Trade Station ignores certain wares

[lalala]

Setting
- Buy & sell order with fixed price and no restriction
- 5 wares configured, all 5 wares in trade range of manager, even in same or next sector some
- Checked that all 5 wares are in trade range and constantly FAR below the price I configured to buy max.
- Budget set and enough to buy
- 10 M-Size traders trade for the station
- I stupidly checked multiple times that buy price is set correct and available. Skipped time, checked again. There are planty of offers for many of the 5 wares all the time

What happens:
My traders ignore 4 out of 5 wares. They only trade 1 ware, while ignoring offers in the same sector in stations straight near the one they buy from. Those 10 traders are not all occupied with the one, instead if the 1 resource is saturated they do nothing. They idle with "no trade found".

[[deleted]]

Don't run your station on auto anything.

[lalala]

Now they stopped trading even the 1 resource:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198048421323/screenshot/2033989441980931845/

They traded 3x times quantum tubes and traded before micro chips.
Typically hull parts are always at ~181 and not traded as well.

[lalala]

Originally posted by Grumpy:

Don't run your station on auto anything.

What?

[lalala]

I think I see a problem there:

All the buy prices are of.

The micro chips I buy for 770 and they don't want to buy now for 762, were bought for 710!

And the same with the 3x quantum tube trades. They were bought for 177 vs. my 215 buy offer.

All the bought wares were bought far under my set price. It appears there is some invisible buffer and they don't buy for the set price.

I know that trade stations are supposed to sell always with a margin above average price and buy with a margin below average price to prevent loss, but ONLY when price is set automatically. I assume that this margin is wrongly applied to the manuall prices.

Originally posted by Grumpy:

Originally posted by lalala:

What?

Do you have anything on Auto?

has nothing to do with automation, trust me.

[lalala]

It has nothing to do with automation if I say that, I know that, contrary to you I do not pull out statements out of thin air. You clearly don't know "how the magic" works so you just have some beliefs. Thin ice to dance on like you do.

Bye and have fun troll elsewhere.

[lalala]

@eMYNOCK
I think I have found a bug I can reproduce. When I raise the prices they start buy. It seems (I still go to test other wares) that there is an invisible -10% buffer. When I set Hull Parts buy at 200, they will only buy at 180 for example.

I can also say that this is not the case for the SELL price, just the BUY price. I bet this is unintentionally applied on the sell price based on the auto-price logic to ensure that buy price is always < than current sell price. But it does not make sense if you controll manually.

[lalala]

Reported:
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=456891&p=5198361#p5198361

[LASci]

Originally posted by lalala:

@eMYNOCK
I think I have found a bug I can reproduce. When I raise the prices they start buy. It seems (I still go to test other wares) that there is an invisible -10% buffer. When I set Hull Parts buy at 200, they will only buy at 180 for example.

I can also say that this is not the case for the SELL price, just the BUY price. I bet this is unintentionally applied on the sell price based on the auto-price logic to ensure that buy price is always < than current sell price. But it does not make sense if you controll manually.

It's not a bug, but you're right that there is some sort of profit margin consideration in the AI behavior on when to buy and sell. To your own traders, if you set a low buy price on the inputs, all they see is "Buy Silicon Wafers for 261, Sell them for 295. Profit 34...not worth the trade." And then it'll sit there just searching for trades endlessly. You can see this on the sell side as well. "Sweet, Advanced Electronics are in huge demand, I'll set my sell price to 1 less than what all the shipyards are paying for it." And then...nothing. The AI won't trade it because it will just see a profit of "1". Unlike Grumpy, I disagree and think you should have the buy prices on your inputs to be set to auto. What you might want to limit is the amount of storage capacity on hand. I try to keep it at no more than a 3 hour supply. Eventually it'll stabilize, assuming you have enough assigned traders, and they'll run out and buy inputs at whatever their minimum acceptable "profit" margin is.

You can see this profit margin desire most easily if you've ever tried to setup a trading station. If you try to set up your buy and sell prices to buy at some low level, say 5% over the minimum and sell prices at say 5% below the max, you'll see a ton of stuff that just never gets traded. But some things will. Like the AI will just move spices or something all the time because your price happened to be within whatever the internal profit margin requirement is. The best solution then is to actually just set a buy price that's like 1 below average and a sell prices that's one above that. Then the traders will start moving goods like crazy. Ultimately they'll still make good money, because they are often buying things at minimum and you're getting your faction discount on top of that. Then they'll sell to a wharf or shipyard somewhere for near max...or the trading station will just fill up and not trade anymore one way or the other if it's something that's over produced in the universe. Worse case scenario is the AI sells to your dock for 1 below average and then another AI buys it off your dock for average. You only made a profit of 1 credit, but then you didn't have to ship any of it. Now you're making money like a bank! Just getting a little taste off of every transaction.

[lalala]

Originally posted by LASci:

Originally posted by lalala:

@eMYNOCK
I think I have found a bug I can reproduce. When I raise the prices they start buy. It seems (I still go to test other wares) that there is an invisible -10% buffer. When I set Hull Parts buy at 200, they will only buy at 180 for example.

I can also say that this is not the case for the SELL price, just the BUY price. I bet this is unintentionally applied on the sell price based on the auto-price logic to ensure that buy price is always < than current sell price. But it does not make sense if you controll manually.

It's not a bug, but you're right that there is some sort of profit margin consideration in the AI behavior on when to buy and sell. To your own traders, if you set a low buy price on the inputs, all they see is "Buy Silicon Wafers for 261, Sell them for 295. Profit 34...not worth the trade."

That contradicts the observation above. Because I've actually increased the buy price, hence the margin now is even smaller. Why do they suddenly start buying?

It does not matter how its called bug or not, because as I've realized its the auto-price threshold. So its probably rather an oversight to have it stick on manuall setting. Yet oversights get fixed, no matter how you call them, bug or not.

The fact is, when I set price manually, this threshold makes no sense:

I have to abitrary increase prices to get them to buy at the price I actually want them to buy. It appears the value is seemingly random on each ware, but might be just hard to reproduce if its uniform % due to how the relative average +/- % delta of each ware varies. It simply does not make any sense having to blindly set values. If I want to control it manually, I want to controll it manually.

[Pandorian]

Originally posted by LASci:

It's not a bug, but you're right that there is some sort of profit margin consideration in the AI behavior on when to buy and sell. To your own traders, if you set a low buy price on the inputs, all they see is "Buy Silicon Wafers for 261, Sell them for 295. Profit 34...not worth the trade." And then it'll sit there just searching for trades endlessly. You can see this on the sell side as well. "Sweet, Advanced Electronics are in huge demand, I'll set my sell price to 1 less than what all the shipyards are paying for it." And then...nothing. The AI won't trade it because it will just see a profit of "1".

Nah, ships will trade even if the profit margin is 2 CR. The trick is to make sure the buy price is below average and the sell price is above average. In your Silicon Wafer example the average price is 299 so it sees buy below average, sell below average, not going to trade. All of my repeat traders and Trade Station traders are set up this way and they all work. But as soon as I drop the sell price below average they don't want to to prevent loss.

[lalala]

They work because they have buy price set so high, that you don't notice the invisible and wrongful threshold on the manuall buy price. Its kind of ridiculous what we talk about. Its as simple as: buy for X or lower, sell for Y or higher. There are trades for less than X, buy for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake, BUY!

I don't get this non-sense all over the place in the game, and that after figuring out things that most new players will not have the patience for, yet it just keep smacking. I can't just decide if I want auto or manuall control, because the game has to have stupidity inserted into the mechanic. Maybe I see some special situation where I can strike profit, why can i not simply controll - the heck. This game just eliminates everything you try to do with dumb nonsense.

You have to monkey-monkey-monkey-patch and break your neck only one way for it to barely work, but break the neck the right side, not the left side and only by 145deg, no more or less, while doing so you need to dance on your hands head down. Since release of the game, even with all the fixes and updates, I just waste most of the time figuring out how to lure the fools into doing what I want and no matter how much you know, the game keeps putting rakes under your feet for the most basic and trivial things! Its like tetris of mechanics but you can't rotate the pieces. And you need clean lines for it to work. Sometimes by pure luck you can actually make a line...

[LASci]

Originally posted by Pandorian:

Originally posted by LASci:

It's not a bug, but you're right that there is some sort of profit margin consideration in the AI behavior on when to buy and sell. To your own traders, if you set a low buy price on the inputs, all they see is "Buy Silicon Wafers for 261, Sell them for 295. Profit 34...not worth the trade." And then it'll sit there just searching for trades endlessly. You can see this on the sell side as well. "Sweet, Advanced Electronics are in huge demand, I'll set my sell price to 1 less than what all the shipyards are paying for it." And then...nothing. The AI won't trade it because it will just see a profit of "1".

Nah, ships will trade even if the profit margin is 2 CR. The trick is to make sure the buy price is below average and the sell price is above average. In your Silicon Wafer example the average price is 299 so it sees buy below average, sell below average, not going to trade. All of my repeat traders and Trade Station traders are set up this way and they all work. But as soon as I drop the sell price below average they don't want to to prevent loss.

These prices are from lalala's screenshot up above. If you look at it, he's set the buy price at his own dock to 295 and the AI is selling for 261 but his own traders won't fill those orders. But as I said, the AI just sees this as a buy 261 sell 295. And it doesn't like that profit margin and so it won't make the sale. I dunno, maybe per your suggestion if he set the buy price at his dock to 300 it would then start filling orders. As I said, I just leave the buying price for my production stations on auto.

But to hijack the thread for a moment and speak to your suggestion, I have a serious problem with the trading station not making purchases. And this jives with what lalala's problem is. According to you, they're happy with a 2 credit profit, but I have a hell of a time getting trading stations to work unless I set my buy prices to just under average. They just don't want to buy (that is fill up the dock); they'd rather sit and search for trades for 30+ minutes rather than go out and buy. But the moment they have an opportunity to sell even like 5 spices off the trading station they'll run right out and do it. My own take on this is that they've got some sort of internal profit margin requirement as well as a bias towards emptying the dock at any price. It's easy to duplicate this. Setup a trading station, set buy and sell prices with a 20% spread (buy 10% below average, sell 10% above average). They just do not want to go out and buy. I mean they will, a little bit...eventually like 10 of your 100+ traders will all go out at once and buy some hull parts or something. But by and large they'll only deal in a few things and will otherwise sit and search for trades until something shows up on the dock for them to go sell. The only found solution I have is the one I suggested to lalala here, set your buy prices to one under average for trading stations and for production stations leave your input buy prices on auto.

I guess I'm a little confused by how you setup a trading station. For the silicon wafer example, are you saying that you set your buy price to 300 and your sell price to 301?

[lalala]

So they have no motivation to buy, because they are "rewarded" (what makes them happy and they get moral for I guess) for buying much cheaper then the buy prder is, but that does not appear to happen with the sell order.

Just think about it: you configure manually to trade a good for a certain price or below and they do nothing untill you buy it more expensive, so they can get a medal on their chest for a larger margin? This is really absurd and what I meant in my last post.

[Pandorian]

Originally posted by LASci:

I guess I'm a little confused by how you setup a trading station. For the silicon wafer example, are you saying that you set your buy price to 300 and your sell price to 301?

For silicon wafers I buy at 298, sell at 300. Even though the minimum theoretical gain on that is 2 CR, you won't see this unless the economy is saturated/there are no buyers. Instead the ships will go out and buy all silicon wafers at price 298 and below from the stations then the station will try to sell the wafers at 300 or above. So I still can get move than 2 CR profit per item but the bare minimum I will ever get is 2 CR.

So the max you buy for is Average-1
the min you sell for is Average+1

You can obviously buy for lower prices and sell for higher prices and the station will still work. My initial trade stations will start with higher sell prices but I'll eventually drop the sell price to Average+1 when I'm ready to stop min-maxing it.

[LASci]

Originally posted by Pandorian:

Originally posted by LASci:

I guess I'm a little confused by how you setup a trading station. For the silicon wafer example, are you saying that you set your buy price to 300 and your sell price to 301?

For silicon wafers I buy at 298, sell at 300. Even though the minimum theoretical gain on that is 2 CR, you won't see this unless the economy is saturated/there are no buyers. Instead the ships will go out and buy all silicon wafers at price 298 and below from the stations then the station will try to sell the wafers at 300 or above. So I still can get move than 2 CR profit per item but the bare minimum I will ever get is 2 CR.

So the max you buy for is Average-1
the min you sell for is Average+1

You can obviously buy for lower prices and sell for higher prices and the station will still work. My initial trade stations will start with higher sell prices but I'll eventually drop the sell price to Average+1 when I'm ready to stop min-maxing it.

So, you actually set things up the exact way I do. At least the way I do now. Originally, though, I had things set with the 20% spread I mentioned earlier. So, for silicon wafers I'd set buy 269 and sell 329. And they just would not want to buy at that price. Even if there's a station right next door selling silicon wafers for the minimum (180), they just wouldn't buy it. The behavior I'd observe is the following:

1) Search for trades.
2) If something, anything even a single drone part can be sold (pushed) off of the trading dock, do that trade.
3) If nothing is available to be sold (pushed) off the station, repeat steps 1 and 2 above for 20+ minutes.
4) Finally after 20 minutes of searching for trades with nothing available to sell, you and 10+ of your fellow trade ships go buy spices (or some other random ware) at the exact same time.

This leads me to a few conclusions. One, they need a certain amount of "internal profit" before they will even move. Two, your own AI traders hate, Hate, HATE pulling (supplying your dock) if there is anything available to push off the dock.

To lalala: don't pull your hair out over this. One of the things I've learned about X games is the developer has certain "way" that they want you to play the game. And they're very obtuse about just beating you over your head with a club if you try to do something different. Rather than trying to make things work the way you want, that in all honesty makes perfect sense, instead ask yourself how the developer wants you to do it. Yeah it's stupid, especially in a sandbox game, but that's just how X games are played. In this case, just set the buy order for your production stations to auto and limit the stock to 2 to 3 hours of consumption. It'll eventually reach a "steady state" where either your traders or the AI is keeping your inputs full at a price that's somewhere below average. *Edit: for the most part. There's a few inputs that AI traders (both your own and other factions) don't seem to like to fill whatsoever. Microchips I've found is the biggest offender here, even when large supplies are available. I don't know why, but I suspect the reason here is the smaller trading spread (min/max prices) available to Microchips and a few select other wares with high average prices (948 for Microchips). My theory is the smaller spread means the AI won't fill microchips until they're nearly out of stock thus fullfilling the internal profit need. The only solution is to integrate their production into the station.

To anticipate your next question, "Why do they do it this way?" My guess is first of all they want to make the game "easier" by not needing to micro a lot of this stuff. Of course, Egosofts typical way of making something "easier" is by making an alternative way "harder". Skill points are a good example of this philosophy at work; instead of enabling game play, they actually restrict. "Don't setup advanced traders/miners, stupid. Setup trade/mine stations." And to be fair, in this game, stations are the better way to do it. But first, they're going to make you spend hours pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to get enough 3+ star pilots to do advanced trade before you figure out that's not the way to do it anymore. My second guess is, a lot of their efforts at large are steered towards preventing player monopolies (the nerf to player owned shipyard sell prices was all about this). They don't want you cornering the market in silicon wafers. Interestingly enough, you CAN do this with the mined wares. Since there are no miner traders, you can setup mining stations with L miners and M miners doing the trades. With enough ships and station coverage you can fix prices on all of the mined wares.