiny cargo bay)

Thanks everyone again for the info