X4 - question on autotrading

[Cabrelbeuk]

Hello everyone,

Understood that this opus want to bring back the management and freedom we missed into the Rebirth Opus, but for now i have not heard anything about Auto-trade...

Being able to delegate these things to focus on bigger improvement and management was a big part of X3 success, is in my opinion one of the most important feature and make tycoons life possible.
Getting back to trade and order menu again and again, sometimes during fight because the pilotes couldn't search by themselves was what made me quite Rebirth after only 80 hours (we are talking about X games guys).
More than 10 transporters and you will spend your whole time babysitting them.

Do we have any information about it ?

[RainerPrem]

Hi,

In my humble opinion, in earlier versions of X:Rebirth nobody missed them, because most players did not even finish the main plot.

Now that the game is interesting and running well, it's time for a "bonus pack". And the Mk3 trader or a variant thereof is on top of my list for that.

cu
Rainer

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

In the new X4 map when highlighting a ship and bringing up the context menu.

The were two options that looked to be just what you are asking for.

They were start sector trading and if I recall correctly start galaxy trading.

[Falcrack]

Autotraders, basically NPCs which are empowered to find the best trade deals and trade autonomously, are in my opinion essential, especially for any sort of good late game experience. An NPC doing autotrading for you should perhaps be paid more, so it is more profitable for you to manually make trades at first when your empire is small, but when your time to micromanage is limited because of so many assets, you need this automation in order to be able to focus on more important big picture issues.

[Juggernaut93]

In the new X4 map when highlighting a ship and bringing up the context menu.

The were two options that looked to be just what you are asking for.

They were start sector trading and if I recall correctly start galaxy trading.

Yes

But keep in mind that these menu voices may be temporary placeholders without implemented functionality and there is no guarantee that they will be present at release time.

[Cabrelbeuk]

Well thanks, that would be super good news and give me back a little slice of hype.

But as most of people, i'll wait the release before taking the game. Rebirth have been tough lesson.

Note for the devs : We are still around just make sure to polish it before release. We do want the X4.

[rulerofallcheese]

Autotraders, basically NPCs which are empowered to find the best trade deals and trade autonomously, are in my opinion essential, especially for any sort of good late game experience. An NPC doing autotrading for you should perhaps be paid more, so it is more profitable for you to manually make trades at first when your empire is small, but when your time to micromanage is limited because of so many assets, you need this automation in order to be able to focus on more important big picture issues.

They were only essential in X3 because once you had put in thousands of hours, it was completely impossible to manage everything. If X4 takes some advice from other threads on this forum and improves management, they may become obsolete.

I'd much rather be able to reliably pass some responsibility off to my station managers or ship captains. That way you're actually playing the role as the head of an organization and not some spaceship-pimp
who just whores out cheap ships to random NPCs desperate enough to go out into a dangerous universe alone.

[Vandragorax]

With the X3 implementation of a Universe or Galaxy trader, the player is simply an investor as such for the NPC. The NPC should be taking a MUCH higher cut of the profits so that we don't earn anywhere near as much from it (not just a salary, but an actual percentage of profits).

After all, that NPC is taking half the risk (with their lives ). And if I want to protect my investment I can send an escort for them, or give them a more defensible ship etc.

I'd be glad to see this as an option in mid-late game in X4 but the ships and software and capital requirements should be purposely too high for early game. Also the NPC should take a much higher cut of the profits so that it is not so lucrative for the player and should not earn higher profits than running a fully fledged manufacturing station.

[Sandalpocalypse]

i think galaxy traders are very bad gameplay personally. they are just automated, put money in, earn money after some time, that have the additional downside of removing the best potential trades for the player! They also have no element of strategy like the station game does.

They made no sense within the game logic anyway; why wasn't the AI using these hyper-efficient traders to solve their resource shortages? In part, the state of the universe has always been justified by limited ability to communicate and to pass information as well as pirate badlands between settled areas and occasionally wars and trade blockades being engaged in. Autotraders ignore that and use perfect information.

IMO what good value there is to autotraders can be done with warehouse stations ala XR:HoL. They can serve as import hubs to a region, and either let NPCs buy from them or deliver the ware(s) being supplied.

[RAVEN.myst]

IMO what good value there is to autotraders can be done with warehouse stations ala XR:HoL. They can serve as import hubs to a region, and either let NPCs buy from them or deliver the ware(s) being supplied.

This tracks with a thought I recently had, while testing warehouses in HoL: these would be great if there was some sort of configurable automated CLS equivalent. For example: warehouse in Albion, warehouse in Cold Star. The WH in Cold Star buys the fancy energy cells and refined minerals and ships them off (via this CLS equivalent) to Albion, where it gets distributed by the WH on that end. On the return trip, the CLS ship brings back food and ECs (and booze + meds) bought by the WH in Albion, to be distributed through Cold Star by the WH on its end. This would provide the automation of distributed station trading with the reach of a "universe trader", with more specific control over wares (ie. more game-play), and requiring more configuration and thought (again, more game-play.)

I agree that fire-and-forget universe-wide perfect trading is deleterious (I haven't used UTs in previous Xs in years, I prefer to set up networks of CAGs and CLS2s), but an automated infrastructure that a player has carefully sculpted, that's worth having (imo.)

[Raztax]

With the X3 implementation of a Universe or Galaxy trader, the player is simply an investor as such for the NPC. The NPC should be taking a MUCH higher cut of the profits so that we don't earn anywhere near as much from it (not just a salary, but an actual percentage of profits).

Sure the player is only an investor, but the player is also putting ALL of the money into the investment. Just like in real life, the owner of the company/equipment takes the lion's share of the profits.

[mr.WHO]

I like the idea of having warehouses/trading stations as a hub for system-to-sytem trade.

[Sandalpocalypse]

IMO what good value there is to autotraders can be done with warehouse stations ala XR:HoL. They can serve as import hubs to a region, and either let NPCs buy from them or deliver the ware(s) being supplied.

This tracks with a thought I recently had, while testing warehouses in HoL: these would be great if there was some sort of configurable automated CLS equivalent. For example: warehouse in Albion, warehouse in Cold Star. The WH in Cold Star buys the fancy energy cells and refined minerals and ships them off (via this CLS equivalent) to Albion, where it gets distributed by the WH on that end. On the return trip, the CLS ship brings back food and ECs (and booze + meds) bought by the WH in Albion, to be distributed through Cold Star by the WH on its end. This would provide the automation of distributed station trading with the reach of a "universe trader", with more specific control over wares (ie. more game-play), and requiring more configuration and thought (again, more game-play.)

I agree that fire-and-forget universe-wide perfect trading is deleterious (I haven't used UTs in previous Xs in years, I prefer to set up networks of CAGs and CLS2s), but an automated infrastructure that a player has carefully sculpted, that's worth having (imo.)

yeah - good point about the scripts required! Presumably X4 will have much better inter-system trade scripts than XR, given how many more systems it will have.

It might even be a good way to explicitly structure x4 npcs in a way that is more transparent to the player, i.e.: most ships trade at very limited ranges, but you could have import-export companies that have networks of warehouse stations that explicitly run long distance trade to the extent that it should already exist in the game. (ie, between specific allied areas for the most part). The inter-warehouse traders could run on CLS-type software, and would presumably be fat targets for piracy, dynamic events, et cetera.

[RAVEN.myst]

The inter-warehouse traders could run on CLS-type software, and would presumably be fat targets for piracy, dynamic events, et cetera.

Indeed - and I forgot to mention something else that I was thinking when the notion first hit me: in X:R I tend to lean heavily on M-sized freighters for local traffic, with occasional L-sized ones as needed, but I don't have much use for XL freighters - however, such "superfreighters" would lend themselves perfectly to such a "CLS" role, which would add more role differentiation (which I pretty much always consider a good thing.)

[FunkDooBiesT]

It's funny that this is one of those things that basically changed when X Rebirth arrived it's just a pity that this was not explained very clearly by the developers for it.

Most of the player base was used to doing something clockwise but in X Rebirth it was counter-clockwise. IMO this caused a major part of the back lash.

I didn't spend allot if time in the older X games but I do remember the freedom of programming your fleets inside of it. With Rebirth it took me a considerable time to figure out that Cap ships for non player trading is a bad idea. I tried to find the perfect Cap sided ship and gave it to my stations and it would very seldom be doing anything. I eventually tried to see what would balance the equation with the medium sided ships and all I can say is that none of my stations has capitals anymore.

4-5 mediums under the control of a manager (fire and forget mk3 software) Then I found another nice thing about the stations, transferring the ships to the defense officers they would manage the escorts for the trading ships and it seemed to be allot more effective.

I don't know about the trading software being more effective than a manager of a station. So for that kind of thing I would suggest a warehouse station that would utilize the managers and defense officers like in X Rebirth. They manage what you give them to manage. They control the profits and the money sits in the station accounts. If you need money you grab some if you don't you can keep it there to make more profits.

To me NPC system works allot better than the software system of the older games.

[Cabrelbeuk]

I am not talking about station automation system (In X3 Reunion you don't need mk3 when you assign ship to a station anyway, if I remember well).

Using NPC or software or whatever doesn't matter.
What i was saying is for the ships you DON'T want to assign to a station but doing general trades (find best deals - go for them - buy and sell - all of this automatically).

In Rebirth there is no option for it. You have to send them by yourself, and it is really annoying when it come to have more than 8 ships involved.
Asking to the captain/pilot of the ship or asking to a software is REALLY NOT the problem .

[Alan Phipps]

So basically types of default command status or stances. Examples:

For tradeships: 'If I don't tell you otherwise Captain, just carry on making us some credits.'

For warships: 'If I don't tell you otherwise Captain, just do the best you can to safeguard our assets and traderoutes from raider attacks.'

The only inconvenience or problems that I see with those is that you won't necessarily know where your ships are nor what they are committed to complete (until you look) when you need them in a hurry, and that your warships might bite off more than they can chew or chase after ships that they just cannot catch.

[schedarx]

Configurable/customizable autotrader is a must.