[Feature Request (Simple)] Make Station Buy Offers completely optional

[Old Drullo321]

Short foreword, station management and logical overview improved alot since version 1.0. But there are things still untouched in 4.10 which could be done better.

I have a simple (and hopefully easy to implement) feature request for player owned station. If you assign a manager to a station, you are forced to accept buy offers, even if you forbid buying/selling the product. This behavior bloats the required station budget for no reason. Bigger stations with more cargo hold become big money sinks or a place for dead credits, simply by having alot of cargo reserved for intermediate products. The required station budget increases by reserved cargo hold multiplied by buy price. This is even true for minerals and liquid ressources where the manager reserves credits even if you deliver every piece by repeated order transfers.

Interesting enough, if you have simple depot stations without consumers or manually add a product without a consumer, you are allowed to deny any buy/sell offers.

Screenshot (1) shows a common station where graphene as an intermediate product get its trade restricted for anyone. This doesn't decrease the required station budget. This is no bug, because it is probably intended that way. Why is this a problem? In early mid- and even end-gameplay, as long as you don't have infinite money, alot of credits just lay arround in your stations. If you carefully manually adjust your cargo hold for each ware in a station you can reduce the amount of dead money for a certain amount but not enough to have a big effect.

In my opinion this is an issue since version 1.0 and it would be nice if it can be improved in the simple way I described it above, allowing the player to remove buy offers for consumed products in the same way as there is this same possibility for not consumed products.


Screenshots:
(1)

[builder680]

Yes, the whole "buy offer" mechanic is stupid, especially if you're starting out and have a couple mining ships who won't mine because you don't have a "buy offer" for what they could mine. If I wanted to buy the crap, I wouldn't have bought miners to mine it for me. Just dumb.

[dtpsprt]

Totally misplaced request IMHO. The problem stems from the fact that the manager has to "buy" resources from the player's assets (ships or stations or worse sips assigned to the station). I would request that all resource and product "circulation" between ships and stations belonging to the player become non monetary (no credits needed to buy your own products, as is normal).

Of course this would be a "problem" in managers and ship captains gaining experience from such transactions but I don't think it would affect them too much. Afterall at least pilots rarely get over 2 4/5 stars, as for managers that "improve" way better, they can always sell their station's finished products or excess intermediates to other factions right?

[Old Drullo321]

Yes, the whole "buy offer" mechanic is stupid, especially if you're starting out and have a couple mining ships who won't mine because you don't have a "buy offer" for what they could mine. If I wanted to buy the crap, I wouldn't have bought miners to mine it for me. Just dumb.

While I can see your point and I had the same view two years ago, it isn't my point. The whole buy/sell offer system in general is not bad and is tied to certain other mechanics. Your solution requires a total rewrite of code, lengthy and probably not worth the payoff. I assume my suggestion is easy to implement as I guess ware consumption isn't tied to buy/sell offers and additionally this feature already exists by default for non-consuming wares (think of trading stations). The mechanics to withdraw certain trade offers also exists. The efford would be more or less only add a new button which combine those two mechanics.

Totally misplaced request IMHO. The problem stems from the fact that the manager has to "buy" resources from the player's assets (ships or stations or worse sips assigned to the station). I would request that all resource and product "circulation" between ships and stations belonging to the player become non monetary (no credits needed to buy your own products, as is normal).

First, this isn't a misplaced request. Maybe you misunderstood my intention. Buying/Selling stuff as part of game mechanics is fine but shouldn't be forced to the player in certain situations. For example if you have a station which needs raw materials (ore, silicon, etc.) and you supply them via repeat order deliver command and additional restrict buy trades to none, you are forced to withhold a certain amount of credits (cargo hold * price of ware) for no reason.
By simply adding the optional possibility to wares to behave the same as manually added wares, this problem could be solved by not reinventing the wheel and don't touch any other game mechanics.

Secondly your solution has two problems:
1. It probably requires alot more effort to implement
2. It has it own problems, station could easily run out of money, for example they buy their needed materials from AI stations for credits and sell it to you for nothing.

[GCU Grey Area]

I would request that all resource and product "circulation" between ships and stations belonging to the player become non monetary (no credits needed to buy your own products, as is normal).

That's already how it works. Really wish it didn't, frequently have problems with stations at the bottom of a production chain running out of cash because none of the money in stations higher up the chain ever reaches them. If I don't periodically remember to check on those low end stations & top up their cash reserves manually they have an annoying tendency to run out of money & then can't buy food or meds. As soon as that happens the workforce quits. I'm fine with there being buy/sell orders between my own stations, just wish they were real ones & money was transferred between stations.

[Wultan]

No money is transferred when trading between your own wards. You can limit the purchase of minerals or gas to your own faction.
The managers are always screaming for a lot of money, but it's really not necessary to give it to these guys. You can't do it without money, but a little money is enough.
You only have to give the managers the money they need to buy things from NPCs that you don't produce yourself.

In X4 there is no transport system, only a trading system. So your own station trades with itself. But fortunately there is no money involved. The trick is to limit trade to your own faction.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Old Drullo321]

I never complained about that trading with own faction cease to function. Sure it works. That wasn't my point.

* If you have a station with at least one open to all ware, problems arise with low money
* If you restrict cargo space too much for high demand stations e.g. 15 computronic substrate, supply problems arise (and or mess up mineral delivery)
* You can get annoyed by upkeep missions

And there is no need to rewrite the entire trading system. It is a good idea that just needs some tweaks