Monthly Trades: high/low mystery

[Kalemenos]

New to Stellaris. (I wish there was a thorough game mechanics tutorial... anywhere!...) So I keep getting this alert, "Monthly Trade Price too high/low." Which good is it? When buying or selling? Is it too high, or is it too low? What can be done to fix it? The little I find on this in discussions and browser searches only brings up gamers with lots of inside knowledge and jargon, so that their discussions of the Market/Galactic Market are unintelligible for poor little us who are still uninitiated. Can anyone help?

[Immortalis]

Open the market tab.

Exclude those things that you are not buying nor selling.

Check the rest and compare the prices you’ve set to the one that those items are currently going for: let’s say you want to buy 50 minerals per month at 1 energy each but the current price of minerals is 2.8 energy per. That’s the issue right there.

[Carog the Fat]

also applies when you run out of creds to purchase what you need.

[Kalemenos]

OK, so I'm selling food - making lots of it. When I "mouse over" food, it says unit price is 0.68. But I can only put "1" in my minimum sell box, I can't put 0.67 to beat the market and attract buyers. Nor 0.68 to gouge. If the market's unit price is less than 1.0, does that mean I should not bother making a monthly trade with that good? What happens if I leave the Min. Sale Price blank in the Monthly Trade setup window? Thanks for the help.

[Immortalis]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

OK, so I'm selling food - making lots of it. When I "mouse over" food, it says unit price is 0.68. But I can only put "1" in my minimum sell box, I can't put 0.67 to beat the market and attract buyers. Nor 0.68 to gouge. If the market's unit price is less than 1.0, does that mean I should not bother making a monthly trade with that good? What happens if I leave the Min. Sale Price blank in the Monthly Trade setup window? Thanks for the help.

If you leave the minimum (or maximum) price blank the system will sell (or buy) the chosen amount of product regardless of price. Though, be aware that selling too much of a product will eventually lower the price, since you're flooding the market making it ever less useful; the opposite is true for the buy order, the more you buy the higher the price gets.

For example, when buying minerals, if you set the auto-buy to more than 52 the price will keep rising; with the amount set at 52 (or lower) the price spike will go back to normal before the next order goes out at the beginning of the next month, thus keeping the price stable.


That being said, food is somewhat useful in the early game when you need it to colonise other planets; after that... well, if you're producing *a lot* of it, you'd better replace some of your factories for something more useful (practically anything, with maybe the exception of clerk jobs).

[mss73055]

While food is a must to have, one barely needs to produce it oneself. The early game actually makes you shift food production into space:
Hydropwning farms > build 3+ > Starbase technology

Once you get yourself a prospectum you've settled for the rest of the game.

Cloning vats without prospectum require additional food production.
Edict "Damn the Consequences" just isn't worth it, as it kills off your leaders.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

OK, so I'm selling food - making lots of it. When I "mouse over" food, it says unit price is 0.68. But I can only put "1" in my minimum sell box, I can't put 0.67 to beat the market and attract buyers. Nor 0.68 to gouge. If the market's unit price is less than 1.0, does that mean I should not bother making a monthly trade with that good? What happens if I leave the Min. Sale Price blank in the Monthly Trade setup window? Thanks for the help.

If you leave it blank it'll always sell the amount you want for whatever the price is at that point.

[Kalemenos]

Thanks for the answers, everyone. Immortalis, a question: what's with the magic number "52"? Why that number?

[AP WOLRD 5 MANIFEST TRUST IN GOD]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

Thanks for the answers, everyone. Immortalis, a question: what's with the magic number "52"? Why that number?

Prices of resources always try to reach a certain value, decided by which resource it is and market fee (what percent efficiency you're selling and buying is, seen in the top right of the market screen). It's been calculated that buying more than 52 minerals a month will increase the price at a greater speed than it goes down, meaning you start paying more for them as time goes on.

[Peter34]

Note that those thresholds only apply to the Internal Market.

Once the Galactic Market happens (and if you're a part of it - I don't know if genocidals are, for instance), then pricing becomes dynamic: If you sell a lot of something to the Galactic Market, the various AI polities will just be more inclined to choose to purchase it from the Market instead of producing it themselves. And so the effect will be lessened, and you can often sell hundreds of an item for several years, without the price tanking. Assuming you're the only polity doing that.

That was probably also one of the reasons for why we got the Lithoids expansion. Before that, I'd see the price of Minerals tank hard in almost every game I played, because the AI polities would mass produce and sell Minerals, and there was no "sink" for them, since there's only so much you need them for (convert to Alloys, convert to CGs, build on planets, resource space stations). Almost every game the Mineral price would tank hard and stay tanked, and the AI couldn't understand that it was stupid to keep producing Minerals (because, you know, making an AI think is quite difficult).

Obviously Lithoids are a fun addition to the game in themselves, but they also serve as a stabilizing factor on Mineral prices, in that if their food becomes cheap then they're very likely to buy up large amounts of it.

[Kalemenos]

Great answers, thanks! I had begun to think it was something like a "Hitchhiker's Guide" 42 or something...