Materials Purchasing doesn't seem to follow orders. (Little Upsilon)

Hi,

I am sure this is a problem most new folks have had, but I looked through this BB and didn't see it answered, so forgive me if I am hashing through an old issue, and feel free to point me to where the answer(s) has(ve) been exhaustively discussed.

I have set my Raw Materials purchase qualitites for new corps to 100.

I have manually set the older corps from 100 to 160, but none higher than 160.

For some reason corps continually buy large amounts of very overquality, very overpriced, materials that make it unprofitable to produce and sell.

I have tried manually purchasing supplies, but the corps still seem to buy more materials at inflated prices. Some have now reached a point where the corp will not stock any more materials, so I can't average down the quality/cost (assuming that works, and the corps use the avg. qual/cost in calcing RM usage).

I do use common market

Hmmm... with your common market contracts, what do you mean about "being continually supplied with the right contract priced materials?"

Contracts will buy whatever quality the supplying corporation is selling at Best Price. If your supply corp is selling quality 250 stuff, the purchasing corp will buy the quality 250 materials for 250% of market price. Neither trade strategies nor supply quality settings are used for contracts. I suspect this is where your problem is.

I'll try cancelling the common market contracts.

Is the price listed in the contract then not the sale price, but the base price, and then multiplied by the selling corps quality upgrade?