This game I enjoy but how do you get ahead?

[Red Leaf]

For someone who has played for I don't know a month, how do you get ahead when most people have tier 4/5 HQ already so that there sale price for an item is low. I often find that I can't make profit cause the CX posting price is below what I can sell for.

How many times have you gone to restart your game until your in a place where your stable?

[Meat]

Well, this game has two major problems. What you described, and lack of any sort of meaningful endgame. Unless you get into a corporation and cooperate, you're in a really bad spot. Try to get into a corp, otherwise... well.

[Grandpa Canuck]

Nonsense, I have almost 80 days in now and I have not joined a corporation. I did loose money the first 2 weeks but every week since then I have made a profit. By base is almost 500 in size with 20+ production buildings. Last week I made a profit of almost 60k, not big but stable growth. I have never restarted. Yes I am small and I can't buy many large bulk orders but all you need to do is find a product you can make and use your ships smart. Find trade routes were people pay you for shipments. Look for people to do private trades with, sometimes you can get a good deal. Favoures can pay off with good returns and some players will more than compensate you for good trade when in need of fast shipments or 1 of that certain item. As for end game, make your own goal!

[Mac Flar]

What helped me to move faster is to look for lucrative transport orders. Is not easy because you have to monitor a lot of local market shipping add an sometimes you also find good selling/buying add to make some extra money. Another little help is to offer spare transport capacity if you have to get supply from a trading hub. Might not make big profit but will reduce your own costs. As you see nothing realy spectacular only small things. :)

I am not in a corp but as Meat already mentioned will be one of the best things to get help to stabilize your business.

[Bliss]

Uninstalling, rather quite simple.

[tuxdelux]

Having played for about a month, I can say that there are endless possibilities to "get ahead" just using the regional market (also known as the CX). Simple market investing (buy low and sell high) will work on rapidly traded commodities, since there is no order placement fees, and you don't even need to build a base.

Then, when you do have a base, every output that you do order will be more profitable than the input. So FILL a ship with some material, drag it to the regional market, and then buy resources for your workers to make more of that material. It is a slow process to create enough goods to fill a ship - it will take many days, but this game is intended to be played very, very slowly. It wants to you carefully plan your moves and wonder about the nature of market forces.

There are so many ways to make profit on the most basic items that pioneers produce. Just look at the materials that your buildings produce, examine the regional market prices, and figure out which ones will bring you a good profit without a lot of competition. The veteran players will overlook smaller profitable materials, because they focus their attention on more complex goods with higher profits.

It makes me sick to see players dog-pile into the same material markets, complain that they cannot compete against players with better efficiencies, all while basic resources and two-step materials go completely ignored. And there are so, so many material markets that have two, one, or even zero players selling into them. I am on a low-pressure planet that requires "sealant" for constructing buildings, and there is none on the market. None. Even though it can be made in a Basic Materials Plant using the Pioneer (first tier) worker.

[Lord]

Isn't the local/regional market thing a pay-for feature? Probably not the best for new players deciding if they want to play around in this sandbox initially. Also I'm not sure I really want to do lots of other-player informal interaction stuff, at least initially... hmm.

My opinion might be worthless since I'm just finding this for the first time, but I suspect you'd need some mechanics that change the state of the world over time and break or modify the parameters of strategies that the advanced players have been using so that they're forced to try to adapt.

This kind of thing happens in real life all the time and sometimes helps smaller competitors compete with larger ones: new technology comes out making your product obsolete, popular trends or lifestyle patterns change, natural resources are discovered or dry up, a war cuts off your access to a market or causes drastic market changes, an environmental or humanitarian disaster poses a new problem that needs to be solved. If things are too static I suspect they'll have a problem with "first-movers" out competing everyone else.

Interesting concept, I guess kinda like Eve without so much conflict and ships flying around.

[Subak]

"Rocking the boat" kind of? just happened with the update some.

There's also been a decent spike in Carbon prices for various reasons related to both that update and the timing of "steam wave".

So far as paying, just play a week, maybe less. You might not really need or miss subscription for much longer than that, but local market sure is handy from day 1.

It's $8/month pretty much. $2 a week. A little over a quarter per day. I blame Jobs/Apple for ruining and robbing the world via iStore iExpectations iHave iCome to iHate.

[Lord]

Yeah exactly something like that - some trigger for events that require adaptation.

Haha, yeah we can blame Steve for a number of things I think. The cost isn't a big issue for me and I DEFINITELY prefer a flat monthly subscription to a pay-to-win "spend $10 more for an instant bonus" or microtransaction stuff. I guess my point was just that if that's going to be relied on for new players to have a chance, that might not be optimal.

[Subak]

The local market and the new contract stuff that just hit are not negligible, imo. But the price sure is.

They're the difference in needing at least an hour+ to transport something to/from a market along with the fuel costs of doing that.

But you can totally do stuff without subscribing and otherwise wouldn't hit a *hard* wall for something like six months of play. Even then, there are already people who just paid for one month, jumped the hurdle, and just did it again later when they needed to.

Mainly that is because your HQ will cap out and can't be upgraded further without PRO.

Once you're that big though, I'd guess the ship limits and lack of local market access to fill logistics/shipping gaps would really start to hurt.

[tuxdelux]

I just helped a steam friend get started, and it occurs to me that the details of contracts are really easily overlooked. They require PRO or BASIC subscriptions, but it is worth knowing they are available.

Unlike the regional market (the CX), players can post contracts to the Local Markets or directly to players with user-defined details, such as length of repayment or time for deliveries.

Once you get to know people in the game, especially by dependably completing their contracts, you can ask them for a lengthy re-payment window.

Just like real-life, you can build your business on loans. When I got up and running, I had many successful transactions with a fellow on my planet, and I asked to buy building prefabrications with a contact that gave me 20-days for payment. The buildings were able to pay for themselves in half the time, so I kept asking people for these 20-day repayment. I built two bases in that way, and in a couple more weeks I was out of debt, with more production than I can handle.