Why does station traders only have 2-3 wares on their lists?

[Blech]

I recently made a station that builds 7 different wares. The traders i assign to the station are not really doing anything though. I have satellites along the AI stations, as well as the 20 relation trade subscription with the argon, where the station is located. When i open the information behavior page on the traders they are set to trade, but all of them only have silicon wafers and silicon in their ware lists. When i assign them to defender, and then back to trader, they get the full ware list, but only for a little while, then its back to silicon. The prices are low enough that i should be able to sell and i have no trade restrictions. I even set the price to the minimum for all the wares for a while just to see if that was the problem.

What on earth is going on? Why is my 3½ star manager acting like such a dork?

[eMYNOCK]

Your Ships get the Tradelist from their Manager.

If that list only contains Production Resources your Manager wants your Ships to buy the most needed Materials to produce What ever your Station is producing.

If that list contains the usual Drone Materials (Drone Parts, Energy Cells & Smart Chips) they want your Ships to stock up the Drones your Station is supposed to have.

Only if your Station has sufficient Materials to keep up Production, has all the required Drones and a minimum amount of Wares to sell it will issue Sell Orders for your Captains to pick from.

[Blech]

I might have figured it out myself, but please provide alternatives if you have them. The station is lacking both silicon and silicon wafers. It is almost full of the finished products, but since its missing input, it seems to set EVERY SINGLE trader to look for the stuff it needs, and not a single trader (out of a trade fleet of 30 ships) to sell the finished stuff. If that is indeed what is happening, I'm lost for words. It is truly dumb.

[Blech]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

Your Ships get the Tradelist from their Manager.

If that list only contains Production Resources your Manager wants your Ships to buy the most needed Materials to produce What ever your Station is producing.

If that list contains the usual Drone Materials (Drone Parts, Energy Cells & Smart Chips) they want your Ships to stock up the Drones your Station is supposed to have.

Only if your Station has sufficient Materials to keep up Production, has all the required Drones and a minimum amount of Wares to sell it will issue Sell Orders for your Captains to pick from.

In this case, that behavior means that because the station needs silicon wafers, and only 2 stations has any silicon wafers to sell, I have 28 ships doing nothing, even though I have a station full of wares to sell and plenty of stations that wants to buy those wares. It just seems so enormously inefficient. My station will actually run out of money just buying silicon wafers, as which point i expect it will simply stop working because they will still try to buy more wafers even though they likely have wares worth 20mil in the station?

[Sungod1]

Because at some point the buy limit was hit and they go stuck with cargo.

[Blech]

Originally posted by Sungod1:

Because at some point the buy limit was hit and they go stuck with cargo.

None of the traders have anything in their inventory. It really does just seem like the station decided it needed a single resource and got really fixated on that.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Blech:

In this case, that behavior means that because the station needs silicon wafers, and only 2 stations has any silicon wafers to sell, I have 28 ships doing nothing, even though I have a station full of wares to sell and plenty of stations that wants to buy those wares. It just seems so enormously inefficient.

Well, not really, if the station can't produce anything then it can't sell anything, can it? So naturally the station manger's AI is focused first and foremost on making sure that all materials necessary for keeping the station in production are procured before doing anything else.

Your problem is the station miners have not gathered enough silicon by the sound of it. Either that or you haven't got enough silicon wafer fabs on the station.

Either way you can fix the problem immediately by ordering a manual trade for silicon and/or silicon wafers on a bunch of the 28 traders you've got hanging about until the hoppers are filled up a bit. The freighters will immediately go back to work as normal. Then figure out why the station ran out of them in the first place and fix that.

I know you could argue that pulling all the freighters off normal duties to deal with this is silly, why not just half a dozen of them? Yeah, maybe, but having 28 freighters assigned to a station is a massive number (I mean what sort of ultra-mega-complex is this?). The AI isn't programmed to cater for that. Most stations, even quite big complexes, do fine with maybe four freighters assigned and in that situation pulling them all off to deal with a resource crisis makes absolute sense.

Also you could say that the game has in it's round about way succeeded in alerting you to the situation, hasn't it?

[Blech]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

Originally posted by Blech:

In this case, that behavior means that because the station needs silicon wafers, and only 2 stations has any silicon wafers to sell, I have 28 ships doing nothing, even though I have a station full of wares to sell and plenty of stations that wants to buy those wares. It just seems so enormously inefficient.

Well, not really, if the station can't produce anything then it can't sell anything, can it? So naturally the station manger's AI is focused first and foremost on making sure that all materials necessary for keeping the station in production are procured before doing anything else.

Your problem is the station miners have not gathered enough silicon by the sound of it. Either that or you haven't got enough silicon wafer fabs on the station.

Either way you can fix the problem immediately by ordering a manual trade for silicon and/or silicon wafers on a bunch of the 28 traders you've got hanging about until the hoppers are filled up a bit. The freighters will immediately go back to work as normal. Then figure out why the station ran out of them in the first place and fix that.

I know you could argue that pulling all the freighters off normal duties to deal with this is silly, why not just half a dozen of them? Yeah, maybe, but having 28 freighters assigned to a station is a massive number (I mean what sort of ultra-mega-complex is this?). The AI isn't programmed to cater for that. Most stations, even quite big complexes, do fine with maybe four freighters assigned and in that situation pulling them all off to deal with a resource crisis makes absolute sense.

Also you could say that the game has in it's round about way succeeded in alerting you to the situation, hasn't it?

The factory has an ore-based production line, and a silicon based production line. How does it make sense that no traders are trading the ore based wares because the silicon line has run empty? There are loads of refined metals in the station, the station is producing loads of wares from them, but none of my 30 traders are selling any wares, because the station needs more silicon. How exactly is that working as expected?

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Blech:

How exactly is that working as expected?

Because the station manager AI makes no real distinction between you having 30 traders or 1 trader. It says "Traders, do this".

[Blech]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

Originally posted by Blech:

How exactly is that working as expected?

Because the station manager AI makes no real distinction between you having 30 traders or 1 trader. It says "Traders, do this".

Odd thing is that the miners don't follow the same rule. I have 10 large mineral miners on the station. Guess how many are mining ore, and how many silicon? 9 Ore, 1 silicon. And ore is about 30% full in the station. So the traders, which should really just sell the stuff that's available, keeps sitting around trying to find silicon. The miners however, seems to be fine with ignoring silicon and are just getting more ore. Its just bad AI, pure and simple.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Blech:

The miners however, seems to be fine with ignoring silicon and are just getting more ore.

That's a bug, it's getting fixed next patch:

https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=436488

And yes, it is affecting your trader situation and yes, it is very annoying.

[Blech]

I found two possible solutions to this dumb dumb AI.
1. Create a distribution hub style station rather close to the station. Create a trade policy to only sell to yourself and set that policy on selling all wares on the original station. Move all the traders to the distribution hub. They will now buy the wares from the original station and sell them on.
2. Setup a number of repeat-order miners to mine silicon.

Still. This should not be needed. The AI is stupid.

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Blech:

I found two possible solutions to this dumb dumb AI.
1. Create a distribution hub style station rather close to the station. Create a trade policy to only sell to yourself and set that policy on selling all wares on the original station. Move all the traders to the distribution hub. They will now buy the wares from the original station and sell them on.
2. Setup a number of repeat-order miners to mine silicon.

Still. This should not be needed. The AI is stupid.

I've been doing this since the start of my fresh 4.0 Terran save. I'm about 9 days in and my traders have suddenly started ferrying less than 30 units around. I'm close to $2b credits with my own warf and shipyard building fleets. My only expense is building new stations at this point.

I've got trade hubs set up every 2-3 sectors apart with 10k+ of each necessary resource. Some resources are close to 200k in reserve.

My trade hubs and my manufacturing hubs all have plenty of traders assigned to them with armies of miners feeding the hub.

Both my manufacturing stations and trade hubs have tens of milllions of credits in the bank and plenty of manager stars to cross the necessary space.

I've tried setting to sell to my faction only via rules as well as setting price to minimum for those faction transactions.

This is what my save has resorted to. This is a problem no trading fleet can fix.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461663095

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

Originally posted by Blech:

I found two possible solutions to this dumb dumb AI.
1. Create a distribution hub style station rather close to the station. Create a trade policy to only sell to yourself and set that policy on selling all wares on the original station. Move all the traders to the distribution hub. They will now buy the wares from the original station and sell them on.
2. Setup a number of repeat-order miners to mine silicon.

Still. This should not be needed. The AI is stupid.

I've been doing this since the start of my fresh 4.0 Terran save. I'm about 9 days in and my traders have suddenly started ferrying less than 30 units around. I'm close to $2b credits with my own warf and shipyard building fleets. My only expense is building new stations at this point.

I've got trade hubs set up every 2-3 sectors apart with 10k+ of each necessary resource. Some resources are close to 200k in reserve.

My trade hubs and my manufacturing hubs all have plenty of traders assigned to them with armies of miners feeding the hub.

Both my manufacturing stations and trade hubs have tens of milllions of credits in the bank and plenty of manager stars to cross the necessary space.

I've tried setting to sell to my faction only via rules as well as setting price to minimum for those faction transactions.

This is what my save has resorted to. This is a problem no trading fleet can fix.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461663095

Quick update to this.

I saved and restarted my game then dropped my station cash to zero from the $10m it had then up to $70m for good measure. I also set all materials on the station to my faction only for buy orders.

The issue has been reduced, but not completely fixed. Only 20% or so of my station buy orders are for less than full cargo when before I was seeing 80% of my buy orders for 10 items or less.

I'm wondering if there was either a random glitch I hit after playing for hour straight or one of the tweaks I did post-reload passed some threshold for the manger.

Either way, it's much better now.

[Akira_R]

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

I've been doing this since the start of my fresh 4.0 Terran save. I'm about 9 days in and my traders have suddenly started ferrying less than 30 units around. I'm close to $2b credits with my own warf and shipyard building fleets. My only expense is building new stations at this point.

I've got trade hubs set up every 2-3 sectors apart with 10k+ of each necessary resource. Some resources are close to 200k in reserve.

My trade hubs and my manufacturing hubs all have plenty of traders assigned to them with armies of miners feeding the hub.

Both my manufacturing stations and trade hubs have tens of milllions of credits in the bank and plenty of manager stars to cross the necessary space.

I've tried setting to sell to my faction only via rules as well as setting price to minimum for those faction transactions.

This is what my save has resorted to. This is a problem no trading fleet can fix.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2461663095

Quick update to this.

I saved and restarted my game then dropped my station cash to zero from the $10m it had then up to $70m for good measure. I also set all materials on the station to my faction only for buy orders.

The issue has been reduced, but not completely fixed. Only 20% or so of my station buy orders are for less than full cargo when before I was seeing 80% of my buy orders for 10 items or less.

I'm wondering if there was either a random glitch I hit after playing for hour straight or one of the tweaks I did post-reload passed some threshold for the manger.

Either way, it's much better now.

Ok so the changes made with 4.0 (intentional or not) has made having miners specifically assigned to a station that requires multiple of the same type of resources (solid or liquid) not work correctly. They will focus on only one resource until it is full before moving to mine a different resource and often will get stuck with full inventories of the first resource. I bet that if you check all of those miners they will have cargo holds full of Ore or Ice and so only have room for a few units of silicon.

It seems like the "best" way to get around this is to try and keep things separated, have a station that only produces things that need ore and another that only produces things that need silicon. Of course this doesn't work for things like computronic substrate which need both. This is where the idea of the mining outpost comes in, set up a station that only has solid and liquid storage and give it buy orders for only 1 solid and 1 liquid resource (restrict it to only your faction) and assign miners to it, you will have to create multiple of these, at least 1 for each of the resources you need. Then you assign mining ships to your production stations as traders. They will now go to your mining stations to pick up the needed resources and bring them back and they will do a fairly competent job of keeping all of the resources stocked. There are obvious drawbacks to this though, it makes you need more stations AND it makes you need more ships, nearly 2 ships for each 1 you had previously as you now need 1 ship to do the actual mining and then 1 ship to move the resources to your production center. (highly recommend the Mules, Supply and Warehouses Extended mod, it makes managing a transportation fleet much more intuitive, once you read up on what the different orders do and how they are used)

In the run up to 4.0 and the weeks after the launch the devs and moderators on here and the EgoSoft forums were continuously talking about "MINING OUTPOSTS!!" and the fact you can assign mining ships as traders and were really pushing this style of gameplay. This suggests to me that either the current issues are INTENDED, they purposefully broke the behaviors of miners assigned to production stations in order to push us towards this style of gameplay because the devs think it's cool but they didn't want to just come out and say that because they were afraid of backlash. OR it is unintended and the result of some fundamental changes they made under the hood and were unable to fix it prior to release and so were pushing this change up in how we play the game basically as a work around to avoid having to fix it (possibly because a fix would require significant alterations to whatever changes that they made and could require a lot more time or will possibly break other things). But that's all just speculation so who knows what's actually going on,

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Akira_R:

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

Quick update to this.

I saved and restarted my game then dropped my station cash to zero from the $10m it had then up to $70m for good measure. I also set all materials on the station to my faction only for buy orders.

The issue has been reduced, but not completely fixed. Only 20% or so of my station buy orders are for less than full cargo when before I was seeing 80% of my buy orders for 10 items or less.

I'm wondering if there was either a random glitch I hit after playing for hour straight or one of the tweaks I did post-reload passed some threshold for the manger.

Either way, it's much better now.

Ok so the changes made with 4.0 (intentional or not) has made having miners specifically assigned to a station that requires multiple of the same type of resources (solid or liquid) not work correctly. They will focus on only one resource until it is full before moving to mine a different resource and often will get stuck with full inventories of the first resource. I bet that if you check all of those miners they will have cargo holds full of Ore or Ice and so only have room for a few units of silicon.

It seems like the "best" way to get around this is to try and keep things separated, have a station that only produces things that need ore and another that only produces things that need silicon. Of course this doesn't work for things like computronic substrate which need both. This is where the idea of the mining outpost comes in, set up a station that only has solid and liquid storage and give it buy orders for only 1 solid and 1 liquid resource (restrict it to only your faction) and assign miners to it, you will have to create multiple of these, at least 1 for each of the resources you need. Then you assign mining ships to your production stations as traders. They will now go to your mining stations to pick up the needed resources and bring them back and they will do a fairly competent job of keeping all of the resources stocked. There are obvious drawbacks to this though, it makes you need more stations AND it makes you need more ships, nearly 2 ships for each 1 you had previously as you now need 1 ship to do the actual mining and then 1 ship to move the resources to your production center. (highly recommend the Mules, Supply and Warehouses Extended mod, it makes managing a transportation fleet much more intuitive, once you read up on what the different orders do and how they are used)

In the run up to 4.0 and the weeks after the launch the devs and moderators on here and the EgoSoft forums were continuously talking about "MINING OUTPOSTS!!" and the fact you can assign mining ships as traders and were really pushing this style of gameplay. This suggests to me that either the current issues are INTENDED, they purposefully broke the behaviors of miners assigned to production stations in order to push us towards this style of gameplay because the devs think it's cool but they didn't want to just come out and say that because they were afraid of backlash. OR it is unintended and the result of some fundamental changes they made under the hood and were unable to fix it prior to release and so were pushing this change up in how we play the game basically as a work around to avoid having to fix it (possibly because a fix would require significant alterations to whatever changes that they made and could require a lot more time or will possibly break other things). But that's all just speculation so who knows what's actually going on,

I would agree with you except the station I screen-shotted has no miners assigned to it at all. All the ships you see there are traders. They're either assigned to the station itself or to one of the other trading outposts within range.

I agree with your summary, and I agree that if this were a scenario where I had assigned a bunch of miners you would be correct. I was not clear in my post that these were all traders, so that's my bad. I should have explicitly stated that fact.

In this particular save I have over 1000 ships. Almost all of them are miners and raw materials traders tied to raw mats stations like you suggested.

I started with them assigned to specific trading outposts to feed my manufacturing stations, but soon ran into the same resource focusing issue you described. I switched MOST of my miners to independent fleets mining specific resources as autominers instead of being bound to a station to get around the issue.

I'd say I've reassigned 80% of my miners are assigned to independent fleets set to automine a given resource in a targeted sector. I have a minimal number of miners assigned to trade hub stations to ensure a minimal intake of raw materials.

I use L + M miners to feed the trade stations 5-10 deep for each resource. 3-5 L traders distribute to the network. Sometimes M traders if I have supply and need the pipeline.

That setup should be optimal for X4 4.0, but it still resulted in my screenshot. I think the limitation was funds in the station itself. Once I changed the funds from $10m to $70m in a station that wanted $377m in operating cost I was good to go.

I tried this in a couple of other stations having the same issue and it checked out. Even though you have millions of funds in a station it doesn't seem to buy max transport loads until you reach a certain magical threshold of station funds.

I have no math to back this up. Simply anecdotal evidence. I'd love to learn the actual mechanics.