Station Building/Trading

[BrianTheMessiah]

So I have a station making superfluid coolant, I have a trade ship assigned to it, but the ship is not moving. Do I need a pier module or is it something else?

[CraftyWülf]

You need a station manager I think. That or you need to check the default bahaviours tab and make sure you increase it's allowed jump range for tasks.

[BrianTheMessiah]

I have the manager and the behaviors for the ship is 16 sectors

[War]

same here

[CraftyWülf]

Does the right click command work? "Trade for"? Because if that one does work, then it's something being wonky in behaviours. Sometimes the commands also like to bug out. I find telling the ship to clear it's commands helps fix that sometimes.

[el cid]

BUMP, got the same problem not doing anything.

[Kyasix]

I had the same problem, i would assign a ship to station to trade, and it would do nothing. I hired a lvl 4 manager (found him on a capital ship freighter) and after that my station ships started working fine. Previous manager was lvl 3.

[lordaquarius]

I have done the following:

- Go to Map
- Select the Ship I want to Assign to a Station, select the INFORMATION button
- Click on SET DEFAULT BEHAVIOUR, and leave the menu on the screen, do not click anything
- Click on PROPERTY OWNED (the second button on the top left corner or MAP menu)
- RIGHT CLICK on the Station you want to assign, A MENU OF OPTIONS FOR THE SHIP WILL APPEAR
- Click on DEFAULT ROLE (probably will have DEFEND selected)
- The ship will appear as a SUBORDINATE OF THE STATION...
- Select the ship and right click on it...
- From the menu, select the behavior you want (MINE, AUTOTRADE, ETC)...

And hopefully, your manager will be able to handle it...

I am waiting to see the results of this choices, They are not clear at all... there is no button on the menu systems that allows you to assign a ship to a station... and from there select the roles you want... I think the devs must fix this...

[TY! Stylo.Crayon™]

It is important to note that you have to go the station management tab and look for the ressources you try to sell. You have to uncheck " restrict trade to other factions " otherwise the manager wont sell this ressource and keep it to fuel your other station/modules that need it.

[reemul]

The station will only trade based on the information available to it - if you haven't been dropping satellites at stations that might be interested in your station's products, your station trader won't have anywhere to sell them. Alternatively, you can assign another ship to "updates prices" but it will have to manually travel to stations to do this, so it's not very efficient.

With that said, superfluid coolant is one of the worst items to manufacture, as it isn't used very often, is rarely desired in significant quantity, and isn't worth very much.

[Hakgova]

A lot of good advice above. One thing not mentioned is that if you are assigning a trade ship to a station, you need a station manager and that manager should have a good "management" rating. By "good" I mean at least 2-stars OR MORE. It is not a requirement but it will cause your traders to trade BETTER.

[Gregorovitch]

One gotcha for your first station is pricing. If the price set for your supercoolant is higher than any customers are currently prepared to pay your trade ship will sit there doing nothing.

This often happens with new stations because price levels are set by your station manager according to stock levels, not market conditions (you may think this is mad but there is a reason for it working that way). Obviously on a new station the stock will be near zero therefore the price will be set top dollar.

If this is so simply click off the auto-price button for supercoolant and set the price close to minimum. If this was the problem your trader should burst into action after a few seconds.

The other thing to mention is station traders get set to Auto-trade default behaviour and this requires a three star pilot to work normally. I'd check to make sure your pilot is a three star. If not that might be throwing a spanner in thew works.

[Ziland]

Dunno if this is any use to you. But I often just put one of my service/marines as managers, with zero stars. Likewise, I've given trade ships with 2 star captains, and they still got the full autotrade behaviour set to them by the zero star manager. It all worked fine.

Most likely, it's as a few have said already. Your stock is too low so price is set too high, or you haven't discovered and updated the trade indexes of enough stations for it to trade (plus, gl selling supercoolant, it's a very niche market).

But if I can give you a hint to start off easy. Do a silicon wafer/advenced metals station somewhere with those resources on site (silicon/ore). They tend to be overabundant and under mined at game start, and sell really well/quickly as a result.

[Aieonae]

The worse case is a lack of demand in the local sector.

I primary eye for shipyards/wharves resource consumptions as their consumptions is one I can influence.

I just setup "shops" beside them printing them parts while I ordered them to build those ships for me, effectively they pay me for the parts while I pay them what I rip from them for those ships.

And after I am happy with my fleet, I pump in food ration and medical supplies those immature pirate bases to further the process of money ripping.

If I have the money, I just use behemoths or L Destroyers to do trading(trust me they are more worthy as station trade are rather sporical at best and their cargo volumes should be more than enough with the build in combat value)

It not to say the L superfeighters are useless, they are great for " manual force feeding" those resources to their respective stations when npc AI traders fail to do their jobs(a bug?).