Trading Mk1 & Mk2 extensions HORRIBLY inefficient

[Alfred Bester]

I have started X3 at X-treme level, and I've been doing pretty well now. Running a sillicon mine with 2 Mercuries one selling and the other buying. Also have a fast teladi harrier and a falcon for capping & exploring and about +1M credits.

I really looked forward to stations again, but to my disappointent nothing has changed in this way. Its a carbon copy from X2. With the new NPC traders doing all the work (which is a big improvement, well done egosoft!) the standard Mk1 & Mk2 trading extensions are almost worthless.
Buying at set price (low) and selling high, my selling Merc always goes off fully loaded, travels 4 sectors (which takes ages) to find the potential buyer is already supplied. And it returns to base. Fully loaded. To go off on a nother goose chase only to return fully loaded because again beated to it by NPCs.

So this is really hopeless, my factory is running almost idle all the time. Products can be sold, resources cant be bought. It would be a huge help if it were introduced a trading extension, unified, and does the following:

Check lowest price, go there. Once in the sector, scan if still lowest, if not, pick current sector as starting point and fan out again to nearest oppertunity. Idem for selling. Without it, its almost impossible to do bussiness.... unless you wait a century but sitting in SETA is punished
Besides, please please, PLEASE reintroduce SETA whilst docked to a factory!

[Storm666]

4 sectors is a bit far to be sending a selling ship especially with these new slow ships in X3, try 2 sectors, its working for me.

[GearHead]

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I JUST HAVE TO KNOW - What in the world is it ? A joke? Do you think those of us that post our specs are obnoxious?

[Scoob]

Posted a similar thread myself. I too have a silicon mine & watch my Mercury trundle off to sell its good only to be beaten to it. I'm ok with that it's just when it proceeds to return home ignoring the factory right next to it demanding Silicon at a far higher price than my minimum selling value - crazy!

We need the Advanced Trading Software from X2s latest plugin converted for use with X3. Or at least for seller & buyers to do a simple check when entering a system to see if there's anywhere else they could sell their wares.

Scoob.

[Chips]

Might want to refine the check, because if it gets to the sector (4 sectors away) and scans to check - if there is somewhere with a higher price a sector or two away, he may just trundle off to sell their instead.

Also - what happens if all sectors have similar price except the one 5 sectors away... does he sell for (example Ecells) 15 at the local base that he was going to (original @ 17), sell for 16 in the sector he just came from - or 17 in one three further back? Is his journey time worth the extra cr or two?

Yes, it is annoying, but there are all possibilties of difficulty on the scripting side of it surely? Don't want him flying an extra 2 sectors for just 1 cr per item more...
I have yet to sell anything from a station (as I haven't used em yet) - but am looking forward to getting some 1st hand experience of the issue to see what it's doing.

[Alfred Bester]

I JUST HAVE TO KNOW - What in the world is it ? A joke?

Yes, just that I wouldn't say quoting specs is obnoxious, however, rather a somewhat childish kind of boasting. I'm cool with it. Peace

Also - what happens if all sectors have similar price except the one 5 sectors away... does he sell for (example Ecells) 15 at the local base that he was going to (original @ 17), sell for 16 in the sector he just came from - or 17 in one three further back? Is his journey time worth the extra cr or two?

The general behaviour is that it sells what it has in its cargo bay to the selected factory. When it retains a surplus, it simply returns to base. So after the journey, no matter the outcome, it returns to base.

I know Advanced trading soft. was used to alleviate some of these annoyances, but I didn't like its level system or that it was exclusively sold on only boron stations. In X2 this might have been reasonable, but the X3 is radically different and Mk1&2 just dont cut it. Sure it works, but a lot slower than is possible.
The new trading soft doesn't need to be advanced as Adv. trad.soft, but merely be a little bit more intelligent, most notably to not stupidly return to base every time after an unsuccesful run.
Well, wether the officials improve this or not doesn't really matter, I'll just make a little script to do just that

[MarkB]

I'd have to say that the selling problem intrigues me.

During numerous run throughs of X2 I only really dabbled in giving stations selling ships. I found it more to my taste to price my stock so that it drew in the AI ships making them take the risk of losing a fully laden transport, I had enough trouble losing my supply ships to risk having even more of my assets in space and open to destruction.

Only in my very last iteration of X2 did I use the BPH and SDS addon scripts (both very nice whoever made them).

What you are saying is that BPH and SDS have not made it into X3 and the only things to use are bog-standard trade 1&2? if that's the case then fine, it just means more price tweaking needs to be done so you don't need to use your own selling ships.

A little more realistic this way too, as if you can do it so should the AI factories, and every commodity would tend to increase in price over time as "eveyone" in the X-universe would be trying to maximise profits.

All that really matters is that you get more for your product than it costs you to make. I think the days of consistently selling cargoes full of your own produce at full price are over.

(Still waiting for my copy to arrive, think the postman has got it as we havn't had any mail for days, including bills and Viagra adverts that normally abound)

[Slocket]

Do the Free Traders conduct buy/sell transactions in a profitable way?

IE Do the Free Traders just move produce around without regard to making a profit. Example buying E-cells for 18 credits and selling them for 14 credits?

In X2 I wanted to make the NPC factories to consider the profit factor, they tended to buy no matter what (infinite bucket of money).

[Alfred Bester]

I'd have to say that the selling problem intrigues me.

Yes, me too. I believe only the MK3 is availble, not fully sure though. I never relied that much on the other races for stocking my fabs. But in X3 it's worth a try. But you won't be able to make as much profit per workcycle as when you run your own transports. So basically its a tradeof (assuming the trade software was actually functioning as I think it should)
The traders definatly make profit. If some station is low on resources or high on products to swarm in to sell or buy.

[MarkB]

I did have the supply ships attached to factories and loops to allow my empire to get resources, but I only started actively selling my produce in my very last run through of X2.

I was still making bucketloads of cash before getting BPH traders assigned to stations, but decided that I would give them a try as I had read quite a bit about them in the forums.

If the AI of independant traders has been upped somewhat in X3 then the BPH being missing should have less impact than it might seem.

If the independants are beating you to prime sales opportunities use that to your advantage by enticing them to shift your stock for you by competative pricing.

Sure, you won't make the cash as fast as before, but the risk to your assets will be way lowered and the running costs for your empire will be smaller.

[Greyhawk1]

Quoting specs is a good way of shortcutting all that typing you need to do in the Tech Support forum. Its much easier typing "for specs see sig" than going through it all again.