Old innocent exploit. Servers should have the ability to stop ez trading now. Cool idea to trade between shops as a happy merchant, but just too easy with jump drives.
http://bugs.star-made.org/issues/1613
Trade between AI shops is mostly nerfed. There is a way for player shops to be set up to create trade jobs while still profiting the shop owner, but there aren't many traders out there. Of course the best use use for resources is crafting them yourself, but I've noticed a percentage of players seem to dislike using factories.
AI shops typically pay c1 for raw mineral (i.e. Dolom), and c30 for the carved versions of the same minerals. So if a player with a station housing a decent enhanced factory sets their shop to pay c2 for the raw mineral, and c15 (for example) for the carved mineral it creates excellent trade potential.
First, any miner with no game experience can swing by the player station and easily earn double or triple on dumping minerals (this is even more appealing if the shop is also offering to buy ore and crystal above market - say c110-c120).
Second, any trader with no experience can swing by and buy carved mineral for c15 (more or less), jump off and sell it for double. So for the effort of taking raw mineral, dumping it in a 5K/cycle factory, then giving it back to the shop the shop owner makes 700%, the miner makes 200%, and the trader makes 200%. And prices can be adjusted to better reward miners and traders for visiting your shop. This technique applies to other raw/refined combinations as well, but raw/carved mineral is a simplest example.
Third, pricing refined goods substantially below what the AI shops pay to encourage trading as another advantage even in a larger faction that mostly crafts its own goods. Defense stations get blown up and you can never craft enough shield caps, so credit income is always necessary. But with 2-3 active miners it only takes a few days to a week to saturate every shop within a single jump so that selling carved minerals and refined goods becomes a more tedious task. Same for hunting around shopping for more shield caps. A trader can make a lot of money selling players raw resources & shield caps, while buying player refined goods and reselling those to shops. Thats two-way profit. The profit potential with just 2-3 player shops running this way is even better than mining, and it provides a useful service - offloading craft goods for credits even when you have to make 10 jumps to find enough shops to sell it all.
All this works with shops
as they are, but hinges on players learning how to set up shops in the first place - which is not an intuitive process currently. Because just placing a shop and dumping goods and money into it without going through and re-pricing every single item the shop carries is going to simply buy shop owners tens of millions of random blocks from whoever wants to dump them on you (Threns Ingots & flower, anyone??). It also pre-supposes the shop owners knowing ahead of time that they can't set the buy/sell prices to stay different, and instead focus on buying raw resources above market and selling refined goods below market while still preserving a margin of profit.
