managers refusing to buy food and medicine

[DrwHem]

Ive never had much confidence in X4s station managers. they tend to sit around with a lot of idle ship and i have to manually keep things stocked. I thought i finally got a hold of this BS but i just noticed that my workforce went from 8000 down to 1000 because the stupid manager refused to go buy food.
I have a buy order on to continually keep foodstocks at 85% or better, same with the medicine.
For whatever reason, My manager has 4 idle ships and almost no food. HOW CAN I GET THIS STUPID SYSTEM TO WORK?
there is a food factory IN OUR SECTOR that always has 25k+ food available but if i leave the managers to it, they never buy food. WHY!?

[Wraith]

Never had to much problems with distributions

I tend to set up these 3 thing when I get warehouses going

1 traders subordinates is a given for the warehouses

2 manual buy and sell amount

3 dedicated mimic distribute wares fleet

Distribute wares fleets have trade rules applies to them to only trade with my faction.

Don’t look down on a good fleet of distribute wares because they are designed to fill up their cargo and then dump it regardless of profit which when used in internal trading make great resource movers

[MOK]

oh snap that does sound good.
And if they ignore profit, then I can keep my market station's pricing high, instead of using automatic.
Can you describe this distribution fleet a bit more? I haven't tried this, but will do so.

But backing up. So if you had a linked distribution network of warehouses, where product had to leave the supplier, hit one warehouse, and then another warehouse pulls from the prior warehouse, you never saw their pulls stall out or anything?
Because(again this is separate from the medical supplies thing) I've been seeing a whole lot of that in mine. I can't imagine what would be getting in the way. But maybe there's a possibility that there's a relationship with the OP's issue. just a shot in the dark tho.

[blackphoenixx]

Distribute wares is fantastic. Easy to use too. Just go into the behavior tab, choose "distribute wares" as a default behavior, select the wares they should trade and then add a trade restriction blacklist to only trade with your own faction.
I recommend limiting them to only one or two wares each, it's far more reliable than having a huge fleet where every ship trades everything.

Then if you need more for a specific ware you can just add more traders with mimic commander without having to fiddle with all the behavior configuration.

They'll deliver pretty much everywhere (except Xenon sectors if you have civilian ships banned from those, which i recommend), even to supply ships.
Makes using missiles a lot more comfortable.

As for distribution networks that's how i run my production chains and it works fine.
I basically assign every station 2-4 M traders, limit them to only buy and sell to my faction and set the buy amounts manually, the rest i usually leave on automatic and things work out fine.
A few distribute wares traders for stuff like energy cells, hull parts, metallic microlattice and so on fill any shortages and a bunch of autotraders sell excess to the NPCs.

I check a new stations inventory after an hour or so and if it runs out of resources i look where the problem is - if the supplier has the resources the receiving station gets 1 or 2 more trade ships, if the supplier is empty i add more production modules of whatever it produces (though i do the math before building so it usually works out).

After that i periodically check what the assigned ships are doing. Just opening up the tab and glancing over the icons. If they're all busy check the station inventory to see if you need more trade ships. If many ships are idle check if the stations inventory is empty - in which case you build more - or if the market is just saturated (just set a trade filter for whatever you're producing and look if there's any big buyers in range).

[Sel Und Irae]

Its not a bug its a feature
Your manager has grown complacent and needs to be removed before he squanders all your precious resources.

All honesty, Try formating the command for that specific location and writing them all manually again. It sounds dumb but it has worked for me many times in forcing the game to correct itself.

[MOK]

Oh FFS.

[DrwHem]

yea...i already have a few ships that are not assigned. im not moving 18 ships from the assigned area to clutter up my map. ill let egosoft work this out if they want more of my money lol. this ♥♥♥♥ worked FINE in x3 over a decade ago so IDK what they broke.

[BurlsoL]

DrwHem님이 먼저 게시:

heres a lovely example of how stupid the station management AI is.
You can see that we are using 6 freighters to pick up under 1000 microchips from one of my factories. just ONE of those freighters can carry around 2000 microchips. the shipyard is pretty much out of microchips, so why is the station manager ordering small batches with multiple ships and not 1 or 2 max cargo loads?

https://ibb.co/Strdgqd

Short answer is "prices". If the manager needs 5000 of something, but doing 5000 in one go would make the price higher than their current buy threshold, they will only buy as much as that threshold allows in a single go. Meanwhile as local storage fills up, their buy threshold will decrease.

You can fix this in a few ways.

If money isn't much of an issue, you can just manually set the buy price to maximum or near maximum at your station until you have a decent stockpile.

Having more storage locally can also normalize buy price slightly as the ware remains in higher demand longer.

Assigning a few small freighters to handle the milk runs will free up larger ships for bulk runs.

If trading between stations you own, try to have production rate to be higher than what a single cargo ship can pick up, and set the sell price to minimum.


The small freighters solution tends to be the longest lasting since they also have less down-time and usually don't need to wait on docking.

[DrwHem]

well im "buying" these microchips form my own factory. the sell price is manually set to the minimum and the buy price is manually set to the maximum. there should be no issue.
the ONLY thing i buy from outside is food and medicine.

[BurlsoL]

DrwHem님이 먼저 게시:

well im "buying" these microchips form my own factory. the sell price is manually set to the minimum and the buy price is manually set to the maximum. there should be no issue.
the ONLY thing i buy from outside is food and medicine.

Still might be something with the prices or station storage. There's some kind of threshold where 80 mircochips is flipping the logic on either the supply or demand side of things.

[Gregorovitch]

MOK님이 먼저 게시:

In your runs at distribution networks, did you ever run into problems? Where the distribution wasn't happening?

Initially, like years a go, I had difficulties getting internal distribution to work but for at least 750 hours of play no, it works fine or if it doesn't in a specific case I can now track down and fix the reason why. I just use station traders set to my faction only.

Internal distribution of wares in a decentralised set up is a ducks in a row problem. Several things need to be set up correctly to get it to work how you want it to. If one thing is not set right it stops working. The majority of glitches occur on account of mistakes with price gradients, gate ranges, trade rules and storage allocation levels. Once you figure how these things work, what effect they have on trade deals, it becomes easier and easier to set internal distribution up until it becomes second nature.

[Bozz 💀]

in my recent experiance it works better when one of your stations is selling the medical stuff and food with his own ships, I had a self sufficient complex feeding my terran stations and I never had any issues with food shortages, just selling to my own stations, it did take a while for the ships to start delivering.

[MOK]

Thanks for the feedback.

Well then, my first impression is that I don't hear any clues that could link the original post's problem with the thought experiment on trade behavior(via spread out distribution warehouse network). Played a few more hours, mainly monitoring stocks, storage, internal trade, and the original poster's described issue, which I inconsistently share.

Redundant storage exists.
Buy and sell allocations and prices check out.
Global rules/bans are appropriate.
Redundant transport exists of all 3 sizes.
Station funds filled.
Demand is present(sometimes extreme).
Orders in range.

The only thing that gives me pause is @Gregorovitch's comment with regard to "price gradients," which I don't know how to interpret. In the thought experiment(and the OP), I had dismissed price nuances to be a relevant factor. As stated many times, all buys are custom max price, all sells are custom min price. But your wording makes me wonder if there's any relevance to the precise prices used in between the minimum and maximum? Or am I interpreting this wrong?

[Gregorovitch]

MOK님이 먼저 게시:

all buys are custom max price, all sells are custom min price. But your wording makes me wonder if there's any relevance to the precise prices used in between the minimum and maximum?

No, that's a brute force setting that guarantees a sufficient price gradient.

I use the term price gradient to to refer to for example a situation where you want to ship wares across a great distance and you can do that using dedicated trade stations spaced out between supplier and consumer so long as you get the price gradients right across each step.

What I do is set sell price to min but leave buy prices on auto. Principle being squeaky wheel get's the oil (highest offer price being the squeakiest wheel).

BTW, what exactly do you mean by "warehouse" and what are you trying to achieve with it?

[BurlsoL]

MOK님이 먼저 게시:

First, and I know this sounds silly, but make sure the traders are set to "trade for station" and not setup to trade for build storage. It's easy to set this accidentally or just forget to transition ships that were assigned while it was still building.

Are your trade ships just sitting there idle, or are they grabbing other things. If production wares are still in reasonably high demand, these can be taking priority.

The other thing you can try is to manually setup a delivery of food and medicine and see if that changes behavior. Normally this would happen if you have a station with its own traders setup to sell those wares, but sometimes you need to give things a kick in the pants.

[MOK]

Thank you for the tips BurlsoL. I'd hoped that the depth we were talking about here would bring us past the basic assumptions. But none of the ships are assigned to incorrect roles, in my case.

As for the what the ships do, it's inconsistent, and the problem location changes. Sometimes I see a large station and its 10-15 transports idle. Occasionally I'll see one of them come to life, but it trades a tertiary input/output, rather than the primary stock/demand. However I see it happen the most often(seemingly) with Food & Meds.

For example, right now I'm staring at one station that's caught the bug more recently, where it's Water storage has maxed out, and most of the production modules and input stocks have been filled or become inactive. Two gates away, a huge water demand exists. The would-be-receiving station is taking water from elsewhere, in the meantime. In prior hours, I've seen these two stations trading water successfully, but not anymore. Other than water, the problem station has a few other secondary demands that could get filled by it's assigned traders. But I'm only seeing them occasionally trade one item.

I've done some manual trades today but haven't noticed it kick the station into gear. I'm not certain whether this has or hasn't worked in the past.
Based on prior experience, it'll begin working again eventually. Perhaps when I quit the game and reload. But something elsewhere will catch the bug and mimic this behavior.

Unfortunately, now that I'm noticing the new 5.0b2 storage bug(described by someone in a different thread), this introduces another variable that makes it troublesome to test the problem.

Gregorovitch님이 먼저 게시:

BTW, what exactly do you mean by "warehouse" and what are you trying to achieve with it?

I see what you mean with the different prices. This is pretty good, and I could def use this.

What I mean by warehouse is, for example, I'll plug down a station with lots of storage and transports. It buys and sells only to me on most processed/advanced items. This warehouse is 2 or 3 jumps from my 'real' market hub. But two jumps out further is a second shipyard I've built.

The goal is for my centralized production to propagate surplus of all product to
1) my local market hub, which propagates its' surplus to...
2) the distribution warehouse, which in turn can service...
3) my second wharf, and a couple random production stations, which are too far away from my primary economy.

Ultimately, I'm seeing inconsistent behavior on what the AI chooses to push and pull within this system, leaving blatant gaps. But bare in mind, the only reason I had brought this distribution process up previously was to see if it could shed light on the problem the OP originally described. And the problems within this different topic I suspect is unfortunately a tangent.