Automated Trade

Stellaris version supported: v2.1.*

Introduces automated trade ships which your planets and offworld trading companies will build of their own initiative. A galaxy-wide trading company will manage these trade ships as a neutral party so they can trade honestly with friendly planets and starbases with trading hubs.

When they reach a planet/trading hub they will pay value-added tax in the form of minerals, energy or influence as well as some form of research to the owner of the planet/trading hub depending on the type of trade ship. If the owner of the planet/trading hub is not the original owner of the trade ship they will temporarily increase their opinion of the owner of the trade ship because of the received tax.

Trade ships are managed by the Dox Trading Company. This company will never allow anybody to become hostile to them because it's bad for business! Destroying a trade ship will have no effect on the trading company/country or on the other trade ships. They will just accept their loss and continue with trading.

Trade ships will destroy themselves after 5 years. The planet from which the trade ship originated will be able to build another trade ship at the same time. More pops will result in a higher chance of new trade ships appearing at that planet. The capital planet has a higher chance as well.

The ships that are deployed by the planets and offworld trading companies of your country will have been equipped with the latest components you have researched. This may include components from other mods. The models come from the base game and were made by Paradox.

Automated Trade policy settings are available which allow you to disable the spawning of the automated trade ships or select a maxmimum amount of trading ships. A limit of 100 automated trade ships is the default setting. When set to 'disabled' a trade ship will be destroyed after it finishes its current objective.

Should be compatible with any other mod out there. Only exceptions are those that change the Vanilla components intensively. Fully compatible with Downscaled Ships.

When used with existing savegames it will throw some errors until the auto-generated designs of the countries are updated (triggered through regenerating automatic designs in the ship designer for players or when a appropiate technology has been researched for the AI).

If you disable the mod through the game launcher all trade ships will have been removed when you load an existing savegame, but some artifacts will be left behind: a country in your list with contacts that doesn't actually exist and some invalid models in your ship designer from which you can delete all but one. Both of these bugs should have been removed by the cleaning of the savegame when it could not find the corresponding data, but are not.

To continue playing with an existing savegame without these bugs it will be necessary so disable the automated trade through the policy settings while keeping the mod enabled in the game launcher.

• The trade ships are primarily cosmetic. The resources they provide are negligible though they can provide a small timely boost while you are waiting for next months resources.
  
• At least a second planet or a starbase with a trading hub module is needed before an automated trade ship appears.
  
• Trade ships will first visit the starbase to pass through customs before visiting the planet of a system. This wasn't the case before but Paradox seems to have decided that moving to a system means actually travelling to the star itself instead of entering the system in Stellaris 2.0.
  
• The ship models come from the base game and are the same as used by ISB Living Systems and Civilian Trade.
  
• Pirates and monsters will attack the trade ships.
  
• Countries with the Devouring Swarms civic will not spawn trade ships.
  
• Based on the implementation of the trade ships from Novio Magnum.
  
• Military Ships Extended contains name lists for this mod.
  
• Not achievement compatible.