Help with auto trade

[Maffin]

I have a medium transportship, a 3 star pilot as captain, selected in the behavior options "auto trade (advanced)" and 5 components (hullparts, shieldparts, weaponparts, etc.), 3 sector jump range.

And yet, the dude is hovering around and I get the message "No traderoute found in allowed sector".
Checking the sell/buy on the map there are plenty of opportunities!

Any help on this?

[Despiser]

Look for what is being bought and sold in the same sector. Assign that commodity to auto trade under behaviour. That usually works, at least until quotas are filled. Personally I run miners more than traders. They will go on mining on their own forever.

[conrado.lacerda]

Wares need to be cheap for autotrades to purchase them (less than the average price). If that condition is not met, I suggest using repeat orders instead with a 1-star pilot and save your 3-star for something better, like piloting a destroyer .

[Maffin]

Originally posted by Despiser:

Look for what is being bought and sold in the same sector. Assign that commodity to auto trade under behaviour. That usually works, at least until quotas are filled. Personally I run miners more than traders. They will go on mining on their own forever.

There are plenty. If I do it with repeat command he constantly flies around making me money.
I have even satellites on every freaking station in the whole Boron empire.

[Kazmeister]

Originally posted by Despiser:

Look for what is being bought and sold in the same sector. Assign that commodity to auto trade under behaviour. That usually works, at least until quotas are filled. Personally I run miners more than traders. They will go on mining on their own forever.

They won’t. They’ll go on mining until the storage is completely full on all the stations that use that raw material and then sit there whining that there’s no station to sell to. It takes a long time though.

[Donauwelle]

Originally posted by Maffin:

There are plenty. If I do it with repeat command he constantly flies around making me money.
I have even satellites on every freaking station in the whole Boron empire.

Yeah the vanilla Auto-trade is quite wanky,
currently in my 120 Hr into the game Boron camp,
I`ve 10 L trader on repeat order trade, not a single autotrader besides nuff stars.
Repeat order is so much more reliable.
Auto-trader has weird conditions, it needs sufficient discount to buy, nuff profit to sell, and somehow even if it does, sometimes it just wont work.
Generally, if starting autotrader do this out of System (oos) this seems to improve the behaviour but is no guarante.

Trade stations work a lot better then autotrade, Dock+Containerstorage, set wares and your good to go.
Single ship on autotrade has more variables to work then the station,
the single ship needs a sell and a buy offer in range, the station just buy OR sell.
The AI can also dock to your station to buy your goods so your not only depending on your ships, just have wares for good price and the AI will come to you.

[6000 Chipmunks]

I've heard rumors that local auto-trade has legit issues, and is being worked on by the devs.

[Sin317]

Vanilla Trader is broken af, and because you can't set up anything, other than ware/s and system/s / range, you don't even know why. They should have added options for min buy/sell prices.

But they didn't. Obviously.

Anyway, repeat orders works, and fill shortages works too. Better than nothing, I guess.

[Gregorovitch]

Autotrading is not an optimal thing in X4 like it was in X3 where a fleet of Unversal Traders was a major game strategy. In X4 two alternative early investments are vastly superior:

1. Mining Stations - mines ore and sells to refineries
2. Trade stations - buys and sells the wares you specify at the prices you specify within the station's current operating range radius.

Both are very cheap to build. The huge advantage they have is that the miners and traders you assign to them have a range determined by the star rating of the station manager not the pilots. All managers can start with 2* since you can easily buy the necessary seminars at any station vendor and furthermore because they get XP from all the trades their ships make they level up really fast.

This means mining and trade stations get an operating range radius of two sectors, i.e. a circle of diameter four sectors, right from the get go. No 3* pilots required.

Station managers are the kings and queens of X4 for this reason and they represent the crucial difference between X3 and X4 business strategy. There were no station managers in X3.

In the early game mining stations make more money than trade stations and are the preferred first investments. However later game when you are manufacturing your own wares trade stations take over as the big earners since you are making effectively 100% profit per sale instead of a small margin.

For this reason the optimal business growth strategy revolves around setting up a mining station network (which starts making you money early game and then supplies your own stations) and a trade station network that covers the whole galaxy (which starts off making pin money and then super-charges sales of your manufactured wares).

Since the station managers level up so quickly they will all get to 5* by early mid-game and therefore each mining and trade station will have an operating radius of five sectors. This should inform your choice of location for building them.

My advice is to forget Autotraders and you won't look back.

[Kazmeister]

Originally posted by Donauwelle:

The AI can also dock to your station to buy your goods so your not only depending on your ships, just have wares for good price and the AI will come to you.

This assumes there are any AI traders left in your universe and they haven’t all been eaten by Xenon. I would do a trade station in mine but I’m already pretty much the only one moving goods in a significant portion of the map.

[Maffin]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

1. Mining Stations - mines ore and sells to refineries
2. Trade stations - buys and sells the wares you specify at the prices you specify within the station's current operating range radius.

I guess I gonna try that.

With Mining Station you mean a simple Station with a dock and storage module?

Where should I place them? I'm in the Boron Empire and they have 2 mining systems with 2 refineries each (one ore sector, one silicon sector). Should I place the mining station right next to the refineries or close to the jump gate that links the populated production sectors?

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Maffin:

With Mining Station you mean a simple Station with a dock and storage module?

Yes, just a dock and a storage module. Remember the storage module you need for ore is the solid one, not the container one. That's an easy error to make.

Originally posted by Maffin:

Where should I place them? I'm in the Boron Empire and they have 2 mining systems with 2 refineries each (one ore sector, one silicon sector). Should I place the mining station right next to the refineries or close to the jump gate that links the populated production sectors?

I'm not familiar with Boron space yet but the same considerations will apply no doubt.

Since you start with a two sector range for new mining stations you pick a spot that covers the max number of asteroids to mine and max number of refineries to sell to, simple as that. Distance is not really an issue since you do not pay maintenance on your ships in this game. An M class miner costs around 500k and it will pay for itself twice over in couple of hours. Just add miners to the station (both for mining and for delivery, you use miners to deliver ores not freighters). The ratio of miner miners to delivery miners is usually about 2:1 plus or minus depending on distances.

I build separate ore and silicon mining stations as this has advantages later game, specifically silicon mining is affected to a greater extent than ore mining by the miner pilots level so it pays to concentrate higher level miner pilots on silicon which you can'y do with a dual purpose station.

Lastly you can also upgrade mining station to refineries by adding refined metal and silicon wafer fabs to them. The advantage of that is a) you get more value added and b) a lot more stations buy silicon wafers and refined metal than buy the raw ores.

I don't do this now I build separate ore refineries and silicon wafer factories for two reason:

a) I can switch them over to supply my own manufacturing stations exclusively on a case by case basis later in the game which gives much better control and

b) it means I can get ores from much greater distances. By mid-game you have mining stations with 5 sector radius operating ranges. A mining station plus a separate refinery
therefore gives you a ten sector max range to get ores from top quality mining sectors to your hungry factories meaning the factories can be built bang slap in the middle of end customer stations.

If you also build a trade station network you can add another five sectors for a total max of 20 sectors from mining grounds to finished product delivered to end customer stations, typically the faction shipyards. It goes mining station -> refinery -> factory -> trade station -> customer and a five sector jump is possible between each.

This is important now because originally mining grounds were two a penny but round the Terran DLC release things changed so most asteroid fields now had very poor yields but certain key sectors had absolutely bumper yields. These are the gold dust sectors which you need to find. Of course these bumper mining sectors tend to be out on the boon docks, that's why these long production chains are so important.

Two other reasons for building individual product stations is it's much easier to manage and tweak freighters to adjust supply flows and it's also much faster to ramp up production by adding modules to stations since each station can only build one new module at a time so this way you can be upgrading production capacity in parallel across many stations at the same time.

So basically the way to think about how to set up early mining and trade stations is to imagine them as part of the huge military-industrial complex you will eventually own.

[ಠ_ಠ Exil]

I had more luck with "Fill Shortages" command, although that is not restricted to a number of gates but instead goes to all known sectors to trade stuff. As long as you set up restrictions on which sectors to avoid I found this method to be better than autotrading.

[Despiser]

Originally posted by ಠ_ಠ Exil:

I had more luck with "Fill Shortages" command, although that is not restricted to a number of gates but instead goes to all known sectors to trade stuff. As long as you set up restrictions on which sectors to avoid I found this method to be better than autotrading.

I'm not even sure what fill shortages does. I see my trader buying and selling the same wares for the same amount with no profit.

[ಠ_ಠ Exil]

Originally posted by Despiser:

Originally posted by ಠ_ಠ Exil:

I had more luck with "Fill Shortages" command, although that is not restricted to a number of gates but instead goes to all known sectors to trade stuff. As long as you set up restrictions on which sectors to avoid I found this method to be better than autotrading.

I'm not even sure what fill shortages does. I see my trader buying and selling the same wares for the same amount with no profit.

To my understanding it looks for a ware that is in high demand and tries to find it somewhere for sale, but at the same time it doesn't unload everything at that one high demand location, it sells that high demand ware at multiple stations which in turn can cause a profit loss.

I usually use this to train pilots for Advanced Auto-Mining and replace them shortly after getting my 1st or 2nd production station.