Local AutoTrade and Fill Shortages

[Knottypine]

Just curious how this is supposed to work. I'm sure I used this behaviour in my last game in 5.10, but it doesn't seem to work well. I set up a small transport to auto trade medical supplies in a sector. There are definitely wares available to be purchased and sold. But my pilot cannot find and trades.

I made them manually perform a trade so I know the wares are not spoken for and are both 100% available for the AutoTrade behaviour.

I have two ships to perform this task to build up some rep. I switched one of them to Fill Shortages since they're two star, and also don't have any luck with them finding trades.

Yes I do have permission to dock, I have satellites up, I don't see any reason for these two behaviours to fail. Version 6.0.

(This is why I usually go for Local AutoMine since that has always worked for me, but doesn't work in all sectors for availability reasons.)

*The ship assigned to Fill Shortages decided it was better to fly four sectors away, through the Void, and then past a Xenon raiding group to buy water; Rather than buy water from the sector it was in. Nice.

[conrado.lacerda]

I don't know for sure, but I suspect from experience (and found mention of this elsewhere) that both autotrade and fill shortages ships only buy if the price is bellow the average. So, for instance, an ecell autotrader will only buy for a price up to 15 (maybe 16?).

Anyway, the idea behind both behaviors seems to be profits from "arbitrage opportunities". I may be wrong; if so, someone please correct me... In any case, give it a try!

[Knottypine]

Possibly. The sector they were in, water was 52 cr each. They flew to a sector to purchase for 53 cr each. So I'm not sure why that is.

[conrado.lacerda]

Originally posted by Knottypine:

Possibly. The sector they were in, water was 52 cr each. They flew to a sector to purchase for 53 cr each. So I'm not sure why that is.

Maybe stock level? I dunno...

Also, 53 is exactly the average price for water...