The power of trading

[rooban]

Hello all,

I have been playing STO for a while now and I love it :)
I am about to reach lvl 32 (long treasure hunts, yumm) and in the process of clearing out sector 9 on my island. I have a decent economy with most of the buildings bunched up nicely around storehouses (Thanks SageSmurf, your Efficient building placement tutorials really helped!) etc.
But as most of us if not all, I regularly have a surplus of some resources or lack of others. So, naturally I trade. That made me thinking, if I can trade, should I really be 100% self sufficient? Can I produce certain goods and then trade them for what I need?
The answer is not that simple. Of course you can, but you have to be very careful in planning your operations. Here are some questions that I had to answer:
- The goods you will be selling - are they desired? You can produce 1 million water every day, but will there be enough demand? And if there is, will it be profitable for you to sell at the exchange rate the market offers?
- The goods you will be purchasing - are they available? You can plan to buy 10 thousand steel swords but if there is not enough supply, you will either miss your target or be forced into spending a fortune.
- And perhaps the most important of them all - can I achieve more by trading than producing everything myself?

Only after I got positive answers to all the three of these questions I started planning the next move.


This will be as an introduction to the topic :) In the future I plan to post numbers and general directions on how to increase your income via trading.

Thanks,
Mark

[RuneMunki]

From my observation I'd say that some of the "basic" items are good to trade. Bread and coal are two that are needed by the boat load and people are quite prepared to trade higher level items for them. In fact I'd be prepared to bet that you could trade for everything using bread alone...

My personal thoughts on your points:
1) Profitability is relative. If by trading you gain a commodity you need at the cost of a commodity you have in excess then it is profitable.
2) Mid-range items (all the 'advanced' items) tend to have the greatest availability. Low-end is not far after and the high-end are generally scarce. High-end needs tend to be situational, so you're better off trading the iron and coal to make the steel and then swords rather than trading for them.
3) If you're on at the right times then yes. It all depends upon the population of the server, time of day, popularity of the game etc.

[rooban]

Hi RuneMunki,
Thanks for your input. Relativity of profilability is also questionable. For instance, yesterday in the evening I put up 1 coin for 400 wood just for the fun of it. And I was surprised after getting 3 offers for it! Immediately I sold 800 wood for 3 and 5 coins respectively so I basically ended up with 400 wood and 5 coins within 15 minutes.
So if you get a good deal you can always trade back and still be on the + side. As for the most traded commodity it seems to be the gold coins. You can get almost anything for them (of course, it depends on the price).

As for low-level goods vs high level goods, I haven't yet done a full comparison table and I will, but some items seem to take quite a lot of ingredients to make so selling them could theoretically hinder your profit. As an example, we can take the steel sword which takes 16 iron ore and 52 coal to make. Not to mention, you need to use up at least 5 licenses to have steel sword production going. And actually even more to keep the production chain rolling. And it takes 24+ minutes to make just one sword. On the other hand, you need to be constantly online and trading to maximize the profits. So it's a two-edged sword, which is good. Were there an ideal strategy, everyone would pursue it.

[JonSnowsHalfBro]

Was this supposed to be a guide? Pity...

I like you Rooban:) I picture you as a second hand car salesman in real life:D

[CrazyBat]

Lol, alrighty then