Trading over-nerfed?

[Altissimus]

I got myself a Legendary trading system at a research station, so decided to do a bit of trading. It has a 12 system memory.

 

Running around in a Trinium/Xanion ship, though currently in the mid-map area (200-250 from core).

 

Spent some time trying to trade.

 

- Stations have very few resources for sale when the price is good, or

- Stations have little capacity to buy!

 

Latter point means you have to go and check how much capacity there is to buy your goods before you buy from the seller, in case you're left with stuff you can't shift.

 

Basically, all the best trades I can find cap out at about 300-500k profit. Given that my crew gets paid about 700k, this is not helping too much.

 

I've got about 5m in cash. I watch you-tube videos of players (before trading nerfs) sitting on 500m in cash. The problem is that you need that kind of money in order to start laying down stations in a system and working towards crafting your own turrets etc. With this current "cap" on trading, not being able to find something over the ~500k mark, the grind is SO BIG that it isn't actually worth it. It's actually quicker to just put on a bunch of hyperspace range finders and a decent c43 and go and find unclaimed asteroids.

 

- The trading system REALLY needs to show how much stock is at buyer/seller.

- More stock needs to be available, especially closer to the core

- Trading is just too grindy at the moment, and all your profit is gone in crew payments, which means it's not even practical

- We DO need lots of money in order to craft stations/systems.

 

Thoughts?

 

Cheers,

A

[snacker]

Thoughts?

 

Trading has issues but since the latest beta has out of sector production it should be fairly trivial to fix the other problems with trading in the future.

 

In the mean time there is a simple fix to make trading more manageable but it requires one thinking about the problem a little differently. I had the same issues you had but have turned to mods for help. I use the out of sector production mod and all production chains mod, both can be found in the mods sub-forum. The first one is self explanatory and the second adds in the missing resources to the game via a coal mine, a oil mine, and a diamond mine or factory, the game will add those to undiscovered sectors randomly if you don't want to set up your own stations.

 

The reason I had problems with trading at first was because I did not look at the system as a whole but simply traded what was close/profitable. Once I started looking at the system as a whole money was no longer a issue, I now have a 10 slot trading ship with a 400K crew that sits around doing nothing 90% of the time but in that other 10% it brings in enough cash to keep my little empire going. I use a large ship not only for the cargo capacity but also to use the slots to maximise the jump range and keep the warp timeout low.

 

What I did was find a product produced by one of the high-tech factories that actually sells, drills for example, which can be sold to mines. The reason for choosing a high-tech factory is due to the number of steps it takes to create the end result. With a massive number of steps needed to make a product it is far harder to exhaust the capacity of the system as a whole and since each step results in a profit it is less important how large the profit is in each step. If you only buy when a factory/station is at full capacity and only sell to a station or factory when it has no stock then you also maximise your profit. Here it helps to have at least one station with some cargo capacity in a handily situated system. Every X playing sessions I spend one session simply making sure all the stations in the supply chain are fully stocked. I am certainly not making 500K+ on each trade but I make a lot more this way than just jumping around claiming asteroids. In fact I am almost too embarrassed to put a precise number on it other than to say that it should be more than sufficient for anyone's needs.

[Dan the Brickman]

build cheap water mines and battery (power cell) stations to start with. Everywhere needs water and batteries. Build the stations mostly out of stone, with say around 2k cargo space. now build 5 of those, and just pick up all the stuff produced, and with some good jump modules you can zip around and sell them all off, come back and pick up more to sell real fast. Once you get 5 or 6 stations up, they are each producing items each tick, so your rate of production goes way up.

 

this is a good way to get massive quantity of items to sell, and common items to sell, while they may not make AS MUCH individually as the fancy tech gear, they are so commonly needed you make profits en masse.

 

 

[Fox]

Agreed for Power Cells, never tried Water tho... but ya know:

 

"Quantity has its own quality!"

 

[Styrr]

In my game, and what I read in the forums this generalizes, all the higher tier production stations are empty. The only possible way to make profit is buying goods from the initial production tier (like energy cells, gold, etc.) and sell those.

I find it really frustrating that way. On the other hand in the previous versions' trading, when the factory stations were not all empty, you could make a fortune at an instant which also makes it boring.

I guess there needs to be some fixing in the balancing. I guess that is not yet the focus of the development as it feels very very early alpha on all ends.

 

Also there is an inherent issue with the current ship building system that makes trading problematic: The freedom of getting a huge cargo space very early on without investing much. So if you would find one great trade opportunity you just build a large cargo vessel, do your trade and are rich (which is currently not possible as there are no good trades at all, with all high tier stations at 0).

In other games you have to do this stepwise. Have small cargo ship. Do some trades. Invest in a ship with bigger cargo hold...

 

I don't have an idea how to fix this, but it will not be an easy task I assume. Looking forward to see how this is solved (I hope it will be, though we can't be sure)

[Hammelpilaw]

In my game, and what I read in the forums this generalizes, all the higher tier production stations are empty. The only possible way to make profit is buying goods from the initial production tier (like energy cells, gold, etc.) and sell those.

I find it really frustrating that way. On the other hand in the previous versions' trading, when the factory stations were not all empty, you could make a fortune at an instant which also makes it boring.

I guess there needs to be some fixing in the balancing. I guess that is not yet the focus of the development as it feels very very early alpha on all ends.

 

I agree, if you play vanilla. With some modding this can be solved (offtopic here, I know, but lets talk about its functions).

 

http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1322.0.html

 

This mod also makes all npc stations working, it does not matter if the sector is active or not. Imo we need this in vanilla game. No need to keep all sectors active, just calculate missing production everytime, a sector is getting active. It makes trading much more interesting.

[AndyofBorg]

I posted a new thread in the wrong forum.. I'm a new player, and trading is no fun at all. It's like the universe has been picked dry and I'm getting scraps at best. No fun at all.