product demand

[lefty1117]

How are you guys determining demand for product (wares) and using that to make your trading station stock/price decisions? I've been trying to search up things on the Trade overlay on the map but it is clunky and cumbersome to say the least. Am I missing anything, are there 3rd party addons or something that can make it easier?

While we're at it, is there any way to make better sense of the trade station performance without the station account credits and the debits from your own traders making it harder to determine actual performance?

[Ketraar]

Personally I never define pricing based on demand, I set it based on how much I think I can get away with (capitalism yay!). But it may also depend on the scope of the station, if its to support local economy then I tend to set pricing low.

In general its easy to get the hang of things after a while, the same type of wares tend to be in damned in most games, these are wares required for ship and station building. Then one works backwards to the wares that are required to produce these ware that are in demand, that is often the first point of good profits. Later on when the supply has been covered profit can be made with the increased production. This fluctuates a bit at first and will depend on how "aggressive" one involves themselves with the economy, directly or indirectly (aka war).

Most easy way to get an idea what is needed is to look at the trade filter and see which wares are on top, hovering with the mouse over shows a number the higher the more demand.

MFG

Ketraar

[Toshis8]

Maybe a good idea would be to look at shipyards and wharfs, how much of each resource they have in stockpiles. After all, biggest sink of materials is shipbuilding.

[ExavierMacbeth]

I think you will get a variety of responses on this... depends on how you want to handle it.

I usually take the stance than ANY income is welcome & just leave the AI Manager in charge of the actual sale price. But then I also usually build my stations to be mostly self sufficient at the bottom so Raw Ore & Refined materials either come from my own miners or dedicated refinery stations set to only trade with my own assets...

This usually means that its impossible for most of my stations to actually sell goods at a loss, even if I am selling for a minimum price.

Only time I really do something different is when I have a specific goal in mind or trying to boost a specific flaw I noticed in the AI economy thats causing the shipyards to stop working. (A rather big problem when the mods I use can cause the Xenon to start steamrolling things if left unchecked)

EDIT: There is also this... to help planning your stations needs :)
http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

[lefty1117]

Do you guys find yourself having to constantly adjust the Buy Price in order to get a decent profit, because by default the automatic pricing seems to put the buy price 1 credit lower than the sell price ... I guess you'd need a hell of a lot of volume for that to be meaningful ... is that the way it's meant to work?

*Note I'm talking about pure Trade Stations in this scenario

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by lefty1117:

Do you guys find yourself having to constantly adjust the Buy Price in order to get a decent profit, because by default the automatic pricing seems to put the buy price 1 credit lower than the sell price ... I guess you'd need a hell of a lot of volume for that to be meaningful ... is that the way it's meant to work?

*Note I'm talking about pure Trade Stations in this scenario

On the matter of buying and selling prices, they're limits to what the station can do, that is, the buying price is a ceiling on what the manager can pay for the ware and the selling price is a floor. But the AI always tries to optimize every purchase, and so your profits on a trade station will possibly be much higher than the difference in prices suggest...

I personally gave up on using pure trade stations to make the bulk of my profitsss a while ago, specially because of the necessity of micromanaging as you described. Nowadays I use them mostly as a sort of "water tower" that buys, stores and occasionally sells cheap wares being produced in either mine or the npc economy. I set the prices manually at the "average", i.e. (max+min)/2, or even lower, with the difference between buying and selling prices just so as not to lose money.

[lefty1117]

Yeah ok. It's the micro management of the prices that I was starting to see as a necessity and so was wondering if I was missing something like a simpler view or a way to get information about where the best places to put trade stations are. It seems like trade stations are still a pretty new capability in the game I guess, by that I mean more needs to be done to make them manageable. Because I imagine that if you had more than a few the micromanagement would be a real pain to deal with.

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by lefty1117:

Yeah ok. It's the micro management of the prices that I was starting to see as a necessity and so was wondering if I was missing something like a simpler view or a way to get information about where the best places to put trade stations are. It seems like trade stations are still a pretty new capability in the game I guess, by that I mean more needs to be done to make them manageable. Because I imagine that if you had more than a few the micromanagement would be a real pain to deal with.

I don't know if these issues we're discussing are a flaw with trade stations as they're implemented in the game or if they're in the nature of the business. If you observe the npc trade stations, they also work in a manner similar to what I've described: giant warehouses used to regulate supply and demand in the economy, i.e. "water towers".

But there are ways to make them work for you. For instance, you can turn a trade station into an "export station" for your factories. To do this, leave the prices on auto but set the station's account at exactly 1 credit (no other changes nor trade rules restricting purchases). This way, the station will buy from your factories because intra-faction trades cost no money, and it will buy from no one else because its account will never surpass 2 credits. All sales will be instantly transferred to your own account.

A "middle of the road" trade station that focuses more on exporting goods but also buys stuff here and there can be accomplished by manually setting the prices, say, at average but you give only some money to it, e.g. 1M credits. This way, it will sell and buy, but its account will never surpass 3M credits (any surplus will be transferred to you account), and so it will never buy too much from npc stations.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

I don't know if these issues we're discussing are a flaw with trade stations as they're implemented in the game or if they're in the nature of the business.

I think the only real flaw with the implementation is the fact that those NPC Trade stations effectively have unlimited money. So the pricing system they are coded to use doesn't actually need to care about making profits.

Unfortunately I don't think this flaw was ever truely addressed (improved a bit over the years but the core flaw is still there) after players started figuring out how to get a player managed Trade Station.

This flaw also existed in X Rebirth when they added a buildable player owned trading station system into that game as well.

EDIT: They could make the trade stations alot more effective if you could set Black/White lists on each Buy/Sell function seperatly. That way you can effectively play middleman station and let the AI properly fluctuate the prices fully based on available inventory.

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

They could make the trade stations alot more effective if you could set Black/White lists on each Buy/Sell function seperatly.

What do you mean?

I ask because you already can set trade rules separately for buying and selling for each ware.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

They could make the trade stations alot more effective if you could set Black/White lists on each Buy/Sell function seperatly.

What do you mean?

I ask because you already can set trade rules separately for buying and selling for each ware.

Really? Did they change that since the last time I tried to build a trade station? (Prior to Avarice Release)

Last time I looked you could set Blacklists on the Station (as a whole) or each specific Ware Type... but you couldn't have one for buying Refined Metals (Say from TEL Only) & a different one for Selling Refined Metals (Say to ARG Only)... You could only set 1 group set for Refined Metals as a ware.

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

What do you mean?

I ask because you already can set trade rules separately for buying and selling for each ware.

Really? Did they change that since the last time I tried to build a trade station? (Prior to Avarice Release)

Last time I looked you could set Blacklists on the Station & the Ware Type... but you couldn't have one for buying Refined Metals & a different one for Selling Refined Metals... You could just get the 1 group set for Refined Metals as a ware.

Yes you can!

I don't know when they implemented this, but in the station's logical overview panel, when you click the ware there is a "trade rule" box at the end of each "buy offer" and "sell offer".

(An image would follow if I knew how. )

[ExavierMacbeth]

Originally posted by conrado.lacerda:

Yes you can!

I don't know when they implemented this, but in the station's logical overview panel, when you click the ware there is a "trade rule" box at the end of each "buy offer" and "sell offer".

Nice... then in that case all they need to do is fix the issue that stops you from setting Buy price to be higher than Sell price... They would probably have to add extra code to stop the station from selling to itself (or bouncing goods back and forth with other trade stations)... But that would make economic relays alot easier to set up.

Kinda getting bored setting up in Neo Fortune just so that I am within 5 star jump range of as many NPC shipyards as I can. lol

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

Nice... then in that case all they need to do is fix the issue that stops you from setting Buy price to be higher than Sell price... They would probably have to add extra code to stop the station from selling to itself (or bouncing goods back and forth with other trade stations)... But that would make economic relays alot easier to set up.

The pricing part has been possible for a while, and the glitch of a station selling to itself is supposed to have been fixed for the current beta.

"Fixed subordinate traders sometimes buying from homebase and selling right back to it."

https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=192&t=405397

[ExavierMacbeth]

hmm guess i will have to try and play with it my next game... Currently gameplay in X4 is on hold until 6.0 is released and my mods update :P

[Ketraar]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

then in that case all they need to do is fix the issue that stops you from setting Buy price to be higher than Sell price...

This not good idea at all, I use higher buy then sell price in my own trade station network to define the stream of wares I want to be distributed. Granted this for internal logistics so the profit margins are irrelevant in these cases since its trade between own stations so no money gained or lost.

MFG

Ketraar