What's your money making strategies?

[Bubbles]

I can't really seem to get ahead.
I've tried basically zero space combat + Spy game and it doesn't seem to be as lucrative as just running basic missions.

Pure trade seems like a good strategy late game but early game is rough.

I just want to build a big enough bank roll to have a big enough ship to do whatever I want and become super rich.

[�[Dire_Venom]�]

It can be a bit rough at parts.
I've tried both a more blunt force and a spy type game, the intel records you can generate do wonders at driving your influence sky high, and it's always worth meeting new intelligence contacts.
You also want to be foccused on the types of missions easiest and most profitable to you, a decent spy mission for me can make between 40-60k without much hassal.

• As for salvaging ships, I've found you can get between 10-30k off them, but thats a pretty risky way of making money.
  
• Trading for me has been more of a passive money generator, I'll just pick up some medium priced goods and sell them off at the first staion which gives me a profit before buying some new ones (just watch out for the permit ones, even with a permit you often can't seel them at other faction worlds because reasons).
  It doesn't generate heaps, but will make you a few $k every couple of stops.
  
• Exploring can also me another decent form of extra money gen if you need some extra cash.
  Bear in mind that the risks seem to get worse the more explorations you do in a row.
  You can get some valuable cargo and seel it for 10k if your lucky.
  
  You can get missions paying out 100-600k latter on latter on as well.
  But as a whole I've enjoyed the Spy game. I still don't have a clue how to build my fighting crew, but I find gaining influence and generating income is more stable. You can't do ship to ship combat though.

[Vostok]

I've been doing well on my most recent play through by buying a good/big ship that's a level below what I could afford at the start to get the bonus leftover cash, then going full pirate route. I had the buffer cash to pay for fuel/spice/repairs, and everything else went straight to upgrading weapons. I just looted and destroyed every rival faction ship. Now I've got talents that give me more money and repair my ship when salvaging. I'm getting a bit under $30k for every ship, on top of what I'm bringing in for missions and selling looted goods.

[�[Dire_Venom]�]

Originally posted by Vostok:

I've been doing well on my most recent play through by buying a good/big ship that's a level below what I could afford at the start to get the bonus leftover cash, then going full pirate route. I had the buffer cash to pay for fuel/spice/repairs, and everything else went straight to upgrading weapons. I just looted and destroyed every rival faction ship. Now I've got talents that give me more money and repair my ship when salvaging. I'm getting a bit under $30k for every ship, on top of what I'm bringing in for missions and selling looted goods.

That sounds pretty intersting, I havn't tried the pirate route yet.
Are you foccusing on just angering one faction and hunting them:? How are your weapons/crew built:? I find I can spend hours trying to work these out XD

[FireShark]

If you start as a merchant with the Galtak Freighter and upgrade to atleast 80-90 cargo capacity you can get some really good profits from trading, even very early game.

Once you get at least a level 3 permit, which isn't too hard, you'll make 15-40k every trade and pretty much just stay around your starting area and maybe 1-2 other systems. It helps to minimize combat risk a lot.

I've had little problems getting to early part of the late game. I had almost 1 million credits recently before buying a new ship.

Now I can trade rare trade goods which get you anywhere from 40-150k per trade and even more if you are adventurous enough to go to some distant star systems.

I'm putting my profit into high-end wilderness exploration now.

I should add that trading in most cases is much faster and less dangerous than running missions so the money can really rack up quickly if you are careful.

[FrozenHell]

My best is just to simply trading. Starting with Galtak freighter and merchant trait. After delivering the arbiter to Faen, immediately buy the 2nd level permit. After you get your engineer officer to lv 5 and get upgrading discount talent, convert the luxury suites to cargo hold, with 4 cargo hold you can get 160 total capacity when fully upgraded.

Not sure if intended or not, but trading is easy in current game version. When you buy some merchandise yo sell, notice that the more you buy, the more expensive it gets. But that's NOT the case when selling. This means you get the full amount of the best price when you sell in bulk. So the trick is just fill all your cargo capacity with 1 type of item and sell it all at once for max profit.

Ex:
If your region have lots of refineries (thulun), stock up on polymer/kambrinite/stronkium /ferrochromium and sell it at industrial
If your region have lots of industries, electric component can be sold to refineries although it's not that lucrative, crop harvesters to farming is also good.

Later on when you can buy the 3rd and 4th level permit, power generators, ore extractors and terraforming is lucrative. The weapon parts/explosive/narcotic spice is good but you need to find low law policy to buy and sell it so most of the time it's not that reliable unless you can find black market in a specific town type that suits you.

Be sure to pick market confidant talent right from the start and be on the lookout for a contact that sells rare goods. Best one imo is if they sell iridlaentine since it's expensive and have 10 legality.

I once get lucky in a custom map and got contact which sell iridlaentine and 3 refineries near it. If I remember right, you can buy iridlaentine @4500 and sell it @7250 at refineries. With my best merchant ship and it's 200 cargo (broadsword with all large part into cargo and most medium part into cargo-fuel storage) that translate to 550k profit per trade before righteous profit kicked in, Better if you can sell it at a refineries blackmarket and have bootleg profit

[stretch]

Just one time I bought some rare trade goods from a contact and I thought they sold really, really well. Supply is limited I think. I never went back for more. I never did the math. I didn't try to sell it anywhere with the aim of making the biggest profit.
I grabbed a heap and sold them at a nearby base and thought that was really easy cash.

I dunno but if anyone cares it could be worth looking into.

[Vlad_1492]

My experience with Rare Trade Goods was a little more.

I bought a cartload, sold it at my nearby planet of my faction.
The demand went to 'F' rating, the credit balance went up nicely.
Used those profits to go back and get more, found a new planet to flood.
Repeated at a few more planets, bought a small moon and retired.

Not sure if demand recovers or how quickly.
Not sure if supply is as infinite as it appears.

[DaDiarra]

Supply of Rare Trade Goods is infinite. This should maybe be looked into the Devs. Demand for everything does recover. It depends on the zone economy rating. Higher economy = faster recovery.

Black Markets also unique, but I don't know the mechanics 100%. I believe they have deeper Supply and Demand so they are not affected by big trades as much and they may recover faster as well.

[ManDudely]

Rare goods aside, this will help with regular trading.

1. Find the following zones; Some systems will have multiple, at least one, or none of the following; Indie Orbital, Indie Industrial, Indie Mining, Indie Tradeway.
2. Go to the Indie Industrial or Orbital. Buy the Ore Processors, Explosives, and basically anything that you can see is in demand on Mining and Tradeway zones. Buy the Capital Ship Weapon Components.
3. Go to the Indie Mining. Sell everything in demand.
4. Go to the Indie Tradeway. Sell everything in demand, especially the Capital Ship Weapon Components.
5. Profit.

[Huillam]

So far my most successful attemp at making money was running missions with the Scout Cutter: excellent fuel efficiency and small crew (less salary, quicker XP).

[Vostok]

Originally posted by PCA Dire_Venom:

That sounds pretty intersting, I havn't tried the pirate route yet. Are you foccusing on just angering one faction and hunting them:? How are your weapons/crew built:? I find I can spend hours trying to work these out XD

Right now I'm only going after the main rival faction and their ally. Any time I encounter one of them I destroy their ship and salvage. I have been slowly building my team so they're competent in crew combat but I pretty much try to stick to ship combat.

I've got my ship set up with the best armor, and the most crippling weapons. My strategy is basically to use Evasive Maneuvers to dodge immediately and then get as many attacks as possible to cripple their systems as soon as possible, then I mostly just leave my talents unused unless I'm getting some bad rolls. I usually end up destroying or disabling them without taking any real damage. My crew repairs and gets bonus salvage. I come away with $30k, minimal/zero damage to ship and crew, and experience.

This isn't a HUGE money maker and it probably isn't a great strategy for the long term or higher difficulty, but this is only my 4th play through and it's been by far the most successful for me so far, and also allowed me to learn much more about the game. I never broke $75k as a spy, but I've just hit $500k as a pirate.

[Vlad_1492]

I seemed to do well with Spying/Skimming. A small ship with 3-4 Spies and E-Techs at levels 11+ gives plenty of loot if you read up on the talents.
Some passive income also as you collect intel just for showing up at high enough spy levels. And tons of Contacts. The spying minigame gets tedious though. Pretty safe if you have a Navigator 11 with that top level perk.

Recently I tried pure Merchant. Keep everybody calm and happy, work my way up the ranks. Slow but peaceful... until I accidentally dropped off a large bunch of loot on the middle of a trade war. Never quite recovered from the spiral that led to.

But that did cause me to understand just how important military rank in a faction seems to be. These 250K jobs started rolling in around military rank 12 as I recall. Go 6 jumps, assasinate or capture, make it back alive, get paid. The salvage and fixit skills are a big deal there since available repair spots are few behind enemy lines.

[Hypnoticborrat]

Originally posted by Vlad_1492:

The salvage and fixit skills are a big deal there since available repair spots are few behind enemy lines.

Might be hard to find, but usually a friendly faction of yours has at least 1 system somewhere close, or you can repair at indie spaceports. But what really sucks is that some components need 36 weeks to repair, so without those perks which repair a percentage of components instantly you don't have the time to repair those big components when you are on a time sensitive mission.

What seems weird to me is that the timers get added on top of each other, for example if I repair and put my crew in the hospital, i spend 3 weeks repairing, 2 weeks in the hospital, that makes 5. But that's unreasonable in my opinion. I really think you should be able to for example send your crew in the hospital to fully heal and repair in the same time, you should also be able to adjust the time you spend repairing, so you can for example leave when your crew is healed, but your components are not fully repaired. Is especially sensible in case of those 36 weeks repair time components I mentioned earlier.

[�[Dire_Venom]�]

Originally posted by Vostok:

Originally posted by PCA Dire_Venom:

That sounds pretty intersting, I havn't tried the pirate route yet. Are you foccusing on just angering one faction and hunting them:? How are your weapons/crew built:? I find I can spend hours trying to work these out XD

Right now I'm only going after the main rival faction and their ally. Any time I encounter one of them I destroy their ship and salvage. I have been slowly building my team so they're competent in crew combat but I pretty much try to stick to ship combat.

I've got my ship set up with the best armor, and the most crippling weapons. My strategy is basically to use Evasive Maneuvers to dodge immediately and then get as many attacks as possible to cripple their systems as soon as possible, then I mostly just leave my talents unused unless I'm getting some bad rolls. I usually end up destroying or disabling them without taking any real damage. My crew repairs and gets bonus salvage. I come away with $30k, minimal/zero damage to ship and crew, and experience.

This isn't a HUGE money maker and it probably isn't a great strategy for the long term or higher difficulty, but this is only my 4th play through and it's been by far the most successful for me so far, and also allowed me to learn much more about the game. I never broke $75k as a spy, but I've just hit $500k as a pirate.

Thanks! How does evasive manuvers help you btw:? Every time I use it I get hit anyway and still take resonable damage so it doesn't really seem to do anything :/
Do you tend to stick with missiles or move to ranges 3-4:?

[Vostok]

What does your crew composition look like? I think having lots of gunners/pilots helps with that.

I have the Aramech 7s (I think) and their optimal range is 4, so I usually try to move up turn one and pop EM and Bombardment (decreases enemy accuracy), the goal being to avoid getting hit and cripple their systems to further decrease their accuracy.

My captain is level 12 right now so I don't think I'm very far in the game, but for right now I don't take a single hit in maybe 40% of my ship battles, and don't use more than a couple talents per battle.