Mustacheion

I am trying to establish a fairly complex automated trade route, and have become rather annoyed at how each command blocks until it can be fully fulfilled. For example, if I don't have enough money to buy the specified quantity of a good, the ship just waits instead of moving on. Likewise, if there aren't enough goods to buy, the ship waits until there are. To me it makes sense to attempt to fulfill each command, but then move on to the next one in the chain. i.e. buy as much of a good as you can, then move on to the next stop, instead of waiting around forever. Do other players like this blocking behavior? Or is this done for balance? Seems to me like it makes it way harder to set up trade routes, as you have to be so precise, which in turn forces you to be much more conservative with the quantity of good you move.

I am building a bunch of factories in a sector, and I want to have a small fleet of guard ships to protect them so I don't have to be bothered every couple of minutes when pirates attack. I have built a prototype guard ship, have it all crewed and armed and it technically works but very very poorly. It will move to and fire upon enemies but the captain is extremely inefficient. If I jump into the ship and control it myself it has plenty of firepower and shields to clear out a typical size pirate attack. But when the ship is under AI control it is constantly trying to turn around and around, spending very little time facing the enemy and very little time allowing the turrets to fire. The problem is that the captain seems way too preoccupied with trying to evade enemy fire and trying to keep at an exact range from the target and spends very little time actually firing. Does anybody have any experience and suggestions about designing and using ships in this way? I just need the damn thing to stop turning so much. My craft is pretty blocky. It has turrets mounted on the front, top, bottom, left, and right all of which face forward. I do have three different type of turret, although I picked them so they have pretty similar range and use type.

Been playing this game a ton in the past few days, and am enjoying it quite a bit. I have a few other thoughts about things that could be done to improve the trading system: 1) It would be great if we had a search tool for the galaxy map. When you have done a ton of exploring it can be really tedious to mouse over hundreds of systems looking for a specific factory type. The ability to add a note to a system in the galaxy map is a really cool feature, but I find it a little hard to use. Being able to search for words in notes might make it more useful / easy to use. 2) It would be nice if, at a sufficiently high quality/rarity the trading computer upgrade module would also record the number of units that the buyer is willing to buy. Sometimes it will identify a trading route for a good that the buyer will only buy a small quantity of, and if the buyer is in another sector it can be really tedious warping to that sector to check and see how many units you need to move. This should only be available at a really high quality. 3) In a similar vein to the two above suggestions, it would be great if we had an easy way to store the information on what a trading post is willing to buy/sell. I have found myself making notes in a text editor recording trading posts that sell useful and rare goods like turret parts, which works fine but is a bit tedious. Since the trading computer upgrade module already has quite a lot of features, I would propose adding a new upgrade module: a galactic database module. If this module is present in your ship, when you enter a sector it will poll the structures in the sector and record various information into a searchable database. Higher rarities of module would store more types of information. Types of information the database can store could include: what goods a trading post buys/sells, average trading ratio of a structure, actual good prices the last time the sector was visited, total number of good a structure will buy/sell, actual quantity of good present in a structure last time the sector was visited. If you upgrade the quality of your database module you will need to go back to previously explored systems to record whatever new type of information that quality allows you to record. Perhaps rarity could also affect the total size of your database: at some point you might need to delete systems that you don't find useful to make room.

Just wanted to post my experience. I spent probably 30 hours playing, mostly trading, and made about 3,000,000 credits in that time. Pretty fun. But then, while exploring, I found an amazing intra-sector trade: a trading post selling body armor for cheap, and a military outpost buying them for a lot, within only about 20 km. I maxed out the trade route, turned my 3 million into 55 million credits in about 20 mins of work. Seems a little too powerful to me. I would recommend writing some logic into the world gen to try to prevent any intra-sector trade routes, or at least something to make sure they are not so lucrative. I am concerned that getting so much money so fast will mess up my progression.