L autotraders VS M autotraders

[OZZO]

Let's share the experience here. What is your preference and why?

I have tried with a fleet of M traders and then scrapped them and tried with a fleet of L traders. Both had some cool highlights, yet I was not completely satisfied with either. So now my fleet is 50/50 M and L.

With regard to the ships I tend to prefer speed over cargo bay size, so my autotraders are:
M - Hermes Vanguard
L - Selene Vanguard

For L Shuyaku may seem a better value for money overall but I noticed that L ships often do not take 100% load (even my Selene) so I went for the fastest one.

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For convenience of all players I'll summarise some observations from the crew:
- M traders are 5-7 times cheaper than L
- M traders usually utilise their full cargo bay (L sometimes do the trips with a small load, probably just considering the unit price difference)
- L seem to be better at making profit per run. Since the goods are reserved, L can then bring a large delivery while the demand is high. If you imagine that M would take 5 trips to serve the same factory, each time the profit will be less because the factory will need less of those goods.
- M traders are much weaker against threats, 1-2 turrets against 7-9 for L
- M traders generally travel faster than L (however, L Selene Vanguard for example is quicker than most M)
- M traders dock faster and don't have restrictions to dock (L ships require a dock that some stations do not have)
- M ships can use highways.
- You need much fewer skilled pilots to distribute a decent cargo load (e.g. if you need to deliver 100.000 tons of something).

[grapplehoeker]

For me it simply comes down to looks rather than specs, so my transporters are mostly Mercury's and Shuyaku's. If speed is a factor with the Shuyaku, then it's nothing a couple of exceptional modifications can't fix ;)

[blizard]

m traders are alot faster at docking

[Alith-Ahnar]

While slightly off topic the reason why the Shuyaku looks so appealing is that it is an anomaly as only ARG/ANT have a XL Super Freighter that's what the Shuyaku is.

But i would not use anything this big and lumbering as a auto trader unless it would be setup with a blacklist that turns it into a internal logistics supplier only as there is no single NPC Station that could make use of the cargo capacity in a single run with a single ware aka the way auto trader operate.

[Mr.Person]

I haven't played in a while but I gave up on L traders because it kept taking trades that could be done in a Courier, completely wasting the point of it being an L trader.

Nowadays I end up spamming Couriers and I've honestly had more luck with that.

[lalala]

I do not use L traders. They are currently literally ~10x slower, than the M traders. They miss gates, they accelerate longer, they fly slower, they stop 50km from target and fly regulary, they turn slow, they do not have reasonable more cargo, most stations do not trade that large quantities anyway and the AI is anyway stupid trading large quantities, they tend to trade small, so they basically fly the same amount as Ms most of the time, 10x slower.

L-Traders are almost useless. This is again one of things in game, full of potential features, of which most are either broken and if not, balanced to level of being almost useless, which is almost as if the feature was not there or would not function. I probably count the some-what useful and not broken features on the fingers of my single hand ;P

[kever]

The L traders behave a bit more sanely in the beta branch, but for autotrading for sure use M traders, or also L traders CAN work if you detect an are where only 1-4 resources are often in high need and limit trading to those wares. Generally speaking though auto trading is really frustrating to watch because they do ALOT of suboptimal stuff. Manual trading with L traders can bring pretty nice profits, I have a ton of automated medium traders and some L traders for station supply and then I have a few L traders I like to chain up with several lucrative trades and then wait an hour or two until they are idle and then repeat ^_^

[lalala]

Originally posted by kever:

The L traders behave a bit more sanely in the beta branch

I played both 2.50 and recently 2.60, they do not behave better in my case. Actually I think it even get worser in 1 point, because I can not recall them stopping almost always 40-50km away from target in 2.50, like they do in 2.60. Otherwise everything else is the same.

[Frater]

they seem to behave just fine for me,although they aren't really useful for anything but moving stuff from a player owned station to another
i hope the devs will introduce a way to automate this logistic though

[Bardicheart]

Roadricus already identified most of the reasons M traders outperform L traders for station managed or auto-trading. To that I will add this, all ships sometimes have a problem with not being able to fly in a straight line. This bug forces them to drop out of Travel mode, re-orient and then re-engage Travel mode; but this disproportionately affects L traders because of their longer delay time in charging up their travel drive. As a result I've had L traders spend more time in Cruise mode crossing a sector than they did in Travel mode, and given the generally slow cruise speeds of L freighters that really impacts their performance. Add to that the long turn around times at gates, longer docking and undocking times (not to mention an E pier as a lot more expensive to build than 3 3M6S docks (about 2M Cr for 1 E pier in materials vs about 750k to 800k in materials for 3 3M6S Standard docks) and it just makes L freighters terribly inefficient.

The only time L freighters show and advantage in my experience is when they are player controlled, either directly flown by the player (who can then compensate for the otherwise slow performance) or just managing the trades.

The problems can be somewhat compensated for with green hull (drag mod) and engine mods (but get the rotation boost, not thrust or travel boost), which in my experience have cut travel times by nearly 60% making them competitive against my M freighters. So if you're going to use a few L freighters, even just for player managed trades, I strongly recommend throwing some green ship mods on em.

I would say L freighters have an advantage in survivability, which is true... but the Hermes Vanguard is fast enough to generally simply outrun most pirates so its only vulnerable while waiting to dock at a station, rendering the comparison moot. Just don't EVER use the Teladi Vulture which is actually slower than some L freighters.

[MaGicBush]

Well I can't even get auto traders to work in 2.6. They just sit there and won't trade, so I have gone all miners in my current game and a few traders I control manually.

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

Well I can't even get auto traders to work in 2.6. They just sit there and won't trade, so I have gone all miners in my current game and a few traders I control manually.

I just do not get it, why is everyone having Problems with the Auto-Traders?

Would you mind to describe your specific steps so i can understand and eventually help setting up at last one functional Autotrader?

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

Well I can't even get auto traders to work in 2.6. They just sit there and won't trade, so I have gone all miners in my current game and a few traders I control manually.

I just do not get it, why is everyone having Problems with the Auto-Traders?

Would you mind to describe your specific steps so i can understand and eventually help setting up at last one functional Autotrader?

Not everyone ;)
I'm perfectly satisfied with the behaviour of all of my traders.

[Stryderunknown]

Ideally setting up an L trader between two stations over great distance and then having the M traders distribute the goods locally to the systems nearby is the best bet.

That does mean you have to setup the stations to act as warehouses and transport different goods to move between the two warehouse stations. (For instance one might deal with Foods/Medicine while the other might deal with Raw Resources. Having them switch goods, makes sure they can profit internally with both directions.)

Since L's don't use highways, it's also the best way to bring goods to the highway systems from further away.

If an L can carry 5 times more than an M you could consider that if you limit yourself to a lot of M ships that will be a lot of work on your CPU and an increase in your save file size, using L's will reduce your CPU usage (by having less agents) and reduce your savefile size (thereby speeding up the save time)

[MaGicBush]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

Well I can't even get auto traders to work in 2.6. They just sit there and won't trade, so I have gone all miners in my current game and a few traders I control manually.

I just do not get it, why is everyone having Problems with the Auto-Traders?

Would you mind to describe your specific steps so i can understand and eventually help setting up at last one functional Autotrader?

So I loaded it up, and tried again(this issue made me stop playing at beta 2). Somehow it is actually working this time! I tried something simple like trading energy cells from one sector that had them for 12, and I saw a system 2 jumps away buying for 18. I set the trader to trade energy cells, at the max distance to buy/sell, and set the "anchor system" as the same system he was to buy them at. I am thinking I may not have paid attention earlier that he could only sell up to 3 systems away, as I was trying to trade weapon components which were for sale for like 272, and being bought at like 325 about 10 jumps away. What is odd though is I got frustrated at that point and set two traders to auto trade with all the resources at max distance(3 jumps) and neither found any trades and just sat. Out of all of the resources in the game I assumed it should find something to trade, but they didn't. So maybe it was just a coincidence and where they were anchored(different systems even) there really was nothing within 3 jumps. Or maybe it was glitched that beta version, and now it's working correctly?

Either way I can play again! I assume as I rank up my captains from 3 stars to 4 or 5 they can trade further away I hope? I'd say people have issues with it as it is rather confusing when you have no idea how the system works. It's much different from any other games with trading I have played, and I do feel like it could be further streamlined to make it easier, but it does seem to work ok I guess. My main issue is with the map filters and how they work. They all jumble together and it's just overwhelming and ugly. Separate windows with "goto" options I feel would go a long ways with the UI, or just allowing you to click on said resource and it take you to where it's being bought or sold respectively. Everytime I want to click on whatever resource(like energy cells), but when I do it just disappears from the list instead of taking me to where they are being bought/sold. Then I scratch my head looking for it, only to realize it removed that filter for some reason. A lot of times if I am scrolled in it will show a line going off screen, and trying to hunt it down is annoying as I then have another "trade box" popped up in the way with more lines.

Sorry I didn't mean to hijack this thread, but the dev asked lol.

[OZZO]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

Well I can't even get auto traders to work in 2.6. They just sit there and won't trade, so I have gone all miners in my current game and a few traders I control manually.

I just do not get it, why is everyone having Problems with the Auto-Traders?

Would you mind to describe your specific steps so i can understand and eventually help setting up at last one functional Autotrader?

They work just fine.