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I am having this exact problem, just spent 10's of millions on smart chip complex, the demand is massive, but NO AI ships come to buy the chips (they'll buy/sell the raw goods...), and i cant seem to get my traders to only trade for smart chips. Rather then selling the chips, theyll sell ENERGY CELLS to a station across the map, and only 160 of them, its laughable. Upon trying to deselect the raw good, and leaving only smart chips in the behavior tab after assigning them to trade for the station, the ship will do a trade and the behavior will immedietly revert to trading for all wears at the station. Only way its worked for me is to manually make each trade, and you cant even select multiple ships at once and give one trade order!
I want to say this is a bug. Why would the trader choose to make a 160 energy cell run, rather then selling the main product? I have everything but smart chips set to restrict trade from other factions, there is GREAT demand for smart chips, and my station is full of them!
The reason for this is each production cycle...
50 Energy Cells + 20 Silicon Wafers -> 80 Smart Chips
Silicon Wafers do cost a lot each, but few are used compared to the number of Smart Chips produced. Additionally this is not factoring in workforce, since I have yet to work out the logic to compute that (waiting for a station of mine to reach optimum workforce).
Now Smart Chip productions will always make profit, however the amount of profit each is quite small. To put it in perspecive Energy Cell production will make at worst (no workforce, minimum sale price) 132,000 profit per hour as long as all Energy Cells get sold/used, or ~4 times the similar condition profit for a Smart Chip production. As such Smart Chips are not as big money maker as people may think, just there is always a lot of demand for them and a single silicon wafer production and energy cell production can supply 20 or so of them. At 40 workforce Smart Chips only take 40 minutes to optimum workforce as well, compared with the 180 minutes of Hull Parts and such advanced products.
The key to this is the price differential between the price the station is set to trade smart chips at and the price customers are prepared to pay. That price can be set automatically by your station manager, or you can do it maually, but the effect is the same.
Station traders use the standard Auto-trade algorithms with the exception they only ever "buy" from their assinged station. Therfore they calculate "profit" from a trade run based on the price difference I just mentioned. For this reason a statrion trader might see more profit in shiping 150 ecells at 10 Cr "profit" per cell than so many smart chips at 2 Cr "profit", even though that quite righhtly might not make any business sense to you. Fortunately it's not too difficult to fix.
Poinits to consider sorting this sort of problem out:
* make sure your station traders are all three star rated - they won't trade properly otherwise.
* Your station manager sets prices in inverse proportion to current stock levels, not market conditions. So if you have a full stock of ecells that price will be 11 Cr or something. That's why everyone wants to buy them and your station trader wants to sell them. The answer is to put the price on manual and set it to 20 Cr. Nobody will buy at that price, problem solved.
* If you have a more or less empty stock of smart chips the SM will set the price to max. This stops your station traders doing smart chip deals 'cos it doesn't think there's any "profit" in them. Again, the answer is to put the price on manual and lower it. This will cause your station trader to burst into action selling smart chips.
* With your station traders, the price set for your smart chips is only considered the minimum they will trade for, i.e. for deal selection purposes only. If a customer is currently offering 200 Cr per chip they will still pay 200 Cr per chip even if your station's official price for them is 100 Cr.
* NPC traders however will buy at the station's official sell price.
* So the only reason really not to set the smart chip price to close to minimum is to stop NPC traders from buying your stock on the cheap. You have a choice here between:
* don't care what they pay, a sale is a sale and keeps the Cr rolling in
* GTF out of here - no cheapskate NPCs trading at this station thankyou very much (disallow factions from trading at the station)
* set a mid-range price for the chips. This may increse profit per chip (although if you mine and refine your own solicon then this is moot) but it also may slow sales andtherfore decrease revenue per hour.
You are producing energycells for free!
You are mining Silicon for free!
You are producing silicon wafers for free!
You sell smart chips for CASH
What you actually count against, is the cost of the station!
To elaborate this, you would actually make more money making the silicon wafers, selling them at high price to a NPC station and then buying silicon wafers at a low price from another NPC station. As such self sufficient complexes are not about profit, they are about being self sufficient.
In the case of Silicon Wafers they are one of the few production modules which can actually lose money. They make practically no profit, especially without workforce and require a ton of that stuff, and so are not really worth owning. An optimum smart chip setup might be a complex with 5-10 smart chip and an energy cell production placed next to an NPC silicon factory and then 4-6 silicon auto miners placed in the sector to supply that NPC factory. This cuts out the low profit silicon wafer production while earning you money by supplying the silicon to the factory and nets you cheap silicon wafers to turn into smart chips to sell.
I dont think you understand,
1. my traders do have 3+ stars
2. I do have my prices set manually for stuff I dont want traded, energy cells, set to sell for max price, set to buy at lowest price, my station has a FULL STOCK (or close to) of energy cells
3. My station has over 30k smart chips in stock, NO ONE BUYS THEM. my traders refuse to distribute them if assigned to station, or set to auto trade smart chips. I AM THE ONLY ONE ON THE MAP WITH A SELL OFFER FOR SMART CHIPS. I mine and refine my own silicon.
Please keep throwing idea at me, maybe I missed something trivial, but im pretty sure after hours looking at this, playing the game for 400 hours, ive not made a rookie mistake and there is a bug with smart chips.
I would definitely drop satellites at places that buy if you haven't already and the auto trade AI brainfarts.
Ditto not having traders or miners in wings, and (long shot but) if you have docked at phq, checking your traders aren't all stopping to await Proceed orders.
Check you have docking space if you have huge numbers of ships docked, make sure you have a pier.
Lastly and maybe relevant, I had a problem where my station was filling up with energy cells but repeatedly buying them in in 5s and 10s despite sell/buy prices being apparently set right, and not selling smart chips - I found that when I added a swathe more traders things started moving / balancing properly, which doesn't make sense but might apply for you, too.
Really? Cause I am not seeing that at all with my engine parts factory. They are taking engine parts here and there and everywhere, just by assigning traders to the station.
I wonder if people having problems do not have a satellite network with lots of discovered stations to feed trade info to their traders. I certainly do.
I do have satellites at every known station, over 400+
Traders are medium ships, not in wing, no cargo dudes required, my station is not at PHQ after i had issues my first play through with ships getting stuck in the asteroid
I have 2 landing pads at my station, no one uses them lol
I have 6 traders I tried assigning to station, they never traded the end product of smart chips
Smartchips are an easy way for the player to make money. One silicon wafer factory provides for 20 smart chip plants, you can not only make an absolute killing but you'll stimulate the economy and get the wharfs and shipyards all back in action, it's the single best way of getting the factions pumping out ships for war.
OK, but what price have you set for the smart chips? That's the one detail you didn't mention.
It looks like im the only one selling smart chips, so I has monoploy, and i had it set to 210, 5 less then what ai stations buy orders was for, 215.
I dont get what coding logic they are using for this, it like my traders dont see a "profit" buying it from my station and selling it for whatever, but they dont get they are not actually paying for the product, they are just transporting it for me