Best way to get your stations to sell to one another?

[CitricComet]

So, first time I am building my own wharf and shipyard and they are mostly setup for self-sufficient operation, but the stations themselves cannot seem to completely keep up with demand on a few items. Instead of upgrading both stations for the same 3 or 4 things - I set up a 3rd station to be able to balance the load out for both of them and a trading station to suck up the excess.
But... and I don't really get this: but my stations are not really buying/selling from one another - even though the inventory, demands & costs look like they should and they are literally right next to one another. The station traders are all selling the goods elsewhere without consideration of the stations next to them.

Seems like I need to set the 'extra' goods station up with a rule to:
Only sell to me & mine. (and no others)

But that just seems like a waste. Is there a better way to do this?

[eMYNOCK]

station traders will sell for the best price they find.. and if your shipyard ain't it they will choose other factions.

you can setup a 4th station to act as a trade station that sells excess to the ai and still set the 3rd station to only sell to your own faction.

that would be one way to go about it.

[Gibbo]

Use traders. I use frogs and I have hundreds of them on one station. They will fill any shortages and even fetch you stuff for terraforming which is nice. Now they're S class ships with a small hull, but can make you a very nice profit as well as keeping the X universe ticking over.

I wouldn't try to micro manage a station. A few people on here thought they could do a better job than their station manager. Well they're wrong.

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by Gibbo:

Use traders. I use frogs and I have hundreds of them on one station. They will fill any shortages and even fetch you stuff for terraforming which is nice. Now they're S class ships with a small hull, but can make you a very nice profit as well as keeping the X universe ticking over.

I wouldn't try to micro manage a station. A few people on here thought they could do a better job than their station manager. Well they're wrong.

for some reason i believe i know exactly who you are talking about...
nvm... thanks for your input... and if i catch you one more time calling me boss i will expell you.. (for an hour)

[Deceiver9811]

Repeat orders. The AI works on a list of priorities that takes way too long to stabilize into a consistent loop of functional trade commands, especially if your stations are not all in the same sector.

Originally posted by Gibbo:

I wouldn't try to micro manage a station. A few people on here thought they could do a better job than their station manager. Well they're wrong.

You absolutely can do a better job than your station manager, especially once you start to reach the scale of building your own fleets. AI prioritizes distance far too much, and station managers prioritize filling storage far too much, punishing players who build a lot of storage modules on freshly built stations. I still wouldn't recommend it, because that's boring and not the gameplay loop most people wanted when they bought this game.

That said, I do agree smaller trade ships are actually really useful for supplying stations. Cheaper and easier to buy/build and typically a dock full of Small ships will carry more cargo than a single Medium ship. It's good for supplying cargo that isn't used quickly, but is used by many stations like Food, Medicine and Energy Cells. The miner variants also work quite well when used as station traders to supply raw resources to your stations. In general, I notice the problems with the trade AI aren't as much of a problem when trading Gas or Minerals, probably because of how easy it is to fill Solid/Liquid storage.