Trading / mining is pretty much pointless and tacked on

[Nova225]

Cargo size should probably be about 100x larger, and when you pick up dropped cargo from destroyed ships, there should be 10x more of it.

That, or the prices need to be increased by considerably more. There's no reason to mine or trade between stations if you can just take a mission, blow up a few pirates, and get just 3 times as many credits in a third of the time than if you had wandered through an asteroid field doing some mining.

[Nokta]

+1

[It's Shas]

I tend to do just the same you mentioned.
I joined the merchants guild at first and thought the yield of the missions (especially the get trading good X by yourself and deliver it there) were pretty high in the beginning, compared to the regular kill missions.
But right now im just doing the same, searching for kill missions for at least 100k to aproxx 500k w/o the need to jump to another system, 1 jump at max.

The regular trading feels realy underwhelming when you have a large merchants guild cargo pod and a ship with huge hold. Most of the time you cant even get this full, because the stations dont have enough of the goods you try to trade. And the profit is to much rng for me, since the prices can drop significantly from your last visit of the station. And the fact that you can only check the stock of stations in space via the map and not in the station itself makes it pretty obnoxious.

To increase the cargo would not help the matter at all imho.
Increase the amount of goods the stations have and let us check the prices on other stations in real time once visited IN the stations itself. The prices / yields will change anyhow while you travel.

[Shifter]

youre doing it wrong :P i just made over 500K from trading and my missions are only offering around 100K each.

I found a transmitter thing or whatever it is you hack and it told me the location of a mining opportunity. got lots of gold, a couple meteroic diomands, and a couple alien artifacts from it. then seen a treasure convoy leaving from a station that had the artifact discovery event and sold it 3 diamonds for 86K and told him to drop his cargo which gave back my diamonds + 4 artifacts. than went to a station under seige and picked up more diamonds and artifacts at about half price. flew around to a few stations buying any red priced diamonds and artifacts i found and then sold it all off at the highest price i could find.

If there were more station events going on I would have made way more but taking advantage of those events is deffinitely key

[It's Shas]

And in the meantime I did 1000k doing two rather simple kill missions.

post scriptum:
the trading itself is still rather obnoxious. If you find a place that sells a specific lucrative good, in most cases it doesnt come in larger quantitys. So to make the time / effort worth your while you need to pick up other goods wich yield less profit or accept missions.

Im missing the "I pickup i.e. arround 50 nano fabrics for a realy cheap price, knowing that they yield me a lot of cash 3 jumps in another system without having to gamble if the price is still good there".

Trading as it is is more of a gamble and not worth the time investement.

[Shifter]

Originally posted by It's Shas:

And in the meantime I did 1000k doing two rather simple kill missions.

yes but as I said my missions are only offering 100k each so i would have had to do 10 missions as opposed to your 2

also some station events increase the amount of an item in stock quite a bit. mining rushes will have lots of diamonds and gold, tech booms lots of nano fibrics, and market gluts lots of everything. not 50 but i dont even think any ships have a cargo hold of 50 unless you add on the large merchant guild extension. could still be improved for general trading but station events are big profits

[It's Shas]

The mckinley has 42 or 45ish I guess? W/o cargo upgrades.
Just the good old regular trading is realy underwhelming. Yeah I get the whole station event thing. It was designed to make trading less of a "This route is the best, repeat it till the end of times to get lots of profits$$$" and more of a objection of the market. This would still work a lot better if you could object the prices from a far. Its just too much rng. Changing station events, other traders transporting goods, time going by.

Those 3 things change the prices / yields drastically on their own.
Having to watch for transmitters to get a good hang on pricing doesnt make much sense to me.

[Shifter]

Originally posted by It's Shas:

Having to watch for transmitters to get a good hang on pricing doesnt make much sense to me.

ya thats probably the biggest flaw. bringing up the map and scrolling to a market tab like you scroll tabs on the pause menu would be nice since events and transmitters are currently the only good way to figure out pricing. apart from obvious things like minerals being cheaper at mining stations and science stuff cheaper at science stations.

**edit** by 'market tab' i mean a page that shows all the relevent economic data for the current system.

[Zhorge]

It's called "Rebel Galaxy" not "Space Traders." Two cents:

(1) I think it's fairly obvious from the title and game mechanics that the trading was not designed to be the central focus of the game. It's a CRPG with a lot of space combat and comes with the necessary functions to support the core of the game. Sort of like how Privateer or Freelancer (only better than both those games IMO) played out.

(2) Trading should be relatively speaking, lower-yield on the game time invested. It's far safer than taking on a battle fleet. The old 'risk-reward' trade-off that most people, I should think, should (or do) understand. It's perfectly natural and logical that trading would 'pay less' than risking your life.

But even with that said, if you really pay attention to things, you can make a ton of money while trading. But you have to work at it. Like it's a job. Because the game just doesn't hand you insane profits through easily exploitable trade circles (unlike those that exist in Elite: Dangerous, for example).


Anyway, my two-cents.

[Axe]

+1: trading & mining need tweaks.
maybe on the trading side there could be something you can get from the merchants guild that tells you the prices in the other systems, but they take a small percentage cut for each transaction you make or it costs a lot up front.

as mentioned in another thread I think the ores values need to be increased a lot, and there should be more of the good quality ores floating around.

[MrPenguin]

Originally posted by Shaggy:

youre doing it wrong :P i just made over 500K from trading and my missions are only offering around 100K each.

I found a transmitter thing or whatever it is you hack and it told me the location of a mining opportunity. got lots of gold, a couple meteroic diomands, and a couple alien artifacts from it. then seen a treasure convoy leaving from a station that had the artifact discovery event and sold it 3 diamonds for 86K and told him to drop his cargo which gave back my diamonds + 4 artifacts. than went to a station under seige and picked up more diamonds and artifacts at about half price. flew around to a few stations buying any red priced diamonds and artifacts i found and then sold it all off at the highest price i could find.

If there were more station events going on I would have made way more but taking advantage of those events is deffinitely key

^This guy nailed it.

The system works the way it works because of balance. If it dropped more loot then people like me and this guy above would easily kill the economy in less then an hour.

[Zidders 'Rockin' Bard' Roofurry]

Originally posted by Zhorge:

It's called "Rebel Galaxy" not "Space Traders." Two cents:

Yeah only thing is they've kinda said to plenty of people that while you would eventually need to fight that you would be able to make a decent profit doing the space trading thing. I get what you're saying but that doesn't mean they shouldn't tweak the trading system so that it works better.

[Anelyn]

Ok let me put it simple: the whole point of the game is to get enough credits that you can buy the ship you want and equip it with the weapons / systems / defenses etc you want.

When you are already close to that or at that point, it doesn't matter how much more money you make be it from missions or from any other source of income as there is nothing to spend it on (there is no (yet) diplomacy / espionage etc so that you can bribe / pay for stuff to get some action between factions / systems etc).

So if you can do 1 mil from a mission without problems you are already at a stage where making another 10 or 100 or 1k mils wouldn't really change much for you.

Yes you can make tons of money from trading and mining but it's a bit more time consuming than doing missions (as you have to find the right fields to mine and the right system to sell your stuff in for max profit). If you really want to trade BIG (quantity wise) get yourself ranks in merchant guild, build the largest guild cargo extender and mount it on their last tier ship - the heavy hauler - slow and cumbersome, good armor & turrets, and you can do 70-80 tons of cargo in one go.

If you complain that you can't make great $$$ with 70+ tons of cargo, then you either don't know what to fill your cargo with and how to sell it or I don't know what.

[Nova225]

Originally posted by Zhorge:

It's called "Rebel Galaxy" not "Space Traders." Two cents:

(1) I think it's fairly obvious from the title and game mechanics that the trading was not designed to be the central focus of the game. It's a CRPG with a lot of space combat and comes with the necessary functions to support the core of the game. Sort of like how Privateer or Freelancer (only better than both those games IMO) played out.

(2) Trading should be relatively speaking, lower-yield on the game time invested. It's far safer than taking on a battle fleet. The old 'risk-reward' trade-off that most people, I should think, should (or do) understand. It's perfectly natural and logical that trading would 'pay less' than risking your life.

But even with that said, if you really pay attention to things, you can make a ton of money while trading. But you have to work at it. Like it's a job. Because the game just doesn't hand you insane profits through easily exploitable trade circles (unlike those that exist in Elite: Dangerous, for example).


Anyway, my two-cents.

I think everyone is aware. But if you put a trading system in the game, it shouldn't be half assed. I don't even bother trying to trade, instead just selling whatever loot I pick up at the nearest station.

[Aepervius]

Originally posted by It's Shas:

And in the meantime I did 1000k doing two rather simple kill missions.

post scriptum:
the trading itself is still rather obnoxious. If you find a place that sells a specific lucrative good, in most cases it doesnt come in larger quantitys. So to make the time / effort worth your while you need to pick up other goods wich yield less profit or accept missions.

Im missing the "I pickup i.e. arround 50 nano fabrics for a realy cheap price, knowing that they yield me a lot of cash 3 jumps in another system without having to gamble if the price is still good there".

Trading as it is is more of a gamble and not worth the time investement.

I made 500K trading at the start of the game in less than 1 hour. Just tradding. I seriously doubt you can do that much that quick at game start in kill mission. As far as I can tell at the start even 10K mission are difficult, but even then you would need to do 50 of them every 1m15 roughly to get as much money.

The tricks is to watch the market in two neighbors station. Example rust : buy water I think, then a nearby station southward, sell loot and buy gold and designer cloth. Then ricne and repeat. Since you get more money at every run it rises semi exponentially. Once you deplete teht rade , try trading between the four station south west of rust nothing which trade brings money in. Soon enough you got the guild medium or large cargo and are making a killing.

It is not as much a thrill as killing pirates, but it certainly fills coffer mega quick and that in the first zone. Once you got something like the scarrab, 7 particle ray, and proton broadside all mk2, in all practicable purpose only massive cocnentrations of fighters and big ship can corner you.

[Rabidnid]

In the early game trading is certainly a way to make money if you don't have a particularly combat effective build. I've gotten diamonds for 1.4K and sold them at a huge celabration for 40k. I made about 300k on the deal and got lots of new equipment with it. Now my net worth is 50 million and I'm making 1 to 2 million on guild missions and don't even look at the commodities board any more.