Local and common markets

Are these at all beneficial?

or is just trading among the corps in your enterprise a losing proposition?

I've been thinking of setting one up.

Well if you to you then it can be helpful. You can control the exact quality of supplies for your corp. But honestly I wouldn't worry about it. The reason is Trade Strategies seem to be broken. So you can just set the supply quality you want to use with them. But... a big but at that. The quality you would want for your corp will be so low that it'll hard to keep those supply corporations profitable.

I know this because up until 3 days ago I had supply corps for all my profit corps and when i gave up and grabbed the upgrades my value and ranking shot up like no ones buisness.

The best way I believe to use this is certain supplies are very detrimental such as Factory Maintenance Units that cost a lot but do not have a significant difference on Quality of the product. So you can keep that corp losing money to ensure a nice low quality and low cost while saving your corps that eat this supply saving multi-millions to make up t

how is quality calculated?

Is there a way to get high Q everything else and low Q FMUs?

it seems i can only set a blanket request for supply quality

Q is a weighted average of supply Q. Things you use more of have a bigger influence on the avarage.

You can manually supply your corps with any product like FMU at any Q you want. If the corp has several months worth of FMU of low Q then it wont order more at the blanket Q value.

The Weighted Average is based soley on Volume. So a production plant takes 900k tons of stone, and it also uses 10k FMU's (unrealistic I know) let's say everything else combined is 90k. 1%*Q of FMU, 9%*Q of Everything else, 90%* Q of stone. As you can see stone pretty much determines your quality completely. FMU's cost millions for in this example but much less in the game for only a 1% impact. So you goal would then become to take everything power is expensive also and buy cheap low quality of that, you can in fact do that through contract while getting a high enough quality of let's say stone in this example that may cost like 400 to offset the low quality more expensive products. This can be done on a really micro level also. Computers for example cost close to 2k much different then the 2m of FMU's but still substanially higher then Stone. You can do all of these with contracts but as I said previously if