Suggestion: The station budget should exclude goods that can only be purchased from your own faction.

[komodowaran]

Currently, stations consider all available goods when calculating their budget.
I suggest limiting this to goods that can be purchased from other factions,
since stations cannot actually spend money on goods from their own faction.

This change would greatly improve station configuration—especially for setups where most goods are supplied internally but a small budget is still needed for acquiring one or two items from AI-controlled factions.

[vvvvvvvv]

A more reasonable idea would be to calculate budget while taking trading rules into account. I vaguely remember that there was a note about this feature having been implemented.

[jlehtone]

I'd prefer the total opposite. I want my stations to pay (and get paid) for all the internal trade too.

[komodowaran]

Eather of those would work, the current situation is just frustrating.

Or what also would help is being able to adjust the max station balance of a station

[Raptor34]

I'd prefer the total opposite. I want my stations to pay (and get paid) for all the internal trade too.

Same. It's hard to tell which station is being a leech otherwise.

[TheDeliveryMan]

I'd prefer the total opposite. I want my stations to pay (and get paid) for all the internal trade too.

Same. It's hard to tell which station is being a leech otherwise.

Yes. That's the only solution that makes sense, in my humble opinion.

[Falcrack]

I'd prefer the total opposite. I want my stations to pay (and get paid) for all the internal trade too.

Same here. I want payments even between my own stations, for internal trade. Would help my see better which stations are truly profitable. A station which only sells to my other stations appears to be unprofitable, but that is only because it is receiving no money for selling it's main product.

Even in businesses today, there are such things as cost transfers between departments, even though it is the same ccompany. Because it is important for accounting purposes to know how to budget for each department.

[Raptor34]

I'd prefer the total opposite. I want my stations to pay (and get paid) for all the internal trade too.

Same here. I want payments even between my own stations, for internal trade. Would help my see better which stations are truly profitable. A station which only sells to my other stations appears to be unprofitable, but that is only because it is receiving no money for selling it's main product.

Even in businesses today, there are such things as cost transfers between departments, even though it is the same ccompany. Because it is important for accounting purposes to know how to budget for each department.

The worst is your refineries, because frankly it doesn't cost much to buy from NPCs while also letting them deal with Khaak attacks, but they keep running out of money because most of their production is hoovered up by your own factories.
Well, it's either that or the refined metals factory which I can't remember whether it was an ore refinery or not. All I remember is that one of those keeps putting up the low cash warning.

[jlehtone]

Or what also would help is being able to adjust the max station balance of a station

You can give station any amount of credits and that seems to used as the "max balance" from then-on.

[komodowaran]

This is not rly a solution though, since you need to manualy do that for every station....

And mod's also can't read those values that you manualy set this way

[pirke123]

The problem with internal cost transfer between your own stations is that it requires actual cash that can be spent more useful somewhere else.

I have a simple trade station that's just a big warehouse and doesn't produce anything. It can only buy from my own stations. It wants 100M credits... I can give it to him, and he can actually pay for all the internal stuff, but that's 100M I can't make useful somewhere else.

In businesses the internal cost transfer between departments is a paper exercise. Unless it's setup as multiple companies under the same parent holding, but even then they can simply buy on margin from each other without having actual cash, and a quarterly balance transfer of actual cash.

[LameFox]

Yeah, I would not look forward to all the extra credits I'd need to get things set up in a new game if my own stations paid one another.

[jlehtone]

The problem with internal cost transfer between your own stations is that it requires actual cash that can be spent more useful somewhere else.

I have a simple trade station that's just a big warehouse and doesn't produce anything. It can only buy from my own stations. It wants 100M credits... I can give it to him, and he can actually pay for all the internal stuff, but that's 100M I can't make useful somewhere else.

No. The problem is in the "it wants 100M credits" -- in the "estimated budget" -- and that is mostly unrelated.

If you have a station with storage full of resources, then it can start a production cycle without any credits. When it sells the products, it will receive credits. If it does not operate on loss, then those credits are more than enough to restore the resource stock for future production cycles. The effective required budget is 0.

If the station starts with no credits, then it needs enough credits to buy resources for one production cycle. The required budget should still be clearly less than "100M" (unless you have megagiga heap of production modules).

If the station cannot sell product immediately after it is produced, but does continuously consume foodstuffs, then an additional buffer of credits is necessary.

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The account balance seems to affect, or did affect, on how many buy orders the station can advertize. With no money on account it (used to) say that it needs nothing even though its storage was empty. On one hand that is a logical thing: do not say that you are ready to buy when you cannot pay. On the other, you cannot lure sellers even though you might have the cash by the time they do arrive.

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With no internal cost transfer you have to continuously transfer credits to a station that does buy from NPC more than it sells to NPC. If you want to avoid that (as it is boring and manual), you cannot have a station that is allowed to trade with both NPC and your other assets. IMHO, that is a very boring limitation.

Since stations are neither necessary nor interesting, why not simply dump a billion in each account and be done with it for a while?

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This is not rly a solution though, since you need to manualy do that for every station....

And mod's also can't read those values that you manualy set this way

True. There is the global "Accept all estimates" button, but that has only one value per station, not an arbitrary sum.

Nothing (in UI) shows the currently set "max balance" whether you did transfer the estimate or any other sum. (The estimate can change if you continue building the station.) The API for mods does not expose the value?