Why doesnt the Advent have a refinery?

The advent are actually better than the other factions. Their trade ports can be used as refineries, and switched back and forth whenever the whim takes you.

Yeah, Advent are so good they dont even need the benefit of getting both extra cash and ressources.

Wait? How do you change between hard cash and metal/crystals?

Further down the tech try from trade depots, there is an ability to switch your depots back and forth from trade to refineries.

I had the same problem till i read the manual and it mentioned that aspect of the advent trade centers. I actually dont use too many refineries anyway, but if i was smart i would.

if you switch your trade depot to 'refinery' mode - does it stop all trade traffic for the system? i.e. can you have two trade depots with different settings.

Yes, each depot can be set independently.

Best of all, you can use the Advent trade depots on only your Ice or Volcanic planets, so as to collect extra crystal or metal when you need it at the absolutely minimum cost in lost trade. The other races have to permanently commit those logistics slots to the refinery.

The disadvantage the Advent suffer is that they cannot use resources from asteroid belts. When the trade depot is functioning as a refinery it doesn't send ships outside the gravity well.

How much of a bonus is it? I tried this in a game against an easy Comp to just experiment around with the game and when I switched the trade ports to boost crystal/metal in the sector, it was only a small .2 or .3 bonus. Is that amount correct or does it maybe ramp up and I just didn't notice or something else I'm missing?

Each trade station works just like a refinery except that it does not send ships to asteroids outside the local gravity well. The benefit is approximately 0.21 per asteroid with no research bonuses, which is another reason why I prefer to use refinery mode on Ice planets when short of crystal and Volcanic planets when short of metal.

Asteroids can support between two and four refineries, and the same limits apply to the Advent trade stations. If you need more resources you should check and see if there is room for another trade station at an Ice or Volcanic planet.

It depends on how many of the techs you've researched.

And don't underestimate how much extra crystal or metal a 0.2 bonus per extractor adds up to over a couple of hours.

your not so bright are ya? 2 ports, 1 for cash 1 for resources

Nice gratuitous insult. But if you actually read my post, you'd see that I never said you could only have one port. We won't even go into the painful irony part.