[Feedback] Subordinates Manual Ware Basket

[Ketraar]

Info
With 7.00 there is now an option to influence which wares a subordinate should trade. Adding a subordinate to trade for commander, will have the ware basket be defined automatically as before, but players can now go into the ships behaviour menu and manually define which wares this specific ship should take into consideration by unchecking Automatic option. This allows to deselect any ware that the ship should not trade up to one. If more then one ware is selected, the ship will try and find trades based on the defined list. Within that list it will try to prioritise wares that the station deemed critical.

Please have a go at this and share your feedback here. Thanks in advance.

MFG

Ketraar

[Monstrosity]

I have a couple things, not directly related to the ware basket, but for purposes for it.

1) Allow to also change max gate distance. This would allow you to make traders trade items based on distance. Example: Hull parts you want to buy are in the same sector, so you can select Hull parts in the ware basket and reduce max gate minimum so it’s not looking elsewhere.

2) This feature would be great for miner subordinates to further refine demand and prevent storage allocation issues.

[JMCorp]

i could see a use for this, but i would have done this differently. i wouldn't have made it an all or nothing, but used priorities. that way more important wares would be traded first, but the ship could still trade the other wares if the priority wares are taken care of already.

[Monstrosity]

i could see a use for this, but i would have done this differently. i wouldn't have made it an all or nothing, but used priorities. that way more important wares would be traded first, but the ship could still trade the other wares if the priority wares are taken care of already.

That is a good point. Maybe a toggle to allow trading of all wares if selected wares has no trades found?

[donzi]

I like this feature. Regarding it's integration, station manager -> station trade subordinates is specifically what it's benefiting right now, yes?

I can't see it being quite as helpful for station miners, but it would be very useful there also.
Specifically for player to control what ORE a miner ship size is going to mine -- indirectly also allowing what sector they travel to also.

EG: could set fast S/M to mine ore station manager desires that is 5 sectors out.

My testing station has buy and sell orders for many wares (think, self sufficient S/M, L & XL ship sales).

Some wares NPC are eager to come and buy, or sell.. also AFAIK this indirectly via NPC travel to me give the station reach beyond 5 sectors somewhat.

Wares the NPC come to buy, I can use this feature to prevent my ships carting that stuff around.

A mixture of subordinate ship sizes can be tuned somewhat now -- no more EC and other small QTY kind of runs with large ships is possible.

This being a manual, direct way to on/off ware movement by ship is perfectly useful without adding much/any further time cost before the ships get working.

Seems it's purpose is perfectly matched with what it does to me.

[Halpog]

thats a perfekt option to be honest i love it. saves a lot of hedache for station constructions and delivering wares from my station to a new building station

[oddgit]

I have a couple things, not directly related to the ware basket, but for purposes for it.

1) Allow to also change max gate distance. This would allow you to make traders trade items based on distance. Example: Hull parts you want to buy are in the same sector, so you can select Hull parts in the ware basket and reduce max gate minimum so it’s not looking elsewhere.

2) This feature would be great for miner subordinates to further refine demand and prevent storage allocation issues.

I second this! If we now have granular control over the traders, distance to sell and buy would be fantastic!

That being said, so far i like how it is set up! Thank you for all of the hard work!
It will be fantastic to have Large ships haul the larger wares and the M and Ships doing the smaller wares.

[CBJ]

Just to note:

[Beta 5] Added configurable ware baskets for station-based miners (new feature in 7.00).

[Anomie]

This function is very practical, great work!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ff374b7t ... 6phk8&dl=0

1.There needs to be an additional box “select all” when I turn off automatic, sometimes all goods are deselected. I often only want to exclude a few goods from trading with a ship, so I would have to click less.
(Being able to determine something like this for ship classes would be great too and time-saving. e.g. m-traders should only trade goods a, b, c and L-traders should trade the rest that needs a little more space, e.g.)

2.It would also be great to be able to determine the jumps, but this would also be great for the entire station if I could set it up myself. Until now I had to specify this via sector travel rules, Which can be very tedious, I like to play from
scratch and unfortunately the rules are only tied to savegames.

3.For the Overview: Could you mark the goods that are illegal somewhere in this window ? So that we can then more easily determine which ships are allowed to transport them because they have a mod, e.g.

[Immi]

Hi, for me the Ware basket works so far unless I let other traders mimic the station subordinates. In this case the mimicing trader still inherits the tradewares of the station and not from his commander. So, its up to you to decide if this is a bug.

[Halpog]

thats exactly the " basic order stuff" for miners we should have from the beginning of the game. needed a long long time to get it .... this would have preventet so much trouble over the years if we would have been able to tell the miners what to mne or the traders what to trade .
finaly we got it

[Starlight_Corporation]

This has been a great feature for my station miners; Got a few stations that consume alot of ore/silicon, but hardly any ice & the feature allows me to make sure some miners only mine ore/silicon, preventing the ice-mining rush they sometimes get.
No longer need to add extra miners or add more large storages to make sure factories survive a drought on ore/silicon mining because they all went for ice.

[Bastelfred]

Very good, but please expand on it, as it quickly becomes useless. I like to use large quantities of small ships for trading at my stations. What's missing:

1. One should be able to assign trade goods to a group (station subordinates), which will then be transferred to all ships in that group.

2. Groups at stations should be nameable. Fixed names like Alpha, Beta... are detrimental to clarity.

3. More groups per station are needed, the fixed 5 are too few. There should be the ability to assign as many groups as needed.

4. If you're already working on groups, do the same for defense and mining too. For defense, offer attack commands as already available in the game. For mining, offer the same functionality as with trading goods.

5. For trade groups, add an option: "Overload", only available when only one trade good is set. Ships will then always fill their cargo hold completely and only return to their own station when empty. Alternatively, if they are meant to purchase goods, they will stay at their own station as an external buffer and transfer their cargo hold as needed over time. Only leaving to fetch new materials when completely empty.

[sh1pman]

I found a potential issue (oversight?) with the manual ware basket selection. If you only include wares A and B in the basket, and then some other ware C becomes critical, then the station trader will just idle and not make any trades. They won’t buy or sell wares A or B until ware C (which is not in their basket!) stops being critical. This is probably not how it should work.

[CBJ]

Can you provide a savegame showing that situation?

[sh1pman]

Just checked and couldn't reproduce, sorry. Looks like there was some other issue. Switched from L size trader to M size trader, and the problem disappeared.

[Axeface]

This feature is excellent, just wanted to say that. And I dont have any issues with it, not sure i'de want it to be expanded, risks bloating the feature.

[Wultan]

I would like to have the option to make this setting for all retailers in a station.
I often have goods at stations that I want to sell, but that I don't want my ships to trade themselves (e.g. surplus energy cells).

[j.harshaw]

Hi, for me the Ware basket works so far unless I let other traders mimic the station subordinates. In this case the mimicing trader still inherits the tradewares of the station and not from his commander. So, its up to you to decide if this is a bug.

Added. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Should be in a future update.

[Ketraar]

Very good, but please expand on it, as it quickly becomes useless. I like to use large quantities of small ships for trading at my stations.

There are no plans to expand this. Stations should work just in automated state, this is intended for micromanagement. With the mimic issue solved you can use that for large scale assignments if you want, but adding more complexity will just add to clutter and not really help most people.

I often have goods at stations that I want to sell, but that I don't want my ships to trade themselves (e.g. surplus energy cells).

That is what trade rules are for, you create one and exclude your faction (or whatever faction list you want) for trades and set that rule in the sell offer section in LSO for that specific ware. It will exclude anyone listed in that trade rule to trade the ware.

1.There needs to be an additional box “select all” when I turn off automatic, sometimes all goods are deselected. I often only want to exclude a few goods from trading with a ship, so I would have to click less.
(Being able to determine something like this for ship classes would be great too and time-saving. e.g. m-traders should only trade goods a, b, c and L-traders should trade the rest that needs a little more space, e.g.)

2.It would also be great to be able to determine the jumps, but this would also be great for the entire station if I could set it up myself. Until now I had to specify this via sector travel rules, Which can be very tedious, I like to play from
scratch and unfortunately the rules are only tied to savegames.

3.For the Overview: Could you mark the goods that are illegal somewhere in this window ? So that we can then more easily determine which ships are allowed to transport them because they have a mod, e.g.

1. Noted for consideration.
2. Not likely sorry, as you mention blacklists are the way to go for this. The fact that they are savegame exclusive is not a good argument, since ware baskets are also only for the one save game, in fact per station as they differ. What you want is a way to export blacklist, but that is a new feature and not related to this one.
3. Noted for consideration.

Thanks for the feedback.

MFG

Ketraar