Comparison shopping efficiently

[melmoth]

Manually keeping track of prices of various goods, components, skills, services and equipment across the many different bases in the galaxy is very time consuming, and a chore if one has to switch from the game to a spreadsheet, do manual data entry, and switch back for every product.

Is there any way to do this more efficiently, or any plans on the horizon to streamline such price comparisons across many products and services?

Also, once prices start changing, it would be nice to have historical price data and a chart of prices (again, without having to use an external spreadsheet, though an option for CSV or TSV export would be great too).

[momoguru]

build 99 has a few more market tweaks that tighten things up a bit. while working on this, i realized how mice it would be for price tracking. so i am working on that. as for comparison, it can be a bit tricky when stacking items and such. i used th baseprice as the main reference, but if i can figure out a better way, i will definitely spend some time on it.

[Sir_Rooster]

It is impossible in a large sandbox game to track all items. I wish that once you visit a station that my computer remembers what is there.

[momoguru]

check your journal, it does just that.

[melmoth]

That's really nice. I never noticed that was there.

Still, it doesn't show:

- prices

- ships for sale

- mercs for hire

- services, like life support refills

Not every station seems to be listed either... particularly, the smaller, generic stations (like medical stations) seem to be missing.

Also, with so much information, clicking on each station and scrolling through the list to find what you're looking for can take a long time. It would be great if there was some way to search through it for what you're looking for, and maybe see all products/ships/services/mercs in a spreadsheet format, with maybe the items in the items in the columns, stations in the rows, and prices in the intersections of the two... and the ability to sort by lowest/highest prices or something...

Questions that I'd be interested in having answered in the game are ones like:

- where can I get a good deal on a particular item I'm interested in?

- how far away is the place that has it or wants it?

- what's the path I need to take to get there?

- will I need to stop to get a refill of life support on my way there, and how much will it cost?

Answering all those questions is a very labor intensive process right now, and involves keeping one's own spreadsheet outside the game and constantly referring to it and keeping it up to date, and visiting and revisiting lots of stations.

If all that info was at the user's fingertips that would make the whole process much, much faster and easier.

[Sir_Rooster]

Originally posted by momoguru:

check your journal, it does just that.

Well Don't I feel like an idiot. I must of clickec on that pilot window all the time to manage fleets and never paid attention it.

SOOooooo Sorry.

[BigRowdy]

Originally posted by melmoth:

That's really nice. I never noticed that was there.

Still, it doesn't show:

- prices

- ships for sale

- mercs for hire

- services, like life support refills

Not every station seems to be listed either... particularly, the smaller, generic stations (like medical stations) seem to be missing.

Also, with so much information, clicking on each station and scrolling through the list to find what you're looking for can take a long time. It would be great if there was some way to search through it for what you're looking for, and maybe see all products/ships/services/mercs in a spreadsheet format, with maybe the items in the items in the columns, stations in the rows, and prices in the intersections of the two... and the ability to sort by lowest/highest prices or something...

Questions that I'd be interested in having answered in the game are ones like:

- where can I get a good deal on a particular item I'm interested in?

- how far away is the place that has it or wants it?

- what's the path I need to take to get there?

- will I need to stop to get a refill of life support on my way there, and how much will it cost?

Answering all those questions is a very labor intensive process right now, and involves keeping one's own spreadsheet outside the game and constantly referring to it and keeping it up to date, and visiting and revisiting lots of stations.

If all that info was at the user's fingertips that would make the whole process much, much faster and easier.

Yeah it would be more fun to make money trading than mining. I know what you want, A spread sheet in-game t(trade computer) showing prices on the items stations have and show only the systems you have visited. The data is there, so it should be doable, unless the game world is not perpetual and just generates data locally when you enter a system.

[melmoth]

Originally posted by BigRowdy:

Yeah it would be more fun to make money trading than mining. I know what you want, A spread sheet in-game t(trade computer) showing prices on the items stations have and show only the systems you have visited. The data is there, so it should be doable, unless the game world is not perpetual and just generates data locally when you enter a system.

I actually enjoy mining, and love visiting other systems.. without a reason to travel the game wouldn't be nearly as fun. I don't think I would enjoy Astrox if it was merely a trading simulator.. but when trading in the game, it would be more enjoyable if the process was more streamlined and involved less highly repetitive, manual, error-prone tasks.

Then I could just spend a minute or two trading every now and then, and get on with the rest of the game, rather than spend hours and hours manually entering hundreds of items from dozens of star systems in to a spreadsheet and hours more keeping it up to date. Having to travel back to already visited sectors just to do price checks is also less than ideal.

[KarmaShark]

Even a way to filter the Market lists for products on known Buy Orders from other stations (i.e. data in the journal) would be nice. I'd be fine if there was still the risk that the buy order disappeared if you took too long, or the data was too old.

As for general trading, an average price field would make life easier for n00bs like me that don't want to write speadsheets ;-)