Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
1. When a station has a shortage of a certain materials, the manager likes to set the subordinate trade wares specifically to those few materials. This can mean that even if a valid trade appears somewhere for any of the other materials, the traders will ignore them because that ware is not on their trade list.
You can confirm if that's the problem by going to the behavior tab of the subordinates and seeing what wares there are on their automatically assigned list. If Hull parts are not on there, you've found the problem.
How to fix this? Previously there wasn't any good way other than manually trading it or plugging the shortage to the manager stops their tunnel vision on a specific ware or a couple of them. With the new update one extra thing you can do is blacklist some wares for specific traders. You can have a few ships that exclusively trade a certain good to ensure that, no matter the situation on the station, there will always be ships ensuring a ware gets traded. So if you see a station consistently assign traders some wares because of shortages and it's blocking other trades, I recommend having a few ships with those wares blacklisted so that doesn't happen, or even having ships that specifically trade one, high value good to ensure the trades are always happening.
I did a lot of micromanaging of the wares list in the beta after they made that a feature. Even though it was a bit annoying and it took a while, after I was done everything was running like clockwork. No more ships stuck doing nothing. I recommend doing so too.
2. The simulation needs to catch up. sometimes there is so much going on that ships can get stuck for a minute or two, seemingly trying to figure out what to even do. But that only happened to me in REALLY busy games.
You want your goods to be filled up and have a source to fill it up faster then it can be drained
For example I have hull part set to 20,000 with my hull part factory with 10 production module giving 10k an hour
It still not enough for how much the NPC just absolutely suck hull parts for building stations and ship
This should stop the whole prioritizing thing the station do
11,000/30,000 is probably why it refuse to sell stuff
It can be 30,000/300,000 and the station itself will take into account the storage percentages instead of what actually in the storage
I'll give all that a shot, I do recall sometimes seeing less wares than what I had set up and would reassign the ships to see if the lists updated.
Might also consider separating station into tiered stations for different levels of goods. The problem will be less damaging that way at least.
I don't know of a good tutorial for this, I've pretty much learned all this on my own through playing a few different saves and experimenting with how to set things up. Sorry
Let me try to put it into more detailed steps to follow. Here's what I would do if I noticed one of my station isn't doing a good enough job distributing or buying wares (assuming you left all the prices and quantities in the logistical view on auto and did not mess anything by manually editing things):
1. First just check if I have enough trade ships. That's easy, if you look at a list of assigned subordinates and I see all of them are busy doing thing and not loitering around the station, that means I just need to add more ships.
2. If you see ships loitering, then there is an issue. Let's say for the sake of this example that the traders aren't distributing microchips to your other stations even though you have almost full storage of it. First click on one of the loitering traders and change to the behavior tab. On there you should see under the default behavior there is a list of wares that the manager of this subordinate trader has assigned to that trader. There is a good chance that microchips are not on there, if they aren't then that's why they aren't being trader.
3. Now the question becomes why are microchips not on there? And in my case at least it's the same issue every single time: there is another ware that the station manager is desperate to get a hold of. For example, your station might have a nearly empty storage of silicon wafers and the manager deems it an issue number one, so the traders will have only silicon wafers on their ware list. Doesn't matter if they can actually buy it anywhere, it WILL be on that list and it will stay there until the demand is met, blocking the exports of microchips. Another case that often happens is if the station has a demand for supplies for station crew, these seem to be always prioritized over anything else. So if you built crew quarters on your station and created demand for things like medical supplies, the manager might set that to be number 1 priority and it will hog the list of wares and block other trades.
4. If this i what is happening, there is one easy way to solve it. With the new update you can manually edit this list and add/remove anything you want from it. You can even have ships that trade just a single thing that you really want to trade.
The most basic thing you can do that will immediately help A LOT is to have decided ships for imports and exports, never mix both. From my experience this is where the most problems tend to arise from. Solution is simple: take a ship, switch the ware list to manual and then make sure it can only trade the wares the station exports, or only wares it imports. Repeat for all the subordinate traders, making sure you have enough ships on both import and export, and that's it. This will prevent situations where when station desperately needs something it will have all of the subordinates switch to a single import, preventing exports from happening. You can further micro manage this too, for example if your station ALWAYS needs something in really high quantities (for example microchips demanding a lot of silicon wafers), you can have dedicated silicon wafer traders assigned to the station, and then remove silicon wafers from all other ship's ware list. This will help ensure that the critical supplies are always being traded no matter what the manager thinks is best.
Set a minimum sell amount on all orders so the ware will not fall below a specific inventory level/amount or %. (Not sure what % of the buy order storage allocation triggers the station manager's priority ware mechanic.) When the manager identifies low stock of a ware it will label that ware "priority" and stop all trading (even when buy/sell orders are set up correctly) and only allow his/her traders to buy the priority good.
There are other options or workarounds for this, (redesigning empire/stations, messing with default behavior of ships, designated ships for one ware, etc) but they aren't "dynamic" enough for me, don't scale well or cause other bottlenecks or deficiencies. The station manager is the boss of the player. Not the other way around. You cannot trump the station managers priority ware mechanic in the game at this point in time, unfortunately.
You will have to maintain a specific storage % of all your station manager's buy orders in order to avoid the priority ware mechanic. Unless you like a lot of manual adjusting or other bottlenecks "down the road". :(
You will have to decide what workaround works best for you.. Sorry.
Thanks! Looks like you caught me deleting my post instead of editing it. Shucks!
Second, you could have travel, trade, or activity restrictions on the station or individual ships that are preventing the sales. Double check they are all set up correctly.
Third, if these are L traders, make sure they have cargo drones on board. Stations are not guaranteed to have drones and if neither the station or ship has drones, it cannot perform a trade.
Lastly, make sure your storage amounts per ware are reasonable. A very common mistake people make is building way too much storage on a station that the manager then struggles to fill so they reserve all their ship capacity buying instead of selling and things break down. You've set your storage amounts to manual which is good. Did you do so for all wares on the station? Manual storage amounts eliminates the problems of the automatic allocation causing all the storage to be filled with one ware and there's no room left to add additional wares, particularly as wares get added at later times. But the per-ware storage amount also needs to be low enough to be filled in a reasonable time to avoid the problem of the manager over prioritizing buying over selling. When I'm manufacturing my own wares to sell at my trade stations I'll manually set the storage amount to what I can produce in about 2 hours. This also makes it easy to identify production needs. Trade station ware below 50% capacity for a few hours? Add another production module since I'm selling more than I'm producing. Over 50% for a few hours, do nothing since I'm producing more than I'm selling.