Miner or trader in beginning?

[BSNB]

So when you can afford your first ai ship what do you go for first? A miner or a trader?

[Wraith]

Mining for the passive money.
My recommendation is to mine Nividium until it no longer a profit then switch to Silicon

[Set-115689]

Miner

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Trader every time

Trade to explore THEN buy a miner for Nvidium and all that exploring pays off.

[Set-115689]

Explore then get a couple marines and capture a trader and a miner. In theory you only ever need 1 or 2 marines to get any non xenon/khaak ship.

[Big Papa]

I have 15 size M autotraders. They might bring in a million every 1.5 to 2 hours. I would say, for all practical purposes, autotrading is broke as a source of income. It does raise your rep with factions involved and allows you to buy the trade license. And I don't think fighter escort works properly for your traders, so I use gunships as traders, with plenty of weapons and shields , so expensive to set up at first. I really didn't take much time configuring type of goods to trade, I simply selected all then excluded space fuel and space weed. Maybe they can be configured to make more money.

[Belteguesian]

Originally posted by vanhelsing:

I have 15 size M autotraders. They might bring in a million every 1.5 to 2 hours. I would say, for all practical purposes, autotrading is broke as a source of income. It does raise your rep with factions involved and allows you to buy the trade license. And I don't think fighter escort works properly for your traders, so I use gunships as traders, with plenty of weapons and shields , so expensive to set up at first. I really didn't take much time configuring type of goods to trade, I simply selected all then excluded space fuel and space weed. Maybe they can be configured to make more money.

Size M is not good enough for auto trading cause it's slow in system, not to mention the lesser capacity. the L's are racing through making way more money faster AND they have doc space to carry their escorts!!!