first station keep loosing credits - need help

[Ofer]

Hey everyone, finally got around to build my first station but it keeps loosing credits.
The station has a 2-star manager, 1 solid and 1 gas M class miner ships.
Upkeep missions are done (assign manager, miners, storage drones etc.)
The station keeps buying materials from NPC ships (mostly Helium gas), transaction log is completely red with purchases from NPCs and nothing is being sold.

Station Modules:
Production modules: Metallic Microlattice, 2x Energy Cell
Storage modules: L Container, L Liquid, L Solid
Dock Modules: 4M10S Luxury dock area, 3-Dock T Pier

What am I doing wrong?
Remove station funds to prevent these purchases?
Assign more gas and ore miner ships?

My guess is that the AI is trying to fill the station resources storage, even though there are enough resources for production and miner ships are assigned to fill the storage.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance :)

[Zalzany]

One that needs helium and ore, so you need a mineral miner for it so it gets ore. Two is there helium and ore near the station? Three you can set up a trade rule so it only trades with your faction, set that for the buy orders for the mats so it only buys from your miners, wich in reality it will not actually spend a credit buying from its own faction so it will only take deliveries from your ships not AI.

Never done terran goods but I know you need more then one miner per production module like a hq with ice, ore, and silcon refinary needs at least 5 miners to not have shortages in my experince. So I assume that would need 2 gas, and mineral to be safe. I mean its buying gas you said so it thinks it needs more. So try another gas miner, but first make a rule for faction only and use that for the buy orders

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1843662261714027795/DA0FF5173C8471E2ACC2A12C61712DBB0B12656B/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

No clue how to share screen shots right but my company is called blantech i made a rule for only allowing trade with itself, and I use that on all ore and gas buy orders, as well as my trade stations only can stock goods from my production stations, but can sell them to any one.

[Zalzany]

Oh and invest in a Trader to have station manger sell it themselves, assigning a trade ship to the station to do trades they will buy if mangers have orders, but also it will sell any goods for the manger. I manualy adjust the min buy, and sell limits myself. Like for water I limit it to sell if over 1200 units, and since it always has a buy order limit buy to 1 So it basiccaly never buys water, just wates for my station to proccess ice into it, but as I produce more then I need I set 1200 so I got like an hour and a half in case of a ice shortage before its traders ever try to sell water, or it allows any NPC to place an order and pick it up themselves.

That is where the big money is you can use satelites and what not to have up to date info on stations in reach of the manger, if its 2 stars for effective means 2 sectors including subsectors it will send its mining ships and its trade ships out. So any one buying your Metallic Microlatte stuff for what the station manger set as good price fro region, I let them always pick that themselves it will send a trade ship out to sell to them. Waiting for them to buy direct from the station is super slow, the AI trader not too great, and the station prices are based on supply and demand, so if a station gets to much of that Matallic stuff in its storage, it will drop the price lower then your sell price, and AI will buy from them first.

[Harrison]

You can set up trade rules to prevent purchases from the AI, I’d recommend that as a first step if you don’t want the AI selling to you at all.

Part of your issue is the size of your storage. The price your managers offer is decided by how much input/stockpile the station needs and the amount of stockpile is decided by the amount of storage the station has.

Using L storage is appealing because it means you can have lots of capacity as buffer but for your first station it also means you need more resources to fill that storage. Resources that have to come from somewhere. For your first few stations you might consider using smaller storage units. Until you can supply either the dedicated mining support or cash to keep them up and running.

To resolve this, you could go in and manually set the prices (which locks them) or even the storage allocations for each resource which would be like having smaller storages on the station. Either is good option if you’re tight on funds.

More miners is always a good option as well. For the sort of station you’ve described I’d want a minimum of at least 3 of each but more probably 5 (that’s medium, 1 or 2 L miners would work as well).

Last I checked (this could have changed recently and I missed it) you need a minimum of funds in the stations budget so the manager creates buy orders and even for your own ships to deliver goods to it, even if no money is changing hands. It’s silly but that’s the way it works.

I wanted to move these paragraphs around to flow better but I’m on my phone and it’s being stupid and won’t let me. Hope it helps.

[Zalzany]

Originally posted by Harrison:

You can set up trade rules to prevent purchases from the AI, I’d recommend that as a first step if you don’t want the AI selling to you at all.

Part of your issue is the size of your storage. The price your managers offer is decided by how much input/stockpile the station needs and the amount of stockpile is decided by the amount of storage the station has.

Using L storage is appealing because it means you can have lots of capacity as buffer but for your first station it also means you need more resources to fill that storage. Resources that have to come from somewhere. For your first few stations you might consider using smaller storage units. Until you can supply either the dedicated mining support or cash to keep them up and running.

To resolve this, you could go in and manually set the prices (which locks them) or even the storage allocations for each resource which would be like having smaller storages on the station. Either is good option if you’re tight on funds.

More miners is always a good option as well. For the sort of station you’ve described I’d want a minimum of at least 3 of each but more probably 5 (that’s medium, 1 or 2 L miners would work as well).

Last I checked (this could have changed recently and I missed it) you need a minimum of funds in the stations budget so the manager creates buy orders and even for your own ships to deliver goods to it, even if no money is changing hands. It’s silly but that’s the way it works.

I wanted to move these paragraphs around to flow better but I’m on my phone and it’s being stupid and won’t let me. Hope it helps.

It doesn't actually care on the funds in the station, if you using rules to only buy from yourself, it sill estimate a safe "budget" but i strip zero all time, they still do buy orders from your own faction even if its empty. Just like my trade stations will still get deliveries from my production stations if their asking buy price is better then rest in range, even though they have a balance of zero.

Like my trade stations estimate 19 million for budget, but since they don't use a single credit and only trade goods from my stations for the buy orders, then sell it to any one who meets the mangers sell price. I check every hour or so and just drag all my station accounts to zero, and they just keep on going fine, I just got put money on HQ when I do research so they can buy the goods I don't make myself.

[Ofer]

Thanks a lot for your reply Zalzany and Harrison :)
I wasn't sure how trade rules work, set supply trade rule to only buy from my "faction".

I will get more solid and gas miners to supply the station storage, now that it's not buying any more from other factions.

Regarding station trader - is Transporter the right ship type for this role?

[Gregorovitch]

The reasons you are hemorraging money is because:

a) Most of your resources are being bought from NCP traders (1 miner + 1 gas miner is nothing like enough to feed your microlattice fab)

b) Because you have L storage modules your buy price for resources is prolbabvly sky high and your sell price for what microlattice you can make is also sky high so you don't sell much of it, you are just filling up your storage allocation for it. You are basically paying through your nose to fill up your L storage modules.

Don't worry. You can fix this easy.

Short term:

1. Buy about three or four more miners and another gas miner as soon as you can

2. Change the trade rule for gas and ore to "my faction only". This will stop NPC selling it to your station.

3. Change the storage allocation for microlattice from automatic to manual and drag it down to a bout three or four freighter loads. Leave price on auto. This will have the effect of quickly dropping your price as you make more mcrolattice meaning it will quickly find it's true market value and consistently sell over time.

4. Buy an M freighter to ship your microlattice to customers.

This will immediately stabilise you station finances.

Long term:

Terran space is very bad for resource gathering. Yields are pants. The solution to this is that you can get from Asteroid Belt through to Getsu Fume and The Void and you can get from Neptune through to Antigone Memorial and the Void etc. Here and about you will find various sectors with bumper yields of the good stuff. You want to systematically prospect and carpet probe all these sectors.

Then you build mining stations to extract these resources and ship them to your microlattice factory and move your miners over to them from your station. With 2* managers such mining stations can therefore exploit good mining fields up to four sectors distant from your factory.

Unfortunately you don't say exactly were you've built your factory. Happen it's too far from the bumper mining grounds all is not lost. One extra station manager star (i.e. 3*) will give a mining station a 6 sector supply range which will probably be enough.

You can get to that reasonably quickly by setting up a temporary mining station to grind resources within Terran space near your station. The manager will level up soon enough and then you can transfer them to a new mining station placed to exploit the bumper mining grounds over in Commonwealth space.

After that you can redisigate the temporary mining station as a trade station and sell all your microlattice and anything else you decide to make throughout Terran space. The manager will level up like a rocket quickly getting a four and then five sector range and you then plug all your Terran factories into it so they will benefit automatically from this trade station's range.

Vorspung durk technik.

[Zalzany]

Transporter are trade ships, their whole purpose is container deliveries

[Ofer]

thanks for your help everyone :)
Trade rule is already set.
More gas and solid miners are on their way.
There's plenty of ore and gas in near by sector so this should cover the production materials.

Getting a station trader next, will let it run for a while and hopefully the station will start making credits for a change lol

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Zed:

There's plenty of ore and gas in near by sector so this should cover the production materials.

Keep in mind that "plenty" is a relative term. Build a single Computronic Substrate module and it will need 18,000 each of ore and silicon per hour to keep it running. Which in technical language is called a metric crap ton.

"Reasonable" yields for ore and silicon are anything from 4-7 per km^3. "Good" yields are 8+. For gases anything over 1.0 per Km^3 is OK and 2.0+ is good. Anything less than 4 is poor for ore and silicon and less than 2 is pants. This starts to really matter when you begin ramping up production to pay for those nice shiny new battleships you've got your eye on.

The big issue is silicon - silicon miners are very sensitive to yield, more so than ore miners. They take for ever and a day to mine low silicon yields. They are also extra sensitive to pilot skill. You want to put your best pilots in silicon miners and grind trade guild missions for high level pilot seminars to improve them, at least until you can do a Terraforming project and train them up that way. This is also a reason to build dedicated silicon mining stations - you can concentrate your best miner pilots on mining exclusively silicon that way.

[Ofer]

Miners are working in Saturn 2, Ore and Silicon amounts is up to 1.5 / km^3 (Max 1.6).
Ore supply filled up fast with 3 solid miners.
Helium gas is at 70% with 3 gas miners, 2 miners are having issues with:
failed orders: automine
no buyers found in range
execute trade
unable to complete trade

This is strange because there's available liquid storage at the station 1 sector away.

Station trade rules can be confusing.
With restricted trade rules to player faction for "Station Trades" and "Station Supply" no trades at all were done for a long time.
Allowing all factions for "Station Trades" ended up with my station buying (yet again) gas supplied from NPCs.
Info online suggests "Station Trades" affects what the station is selling.

Reverted to restricting both to player faction.
Hopefully the station trader will be able to find buyers...

[Bozz 💀]

Sometimes it takes a lot of time, I would just buy some mineral and gas traders and put a repeat order selling your minerals to the station that you have found, it's way more effective

Also check that the station has docking modules, I once lost my ♥♥♥♥ because there was a station right next to my station buying ore and my station manager did not want to sell it there and after a while I found out that the docking module of the target station was out xD

check your pricing
Check that you did not tell the station to sell all but xx amount which can be the probleme, he likes to modify this sometimes so I would set it manually to sell all but 1
check that the traders can transport the minerals and the gas

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Zed:

Station trade rules can be confusing.
With restricted trade rules to player faction for "Station Trades" and "Station Supply" no trades at all were done for a long time.
Allowing all factions for "Station Trades" ended up with my station buying (yet again) gas supplied from NPCs.
Info online suggests "Station Trades" affects what the station is selling.

I've played 1000 hours of this game and I still have no idea what "station supply" rules are. I would say whatever they are doesn't matter. I suspect a lot of rules are in there 'cos folks that want to set up custom default positions for their stations so they don't have to do anything much else when they build a new station. Since I don't mind working through my stations I don't care.

So all I do is look at the trade rules for each ware listed in the logical view for each buy and sell order. They all start as "no restriction" by default. The only other one you need really is "my faction only". I simply go through the logical view and switch the buy orders to "my faction only" for everything I don't want the station to buy and remove sell orders for anything I don't want them to sell.

In your case all you need to check is that your resources buy orders are set to "my faction only" and your microlattice sell order is left at the default "no restriction". That's all you need so try to resist the temptation to fiddle with any other rule settings to make it "work".

Then getting the station to actually sell it's product is down to three specific requirements:

* that you have a trader assigned to the station and there is a dock for it land and load from (which NPC traders can also use to buy from you)

* Customer range (counted in gate transits) <= manager's skill rating in stars

* Current customer offer price > your station current sell price.

So long as your sell order is left as default and the other three conditions are met your station trader will shift product. If it doesn't one or more of these conditions is not met, you have to track down which it is. Keep it simple and it will work fine. After a while this becomes second nature.

I do not agree with @Bozz that it's easier to use Repeat Order to sell station wares for the simple reason it's not responsive to changing market conditions and there are too many things that can go wrong with it requiring you to fix. Once you get your station traders set up properly it's much, much easier and more profitable IMO.

[Mnemon]

The station supply rules only control drone/missile resource supply as far as I can tell.

[Ofer]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Gregorovitch.
It helps to have simple way to assign station trade rules per item instead of something generic.
There's much to learn in this game and it can be confusing for new players.