Advice on how to do "Internal Logistics" trade rules

[jonesmz]

I have an ore refinery station with a pier and an L freighter set to "Trade for commander".

I have a "trade station" that doesn't produce anything, just buys and sells, has a pier.

Both stations are in the same sector, like 3-4 KM from each other.

I have a trade rule "Internal Logistics". The trade rule is set to "Restrict all factions", and then "Additionally allowed factions" includes only me.

Ore Refinery is set to sell refined metals, with the "Internal Logistics" rule.

Trade station is set to buy refined metals, with the "Internal Logistics" rule for purchasing, but not for selling.

Watching the behavior of the L freighter in SETA for over 20 minutes, and so far It's made exactly one trade run.

What gives?

I see this kind of broken behavior all over the map. I have, literally, dozens of M freighters assigned to "Trade for Commander" who haven't left the system they were constructed in, despite *plenty* of trades that should qualify for their respective trade rules being available in even the same sector as the station they are assigned, so we don't even have to wonder if the manager doesn't have enough stars.

What do?

[Old Drullo321]

While there are definetively some flaws, drawbacks and limited options, the basic shipping from a mining hub to a specific station usually works well. I have several indepentend trading areas in my game where i set up simple mining hubs deliverung which serves several purposes:
* One of them simply delivers to an exact station some systems away via buy/sell
* Another one is configured as sell to all but my station still get the wares.

Before going into detail, just check if you at least tried the following:
* If using ore as buy/sell from a mining hub, you need mineral miners as freighters (as i read your post, you didn't have a pure mining hab, rather then an ore refinery and a trading hub, e.g. container storage is used betwen those 2 stations)
* Albeit the internal buy/sell is free, the general generated buy/sell offers from a station are based on the stations budget, try out to give each affected station the advised budget (even if it leads to such extreme as for example my general storage needing 2 billion, he simply works worse when only having 1.5 billion, even if only internal trading...)
* While internal trade offers are free of charge, they still follow the normal logic of buying/selling, so have a look at the min/max prices and/or auto-pricing, it affects them (which is good because with this system you can finetune internal logistics)
* In addition to above, when using auto-pricing, check if you use auto calculated storage amount or set it to a certain amount. E.g. if you assign 2 million storage amount to refined metall with auto pricing, only having one refined metal module, the price will likely not drop for a while

I give you an example for one of my areas, which you can adapt:
* One sector containing everything (Central Storage, several different station, usually T1, T2 and T3 wares) except mining hub
* Mining hub minimal buy via mining minerals/gas and sell max price, manual storage. Trade rule set to own faction only and to mining and the other sector only
* Central storage buy everything at max, manual storage, sells everything auto-pricing to either only me or everone
* Specific factories buy at max (in case of raw materials max-1) and sell at max-1 to me only, manual storage amount

This should work for you too

[jonesmz]

Thanks so much for the reply.

Just to clear up some additional details: My ore refinery has miners assigned to it as "Mine for Commander", and has a 100% full ore storage and refined metals storage. This ore refinery has been in my game for along time (My second station), and i'm only recently trying to get it set up with L freighters instead of M freighters, as an attempt at convincing the "Trade for Commander" command to actually move goods around.

My assumption was that if a gaggle of M freighters, when they have too many possible things they could do, wasn't working, then if the single L freighter has literally only one station that it could *possibly* trade with, because it's the only other station owned by an allowed faction that also has a pier, then it should just ... do it's job.

Before going into detail, just check if you at least tried the following:
* If using ore as buy/sell from a mining hub, you need mineral miners as freighters (as i read your post, you didn't have a pure mining hab, rather then an ore refinery and a trading hub, e.g. container storage is used betwen those 2 stations)

The trading hub is, eventually, going to be this ore refinery's gateway to the rest of my trade network.

My vision is:

• Production stations get their inputs from where-ever
• Production stations only sell to my own stations, via the "Internal Logistics" sell rule.
• Trade stations only vend goods that I produce (Internal Logistics on the buy rule)
• Trade stations sell to anyone.
• With the above, eventually my trade station network should be topped up on any good that I have a factory for, lubricating the NPC economy.

* Albeit the internal buy/sell is free, the general generated buy/sell offers from a station are based on the stations budget, try out to give each affected station the advised budget (even if it leads to such extreme as for example my general storage needing 2 billion, he simply works worse when only having 1.5 billion, even if only internal trading...)

I did know that internal only trades needs the budget to be there. In fact, i was originally under the impression that a "Trade for Commander" ship will transfer money from it's station, to the station it's purchasing from, regardless of owner. That's what I want, so that unprofitable stations don't suck up all my wares. (Well, they would eventually run out of storage, but still).

Is that not how "Trade for Commander" works?

[Old Drullo321]

All internal trade, regardless from which type (storage, building storage, ship, auxiallary, whatever comes to your mind) is free as no actual money is transferred in the end. However the game still calculates as if money is transferred the usual way. This is the reason that less money in a stations bank account mess up the buy/sell offers, even when only trading between your own properties.
From my own experience, the only thing that worked with only one credit was a mining hub, "selling" minerals/gas to my central storage.

"Trade for Commander" is nothing else then a bunch of individual buy/sell offers following the bank account and settings of the station the ships are assigned to.

Just a theoretical example.
Player owned station A produces and sells refined ore, trade rule only own faction, limited to same sector, automatic pricing
Player owned stations B and C require refined metal, buy offer only own faction, same sector, A pays up to 50 credits, B pays up to 60 credits.
Station A will try to sell to station B as long as it is possible first.

Same scenario with automatic pricing:
Player owned station A tries to sell to B and C, whoever pays the best price at the moment of selling

####

So maybe the best thing would be to provide a savegame or alternatively screenshot which show everything neccessary (savegame would be more helpful), if uncompressed just zip it and upload it to some hoster like google drive.

[jonesmz]

All internal trade, regardless from which type (storage, building storage, ship, auxiallary, whatever comes to your mind) is free as no actual money is transferred in the end. However the game still calculates as if money is transferred the usual way. This is the reason that less money in a stations bank account mess up the buy/sell offers, even when only trading between your own properties.

Thank you so much for the information.

Sadly, this is the exact opposite of what makes sense.

If *all* internal trades don't transfer funds, then there is no reason to require the stations to have any money in their budget to make internal trades work.

Since internal trades don't transfer funds, that means that it's not possible to set up a station that buys it's inputs on the market (whatever inputs those happen to be), but only sells internally. The station will eventually run out of money to purchase it's inputs, requiring attention from the player.

Basically we have the worst of all worlds.

Stations need money in their budget, not because they will USE that money, but because the scripts for automated trading aren't smart enough to understand that the trade doesn't transfer money, and because the trade doesn't transfer money, the station eventually runs out of money.

[Old Drullo321]

Yeah, exactly as you describe. Alot of people continously mentioned this for years.

* You can't safely run open loops
* While i could be part of "good managment" to only assign as much needed storage as possible, with the introduction of Terraforming you are forced to create big scale logistics, warehousing and store alot of things in advance.

Just had a look at my stations. I have 2.5 billions cash but my stations block 4.5 billion in their station accounts for trading. My central storage alone, even with careful manual storage limits needs 1.4 billion allone

Ah and one bad side effect of this whole logistics stuff and how you have to work with buy/sell offers with both manual and automatic pricing for greater scale internal logistics: Because most of those buy/sell trades are considered as "bad" trades, your pilots won't even gain experience / pilot levels. Hilarious.

####

The problem with the system, it simply doesn't scale well. If you don't completely place your stations in No Man's Land and it is a small to medium sized station without additional 20 other of your station trading with each other, the auto-pricing mechanism works very well and could be seen as an improvement to previous games. However because of the need of scaling and no way to speed up station building, you're forced to build many (big) stations and as i said above, with the introduction of terraforming, things change completely.

However we aren't given the tools do manage this. I think it could be possible to add certain features without interfering too much with the current system:

* Add a checkbox to allow player stations to transfer money between player-ships and station to allow open loops
* Add a checkbox to allow stations to exclusively work internally plus without station money. This should be another checkbox for a somehow exclusive mode so that buy/sell offer logic doesn't get confused. (Not to mix up with current possibility of internal trade only via traderule)
* Extend the repeat order command: a) allow to hide ships or allow grouping of those ships to hide large groups of them in ui, b) allow mimic behaviour to actually copy trading commands via repeated order
* Add any kind of gameplay mechanic, however this is introduced, to speed up station building, resulting in less stations, less problems with trade rules, buy and sell offers and the need to house large sums of money in station accounts.

[jonesmz]

Again, thank you for following up on this.

Unfortunately, this just isn't fun. I'm going to spend my free time playing other games until the next X4 patch releases.

I really hope that @egosoft is able to put some developer time on low level quality of life improvements soon.

[jonesmz]

I noticed in the discussion revolving around the 5.0 beta that way "Internal Logistics" style trades work is now being changed, and from what I can tell they're being changed to work more along the lines of what I originally described was my ideal behavior.

Does that seem accurate? Sometimes it's hard to tell based on looking at such a dense changelog, so I wanted to ask a second opinion.