Am I the only one sufferring from lazy trading ships?

[FrozenVagabond]

I have 2 stations in ~120 km distance. One of them makes a lot of basic products, hull parts, antimatter cells, etc. The other one use the basic products to make more advanced wares.

So in the basic producer, I have set all of the products in min price and allowlist only myself to buy them. and in the advanced producer (basic products consumer) it is buying those basic wares at max price and allowlist only myself too.

I have like 40 million credits in the buyer station, 10 trading ships set trade for commander. The trading works, partially. They do trading every now and then, but not always. In many cases they 'think there is nothing to do' when the consumer station is running out of hull parts while the producer has 10K of them, they will probably find it out in 5 minutes or 10 and start to move 500 of them and decide to take a rest again.

I have to manually set buy-sell commands to them when I see half of the trading ships are idle, while actually the trading/logistics bandwidth is way lower than what I need.

I tried to set repeating commands and it works, but I have to do it one by one, and every time they get 1 or 2 shots from the annoying pirates so I try to repair them, it is a nightmare. I will have to cancel the repeating commands thing and set it to something else, repair the ship and reset the repeating commands.

Is there anything obvious that I am missing to make it easier / less pain? Or it is just the way how German workers do their job and can not be changed?

[gizmo6023]

Same issue until I saw a post that said using min price causes issues even with a only buy from yourself restriction. The credits don't really go anywhere as its still your account, kind of like taking money out of your left pocket and putting it in your right.
I just put the restricted wares on auto price and make sure to place the my stuff trade rule in effect. You still get the occasional bonehead that has to be told coffee break is over get back to work, but you are dealing with artificial AI and some of it's coding could use some polish.

[FrozenVagabond]

Originally posted by gizmo6023:

Same issue until I saw a post that said using min price causes issues even with a only buy from yourself restriction. The credits don't really go anywhere as its still your account, kind of like taking money out of your left pocket and putting it in your right.
I just put the restricted wares on auto price and make sure to place the my stuff trade rule in effect. You still get the occasional bonehead that has to be told coffee break is over get back to work, but you are dealing with artificial AI and some of it's coding could use some polish.

Yeah I have set the buyer at max price and selling with min price. I understand the logic behind is that the trader reuses the same auto-trading logic so there must be a profit even though it is from left pocket to the right.
But still, they are just too lazy to work.

[FrozenVagabond]

Originally posted by gizmo6023:

Same issue until I saw a post that said using min price causes issues even with a only buy from yourself restriction. The credits don't really go anywhere as its still your account, kind of like taking money out of your left pocket and putting it in your right.
I just put the restricted wares on auto price and make sure to place the my stuff trade rule in effect. You still get the occasional bonehead that has to be told coffee break is over get back to work, but you are dealing with artificial AI and some of it's coding could use some polish.

Actually I find myself a way to go, DeadTater MOD seems to solve this problem well.

[RaideR]

Same
But my assumption is this
The manager doesn't sending trade signal till his storage riches critical low amounts, like enough for 1 cycle or let's say 5 minutes
And than he is sending requests to buy more, even from yourself
They are never trying to fill up completely, like everyone of as do manually
Same with let's say gas, manager will stop buying gas if he's storage more than 10-15%
They are never selling last product either
So that's why having massive storage is actually a bad thing, unless you run it on repeat order
But that's my observation

[FrozenVagabond]

Originally posted by RaideR:

Same
But my assumption is this
The manager doesn't sending trade signal till his storage riches critical low amounts, like enough for 1 cycle or let's say 5 minutes
And than he is sending requests to buy more, even from yourself
They are never trying to fill up completely, like everyone of as do manually
Same with let's say gas, manager will stop buying gas if he's storage more than 10-15%
They are never selling last product either
So that's why having massive storage is actually a bad thing, unless you run it on repeat order
But that's my observation

Actually I am guess it in another way.

It feels like a trading ship will try to search for a 'trading opportunity' containing a sell station, a buy station, prices and profit to make (simple logic to make). But the searching is triggered by a timed scheduler. When a trading ship searches and finds a trading opportunity, it will do the trade and schedule the next search time, not sure if it is a fixed period or has some sort of random factors applied, but before it reaches that time it will just keep in idle when the previous work has been finished.

Since the whole game is single-threaded, it is like a queue of events (like many 1980s German software does, but Germany has been staying with how everything works in 1980s.) getting coordinated and scheduled with a time based events bus. An event processor/handler kind of logic unit will take an event and trigger a piece of logic, in this case is scanning for a trading opportunity.

When the (single) cpu core is busy enough, the events gets piled up, so in late game it gets a lot worth.