Commodity sales paying wrong value.

[TimothyHills]

Selling a commodity only returns approximately 80% of it's value. Whilst sat in dock buying and selling doesn't return you your purchase price, leaving an equal balance, but leaves you with less money.

[fluffyfreak]

Well yes, that's deliberate. You're selling something to the station that it will then want to sell to someone else for a profit. So it buys it at a lower price than it sells it. Otherwise there would be no profit.

The trick to making money in the game is to buy something from one station at a low price, then travel to another station where it sells for a lot more, and sell it there. Hopefully making a profit.

[TimothyHills]

The expected behaviour is to be able to sit in dock and buy and then sell without making a loss. The price advertised is not being honoured. This is contrary to all other games of the genre that I have played since the days before the IBM clone, that we call the PC.

As for trading in Pioneer. Giles 205, Farming Machinery advertised price of $9.57. Compare to Sol gives us the green light (green text in economic info). Advertised price at Sol is $11.99 but actual sale price is $9.59. A profit of only £0.02 instead of the expected $2.42.

If the actual prices are no being advertised then informed decisions can not be made. With the deliberate 20% sales tax then profitable routes being displayed in the info screen, with the green text, is invalid and non trustworthy.

Bottom line; this deliberate 'feature' is a killjoy for me. Sorry.

[fluffyfreak]

Ah I see the column doesn't show buy/sell only the purchase price. I thought you were just upset about the reduction factor. Ok well that's an easy enough fix. brb.

[fluffyfreak]

I've submitted a PR in #3153 but it'll need a little discussion before it gets merged, if you want to make the change to your own copy then you can.

Open up the file pioneer\data\ui\StationView\CommodityMarket.lua and change the line

stationColumns = { "icon", "name", "price", "stock" },

to read

stationColumns = { "icon", "name", "buy", "sell", "stock" },

and when you run the game it should just work.

Andy

[TimothyHills]

I can now see that there is a 'commission' when selling commodities. But with the example shown of making $0.02 between Giles 205 and Sol with Farm Machinery, one would have to haul 50 units to make a single dollar. Hardly warrants a green light in the Economic info screen, maybe there is a balance issue with the commodities prices, commission amount and Economic info screen green text.

Thanks for looking into this issue for me though, appreciated.

[impaktor]

Maybe six months ago I had a pull request for selling price being 80% of buy price, but I closed it (un-merged) since it makes commodity trading extremely difficult, however, it was implemented for ship equipment, and here it does seem reasonable, since you don't trade ship equipment, and when selling something back it's used and should render a lower price.

This sell and buy price for commodities were/are/should be the same, but then six days ago I fixed a bug with fuel club price not being discounted, and same bug in goods trader: 6fae127031b2f31ee11417a277c58b0c8df415ea.

[impaktor]

Nope, the bug was there prior to 6 days ago. I should stop typing and start reading the code.

[fluffyfreak]

@impaktor not sure how long it's been there, I think it's a reasonably good idea overall, it just needs visibility.

Was thinking of extending it actually so that you get a lower disparity at different worlds, economies, and how populous the system is... that last one as a shorthand measure for economies of scale :)

@TimothyHills no problem, I'm sorry I misunderstood what you were pointing out initially. Now of course you might end up with us extending the feature to deal with that kind of extremely difficult trading scenario!

[TimothyHills]

Have lots of thoughts myself, tis why I'm glad I found Pioneer. Still struggling to do a build with Codeblocks.

When I first thought of the price discrepancy as a Sales Tax, I thought about an Import Tax. Sat in dock buy/sell would make no difference but a proper import and sell would. Manic War Lords would tax loads and Independent worlds, trying to attract trade, wouldn't. Don't know yet if Pioneer has the old Federation and Empire but they would have a moderate import tax to help pay for there war machines.

Anyway, thanks again, looking forward to the fix, itching to get trading.

[fluffyfreak]

If you're on Windows then I usually recommend just using Visual Studio 2013, I keep it up to date. @Luomu did the CodeBlocks stuff but he hasn't been around for a while so it's almost certainly out of date now.

[impaktor]

@fluffyfreak the problem is there will be almost no profit at all with the current 80% re-buy. It eats it all up, so it would need some balancing, and my feeling (although I don't have much personal experience) is that trading in pioneer doesn't pay very well at all compared to other missions.

I would vote to set it back, until we've figured out what we want to do, unless you know how to fix it now.

[fluffyfreak]

Not sure, will have a look.