Managing the Station Manager...

[Supr4]

How do you work with Station Managers? I miss CAG...
I have a complex producing basic stuff and microchips, the only resource it needs are silicon wafers. i have 5/6 silicon mines spread on neighbor sectors and all these are set as supply stations on the main complex. The complex has about 10 TS ships assigned with auto role, but it seems it prioritises selling energy cells over buying silicon wafers and it sends all ships to the same station at same time, it doesnt spread automatically roles, like fetching silicon wafers first or even supplying energy cells to the supply station and on the return get the wafers... but no, it doesnt do that....
Most of the time, my complex has 0 wafers resource and all the TS ships are hapilly going to the same station filled with energy cells and returning home either empty or still with energy cells, because it couldnt sell to the supply station as it was full...

How do you manage your complexes?

Should i do the other way around and set SM on the silicon mines and give them a couple TS?

Another bonus question, what about your PHQ, how you manage wares on that? do you set a SM as well on these and assing TS to get stuff from your complex? How?

Thanks all

[Hwitvlf]

I don't use the station manager too much, but you can set ware restrictions for each ship in the stations control panel under "Station Manager Restrictions". In your case, I would set some traders to only deal in silicon wafers. You can also add stations as 'supply stations' in the control panel. I've never used that, but I suspect it makes the managed ships fetch resources from those stations.

You can also set a ships to 'role = none' under 'restrictions', (which releases them from auto-control), and then just set one to 'fetch wares from station' for each of your silicon mines.

Personally, I keep an Owl Miner at my complex and manually transfer wares to the HQ when needed. Another way if you have universal traders is to set your HQ to "trade with other races = no" and then set the wares you want stocked as 'resource' with a max buy price, and set 'max storage' to a reasonable amount. Your traders will often sell to your HQ because the 'max price' setting and they'll buy at the lowest price available. I don't think traders ever pay over mid-price for wares. If you set your mines similarly, but selling at lowest price, your traders will usually buy from them and sell to the HQ. You could probably play around with automatic pricing to make your traders deliver goods to whichever of your stations needs them the most.