Help Understanding Trade Stations & Map Icons

[skunkmonkey]

I'm trying to setup a trade station, but I don't think I'm understanding the map icons very well. I read the Trade Station Steam guide, and it made sense, but when I go to setup the wares buy/sell orders things don't make sense. I'm guessing that guide's price list is out of date or I'm seriously misunderstanding the map economy icons.

The blue or yellow hexagonal icons displayed on the map are supposed to be supply / demand icons I thought? This doesn't seem to be the case though when I look at prices, and it's confusing me as to how to setup my buy/sell orders.

As an example I'll list the done components prices and blue / yellow icon count for 3 different sectors.
Sector 1:
Bought Wares = 3 blue hex, 913 cr
Sold Wares = 2 yellow hex, 983 cr

Sector 2:
Bought Wares = 0 blue hex (only wants like 4 items), 1028 cr
Sold Wares = 1 yellow hex 840 cr

Sector 3:
Bought Wares = 2 blue hex, 973 cr
Sold Wares = 2 yellow hex, 970 cr

From this data it doesn't look like the supply / demand corresponds to the price at all, and it's leaving me very confused. Sector 1 has much higher demand than both sectors 2 and 3, but the price is much lower.

What do you veterans do when determining buy / sell values for your trade stations?

[Sinius]

Under normal circumstance I let the station manager determine market price automatically. Same with inventory levels. Your sell price will increase as your inventor goes down and vice versa. Buy price for your station will increase as inventory levels get lower and decrease as inventory increases. You can manually set all this to some degree in some cases but if you leave it at automatic you will make profits. Later as you begin to build ship yards and start to experience frequent shortages in certain wares you can manually up the storage level to keep more available. Early on I found automatic best practice.

[skunkmonkey]

When I change to automatic pricing it's always setting the sell price to be 1 cr higher than the buy price no matter what ware it is

[Sinius]

Not uncommon for a trade station initially. Market influence takes time to adjust prices.

[Sinius]

Trade Stations can be a money hole initially depending on the number of wares you are trying to build inventory for.

[skunkmonkey]

Okay, thanks for the info. I'll let it run for a while and see what happens. So far it's looking like my production factories are doing much better, so if it doesn't right itself eventually I may just do production factories exclusively

[Sinius]

I generally wait till I establish a good Credits on hand of a couple hundred million before I try an exclusive trade station. Any factory can be a defacto trade station if you have the storage. Just add the ware from the logical overlay and create a buy and sell order.

[Wraith]

They might have put their base price higher then the other sector

The way demand and supply applies to this game is through percentages of base price set by the station

If you ever open up the actual trade windows for trading(the one with the sliders), you can see the influence of demand and supply as well as reputation discount and trade discount through data leaks

[wurm213]

Ive been playing with some tradestation combined with admin module in the past. It has practically 12 Large Docks, some defense modules,. a bunch of S/M landings and of course Container Storage. I set it up with the wares, which are needed from carriers or resuply ships and I let them fill the storage from my merchants from my own fabrics around this area.

This works pretty well but you have to play with the prices a lil, otherwise there will be no trade started. I'd like to see a better solution for this, like just to give your merchants the order to sell there without comparing the prices.

So, a passing carrier which needs supplies is grabbing all from this trade station. Ive set up the some filters which I turn off and on, so if I have to much resources I just let the other faction buy my wares which works good and the storage is empty pretty fast.

I have one of this station in Argon Prime and is doing great profit.

[o0♥pinky♥0o]

Anyone know what the orange shopping basket by the gates on the map means ?