[CoH] Station brought to it's knees by priority trade for smart chips

[Gregorovitch]

I refer to the PHQ and it's traders in the following save:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0d6u1fs7r3wfd ... ml.gz?dl=0

The situation is this:

Some time ago, before I've spent some time progressing the first phase of the Split plot line, I ordered an increase in drone numbers at my PHQ. Checking back I find the whole station has ground to halt because the traders have been set to only trade in smart chips, the missing ingredient for these drones. All of them. There are obviously no smart chip factories within range so all the station freighters have been sitting around idle for hours looking for trades they cannot hope to make.

It is manifestly ridiculous that a whole complex can be brought to it's knees like this for want of a measly handful of smart chips. It's even more ridiculous that this can happen with no indication given to the player. And more ridiculous yet again in that out of six or seven freighters assigned to the station only one would be required to fulfill this order anyway. IMHO the station AI logic behind these priority trade decisions needs to be significantly changed so that this sort of thing cannot happen. There are of obviously innumerable ways to do that but this situation, and similar such situations, should never happen IMHO. Player cannot be expected to watch everything everywhere all the time.

Clearly it's easy enough for me to sort out now I'm back from plot missions and checked everything, but that's not the point.

[Lychee]

I play the starwars mod, and I have the exact same issue for my traders. They will prioritize buying a totally expended good, and then just let the whole thing crumble. We were out of Antimatter cells, there wasn't even a station in our faction that made them, so they just sat there doing absolutely nothing. Even when they could have been selling my finished goods to shipyards and wharfs with high prices.