When and what to buy from black market in singleplayer?

[Airu]

Never really used it much so no idea how to best make use of it

[Jokery]

what u need... u buy/sell. i usually when i need something i buy it

[insolent1]

At the start, I normally sell 2 metal and buy 1 crystal once it drops a bit in price.
Using the black market depends a lot on the map as some maps you might find yourself with more metal and a shortage of crystal or viceversa so using the black market to offset this is a given.
There are some techs and pacts that reduce the price quite a bit.
When you have your trade port spam set up buying M & C is no problem.

[Airu]

Which ones are better, trade ports or refineries?

[Jokery]

both

[Sagi]

If u mean placing resources onto the black market means you will sell directly to a player who is buying. I believed this way you get more credits then when you would have sold the resources immidiatly.
There is also a percentage and i believe this is how big the cut is you get. The higher the better i think. It also shows you if you are currently selling at the lowest price or not since resources would be sold first from the one with the lowest %. But since nobody ever does this might as well leave it at 100%. All what i have said now is how i understood it, i may be wrong.

Trade ports especially in bigger games are (much) better since they are cheaper and can be mindlessly spammed alot. Refineries rarely make up for there bigger cost and having more does not drasticly increase income like trade ports do with the longest trade route.

A solution for this (wich will never happen) would be if they double or even triple the cap on resource prices. Now the max price for any resource is 500. If they increased that to 1000 or 1500 Then everything would balance itself out.
People would less mindlessly buy everything they need since prices matter much more. Refineries would become better since selling resources could give much more credits.
If everyone would start building refineries and selling resources, players with more trade ports would again get the upper hand because resource prices would stay low.
We will never see this because they no longer (for as far as we know) work on the game.
Perhaps this would be a very cool idea for a mod (hint hint to any modders out there...)

[KellyR]

I always buy one crystal at the very start, so I can get the final population/income upgrade on the homeworld and the capital ship factory both started immediately.

[GoaFan77]

Originally posted by Flamew1ng:

Which ones are better, trade ports or refineries?

For unmodded Sins, definitely trade ports.

[KellyR]

Originally posted by GoaFan77:

Originally posted by Flamew1ng:

Which ones are better, trade ports or refineries?

For unmodded Sins, definitely trade ports.

I mean, yes... but why choose? Just put in 3-4 refineries at hub systems where they can service 4+ gravity wells. Also there are generally gravity wells you *don't* want a trade port in, because it would short circuit a longer route, so put refineries in those locations.

[Duneman]

In singleplayer?

The market fluctuates roughly between 250 and 500 credits per 100 units of a material, which you can track on the black market screen as a line graph(gold for metal and purple for crystal). As for what to buy, purchasing 100 or 200 crystal early on can speed up colonization(especially if you have a lot of volcanic or arctic worlds around your starting planet). Otherwise the common process is dumping a few hundred units of 100 when the price is high and using it to purchase some extra crystal as needed. If it isn't an immediate priority you can put the units up for sale on the black market screen, and the AI will likely eventually purchase it. Do be sure to jack the price up to 100% though.

Trade Ports are way better than Refineries. There are several reasons for this. First, they become profitable way sooner. Second, they are not reliant on having plentiful resource asteroids in the area. Third, you can create a chain of planets/starbases which boosts the income rate of the entire chain. Refineries by contrast work best when there are plenty of neutral zone resource satellites in the area, such as those found around gas giant planets or inside asteroid fields(uncolonizable zones have double the resource gathering rate). My general rule of thumb is: have at least 10 resource satellites in the surrounding planets(a dozen or more is preferred) and only build a refinery if the game is expected to last at least another hour and a half. Lastly, there is a limit to how many refineries can gather resources from an area, it's 3 for colonizable zones and 4 for neutral zones. Refineries used to be even worse back in the day as they were subject to planetary allegiance...