[Feedback/Suggestion] Chaining Trade Stations Are Near Impossible

[Monstrosity]

Currently theres no easy way, if nay way even exists, to chain trade stations in order to encompass the galaxy.

BY chain I mean the following design.

1 Sector Contains production. These sell to player owned trade station A. This trade station A sells to AI and other trade station B. This trade station B sells to AI and another trade C station in the chain, etc.

At the moment, there is no easy way to prevent Station A and B just trading wares back and forth, requiring many more traders. You can use a blacklist for station B not to trade with A, but that doesnt stop A from trading back and forth from B since it has to be allowed to trade to supply.

There needs to be more ability to refine station trading. Maybe in the example of designating a chain, maybe in the form of more specific blacklists for buy/sell ware, which would include designating sectors/potentially individual stations.

Multiple ways to do this, but currently it requires way too much effort to achieve this.

[GCU Grey Area]

Can be done if prices are manually set at each station & prices progressively increase with distance from the station at which the products were made. Works best if freighters working for each station are configured in 2 distinct sets. One set of freighters are configured to only trade with player-owned stations (so they have no choice but to sell to the next trade station in the chain where prices are 1cr higher) while the other set are configured to sell to NPC factions within the trade range of each station.

[Koizuki]

You're right that it's a pretty arduous task of trying to restrict trade in a single direction, although I do have an autonomous trade network set up in my game with a slightly different approach, but as you say, it does require quite a few additional traders.
As GCU mentioned, manually overriding the buy/sell price would be a way to force it, but it may have unintended consequences with regard to selling to the NPC's, since you can't have separate pricing for yourself vs. everyone else.

I've got Trade Stations operating in Segaris, Second Contact II, Silent Witness I, Pious Mists II, Heretic's End, and Two Grand, which allows them to reach almost every sector of the galaxy with the exception of the deepest TER and BOR sectors (I plan to eventually add trade stations closer to them to cover those, even though it's not really necessary.) Importantly, these are also within 5 sectors of at least one other trade station. My production stations are elsewhere in Grand Exchange, Pious Mists II, Family Zhin, and Silent Witness XII. All the station traders of my production stations are able to send goods to whichever Trade Station they want within range (they usually have multiple options,) and my trade stations also have traders offloading them to each other, as well as selling to NPC's. Finally, I also have a separate Logistics fleet of freighters doing 'Fill Shortages' but restricted to only my trade stations' sectors.

This doesn't quite allow trade only in one direction like you want, but it does allow my stations to automatically load balance across each other no matter where I'm drawing resources from. Maybe something about my setup may help you with setting up your network in an acceptable way. Trade goods should only flow back and forth between the same two trade stations if they're already roughly equal in amount stored percentage (due to the buy/sell prices reaching equilibrium,) but even then there'd have to be no other goods with better prices to move between the two stations.