It's also unnecessarily clunky in some places. I managed to build my first production station which is a pretty simple one. It takes ore and energy cells to produce metal. However, I had to watch videos again on how to set it up to find out, that you can create various rules, how you ships, managers and stations should behave. So, with ath I managed to set it up now in a way, that my miners mine in the sector where the station is, no ore from other sources gets bought, energy cells are only sold when there's a certain amount of them around and my trade ships sell the metal, but don't sell the energy cells.
I just feel all that is just so unnecessary, because you basically have a manager running the station and you can't just directly tell him what to do. You have to do it with a various rules. And it all gets even messier when you have the AI misbehaving. I have built the station in a sector where there's quite a lot of ore according to my resource probes. But that didn't seem good enough for the station manager, because he decided to send my miners into the next sector where there's much less ore. Apparently that didn't bother him. So, I had to do forbid my miners to go into any other sector except the one where the station is in. Now, it works. Same for the trading ships. I basically wanted them to sell the final product, i.e. the metal, but of course that's not what they did. They just kept selling energy cells which don't make as much money and which I'm already selling from the headquarter. So, again I had to make a rule that prevents my station from selling the energy cells to my traders. I'm fine with selling the excess energy cells, but only if other traders come and get them. That works now. At the same time, I had to do another rule saying only sell to my ships, so the metal is distributed by my ships and can't be bought by other traders from the station. It just all feels so backward. It would just be so much easier to be able to tell my ships and stations what to do instead of making five million rules to get what I want. The whole stuff with the rules and the AI managing things might come in handy later when you have far more ships and stations, because it does give you quite a lot of options once you get the whole concept. I'm just not sure, whether it has to be so complicated...