Getting my stations working

[Justin]

After doing quite a lot of research, I think I've managed to get parts of the game down. I made my first two million at the stock market, done quite a bit of trading in Argon territory, and have purchased and established a wheat farm in Herron's Nebula. I also bought a Mercury and successfully slaved it to the station, and I -THINK- it's going around buying energy cells. And I think I can order it to sell the wheat to the surrounding areas.

The trouble is, I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing it right. I think I'm making money, but I can't really be sure. I've been using Remote Best Buy and Remote Best Sell to buy energy cells and sell wheat to the surrounding stations, right?

I think I'm selling the wheat for 30 [21] (avg 32; no idea what the square brackets mean). And I think I'm buying the Energy Cells for 14 (avg 16).

I can also do some fund transferring, but I'm not sure how much to leave with the factory and how much to put in.

Hopefully I can make money remotely with these freighters instead of having to sit around on the stock market all the time.

[Zloth]

You can control the trader like that. You'll definitely want to scatter some satellites around, though, so the trade ship will know where to buy and sell. You'll probably want to drop about a million into the station at first - it's going to need to buy a LOT of energy.

Did you download the bonus pack from Egosoft's web page? (Oh rats, Egosoft's web site seems to be down right now so I have to go from memory.) The bonus pack adds a new trade command called "Start Commercial Agent". These are very handy things for keeping your stations profitable without you having to mess with when to buy and when to sell.

First it will check your resources. If the station is running short on them, it will look for the best buy and fetch more. If the resources are fine then it will try and sell your products for a good price. As the pilot does more and more trading, it will learn to use the jump drive on the ship (assuming you install one) to vastly speed up trading time. He/she/it will also become wise in the ways of the world and will insist on more pay and might even improve the defenses on the ship.

When you start it, you'll be given a LOT of options (par for the course in this game). Here's a step by step for your first one.

1. Outfit the trade ship with Mk1 and 2 trading software, best buys/selling software, SETA, and, if you can afford it, a jump drive.

2. Send the trade ship to your station and set his home base to that station. It's really easy to forget that last part and, if you do, your agent will just sit there and twiddle his thumbs.

3. On the station itself, adjust the prices to where you want them. Note that places like trading stations will only buy for the average price or less so going over the average will cut down on how many customers will buy.

4. Adjust the stations ‘max jumps’ to something small for now. This controls how far away your trader will travel to buy/sell items. You don’t want your trader flying all the way to Queen’s Retribution to buy energy cells! I would suggest keeping it down to 4. Also make sure aliens aren’t allowed to trade at the station.

5. Now select the trader’s trade menu and start the commercial agent. Here’s the big key: practically all the options are just great on default! You can learn about them later if you want! The only change I would make would be to go to the jump drive section and tell the trader to use that. Also, see below regarding the satellites.

6. The trader will probably sit there for about 30 seconds then should take off in search of energy cells. He’ll probably keep buying those for quite a bit then he’ll start mixing between buying energy cells and selling wheat. He’ll send little messages to you (that only appear in the message log) when he gains a rank.

7. Eventually he will start using his jump drive. Once that happens, you can raise the range up either on the station or in the commercial agent menu system. That will let him sell his wheat over a huge area and you’ll be able to raise the price!

One thing I very much like to do with my agents is limit them to trade only in sectors with a satellite. That lets you pick and choose exactly what sectors your traders will use. If there’s a lot of pirate or Xenon activity in a sector, simply don’t put a satellite in it. You can also not put satellites in the Terran sectors that are far from any jump gate, which keeps your agents from driving all the way to the Moon just to pick up some energy cells. This is a lot easier, IMHO, than trying to manage sector white/black lists for every agent you end up getting.

Definitely READ THE INSTRUCTIONS for the bonus pack! I’m going from memory so I may have gotten something wrong above. Plus there are other handy things in there, like the commodities traders which are quite handy for moving stuff between two+ specific stations.

P.S. OK, so I don’t think you really need the SETA in a commercial agent. These are NPCs driving the ships, not computers! Don’t be a cruel master; buy them the SETA they deserve. (Especially on Labor Day, for pity’s sake!)

[Justin]

What's the difference between the Commercial Agent and my current setup of "Remote Best Buy/Remote Best Sell"? And didn't you say that I need to pay Commercial Agents in order for them to work?

[CTHOMP]

I believe remote best buy/best sell still requires you to issue commands after each trade or you have to select a sector/station to do it? A commercial agent is fully automated and thus a set and forget type of thing.

[Justin]

I'unno, I think my remote trader is still working.

[Zloth]

I don't think there's any way to tell a trader to do remote buy AND sell. You'll need two freighters to cover that. This will do both. The fee is pretty small compared to the price of a completely new freighter.

Oh, and the bonus pack does not count as a mod so you can still get achievements in game. (If only it had started out that way - I should have quite a few more achievements in this game. Ah well.)

[John Hadley]

The only real problem with remote best sell or remote best buy is that you can only set up the trader to buy or sell a single resource from its home base. With the additional trader options offered by the bonus pack you can have one trader service more than one factory or have a trader supply more than one material to a single factory. If you want a single trader to fetch two materials for a single factory without the bonus pack you have to keep manually switching your trader from buying one material to another. You'll have to have two or three freighters for every factory if you want to completely automate trade without the use of the bonus pack and with the bonus pack you can have only one, or even less than one trader per factory.

Remote Best Buy and Remote Best Sell do repeat continuously once you set them up.

[Justin]

Will the trading it does offset the amount of money it's demanding, though? I mean I only have the one station, and not a lot of money.

[John Hadley]

Your stations will make money slowly as long as you set them up with traders to make sure they have raw materials and they are close enough to places that your traders can sell the products, but they don't cause an avalanche of cash flow. You'll earn more faster by controlling freighters manually and buying and selling at other peoples stations, but there's a limit to how much manual trading you can handle yourself Factories and automated traders provide income supplementation as you build up beyond the limit of what you want to handle yourself.

If you are low on cash flow then its better to buy a freighter than a factory.

[Justin]

So you can never really reach a stage where you'll automatically get enough cash flow from automated freighters to buy high-end stuff? You'll always need to keep trading items with your freighter?

[John Hadley]

You can make plenty of cash from automated freighters, but you won't make credits as fast with automated trade with one or two freighters as you can make yourself doing missions or through trade controlling the freighters by hand. I don't know exactly how high the mission rewards go but I've earned 500k to 1 million for a single ten minute mission to deliver military personnel once my rank was increased. You're lucky to make maybe 100K per hour from one of the cheap factories. They don't produce resources as fast as one freighter can trade resources, but you'll need probably two or three freighters assigned to a factory if you do not have the bonus pack trading extensions. Its an investment that does pay itself back and earn money over time but not that quickly.

The thing is that you can only manage a small number of freighters manually, maybe 3 or 4 before it becomes too much of a chore. Manage as many as you want to by hand to earn maximum profits and automate the rest to earn slower profits with much less interaction required on your part. Automate them all if you just want to fly around and do combat, just understand that your combat mission earnings will be more than your total factory earnings until you have several factories and freighters operating.

[John Hadley]

Note that it may not be obvious that mission rewards can become very large when you first start the game, but they do. You get only 600 credits maybe to start out with, but when you succeed a dozen or two missions and get your rank up with a race the payouts become significant. You can scan asteroids for 25-50K per asteroid, get ship retrieval missions that pay 300K+ credits, get military personnel transport missions that pay 500K+, and so on.

[Justin]

Originally posted by John Hadley:

Note that it may not be obvious that mission rewards can become very large when you first start the game, but they do. You get only 600 credits maybe to start out with, but when you succeed a dozen or two missions and get your rank up with a race the payouts become significant. You can scan asteroids for 25-50K per asteroid, get ship retrieval missions that pay 300K+ credits, get military personnel transport missions that pay 500K+, and so on.

Sounds great. So I guess the next step would be to fly around in my Nova and see what missions I could do? Or do you think I should try and upgrade my Mercury freighters so they can carry more stuff? I'm still a little lost as to what to do =P

[Zloth]

Either or both will work. Have you started the Terran Conflict or Goner plots yet? You'll want a cheap little fighter to start the Terran plot (and hopefully a docking computer). The Goner plot starts out more trade oriented. They both start in the north-central part of the galaxy.

If you haven't been to those parts yet then you might want to do some exploring. You can do some side missions on the way, too.

That's the strength of the game: there are many ways to make money. Some work faster than others but so what? Fuel and food are free and you don't get extra points for a speed run.

[Justin]

The trouble I'm having right now anyway is that because there's so much open, I'm lost as to what to do to get a solid grounding so I can afford to make some mistakes without being put into an unrecoverable (read: adding another 100 hours of making up lost money) drop.

I also sorta downloaded Albion Prelude first. I haven't exactly made a lot of progress though, so I suppose I could switch to TC.

Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that first. =P

[Zloth]

I'm actually getting confused as to what is actually in Prelude. I thought it was just the single, big plot for Prelude but the achievements say otherwise. They must have put some plots in there. Maybe all of them?