Money question

[Ha!SpidersCan'tJump]

Ok, so, a bit of backstory and why the question:
I play VRO and Faction Enhancer, and at the 30h mark xenon start to build big bad ships, so, i need to up my game a bit, so, there is the problem: Money
Warfs cost a lot, production and habitats too. Altho i can and are using EMPs, i don't think i can EMP warf. I'm at the point where i have some hull parts stations and spacefuel station in split space, yes, they drop 400-500k every once a while, but, argon shipbuild cost 250mil+250mil and some more. At earlyer points i fly-by board ships, but it make defencive forces week.
So, TL.DR.
How to make more money with midgame setup? Just more stations?

[Pandorian]

First unless VRO drastically changes base game you are correct in assuming you can't EMP a Wharf to get the blueprint.

My advice for money is to find a major hole in the economy and work on filling it. For base game there is never enough minerals which lead to shortages basically everywhere. The most common seen result of this is Hull Part shortages which usually track to Refined Metals and then one step back with Ore.

Given you are playing mods I don't know how Split are doing but in base game (pre 6.0) they have a rough start and usually require you to help them more than other factions.

Although stations are good for the player I find that a bottom up approach works much better as then you don't have to build as many stations. Start with filling Ore and Silicon needs (ignore Ice), then once those needs are being filled start working on transporting the wares that are made from them. You can roughly separate goods into Tiers or imagine them in a pyramid shape with the bottom Tiers (ore, silicon) supporting upper tiers (Refined Metals, Silicon Wafers, etc) which support further up tiers (Hull Parts, Advanced Electronics) and finally ships.

If you insert yourself into supply and transport you'll find that money just falls into your pocket and it's hard to spend it all.

[Bozz 💀]

split have very bad start even in 6.0, In 100h they lost already 5 sectors ^^

best way to make quick money would be boarding, terrans have a lot of ships they don't need, SCA doesn't need it's ships either, and vigor syndicate can also spare a lot of barbarossa's, plus you can find them far away from their main sector so if they go aggresive on you it's not a big deal.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Hull parts are a good start... Throw a Claytronics on it to start offsetting some of the station construction costs & supply delays for expansion. Then work on getting both production chains self-sufficient working your way backward in the supply chain until your mining your own ore.

The fun thing with all the X series games is that the supply/demand is never 1:1 so you always produce a little more of everything than you actually need. Eventually you arn't just selling the top end goods but bleeding small amounts of everything into economy to help offset costs & increase profits... Extra microchips always end up being a nice income bonus for me. But it eventually snowballs.

Eventually you will either have a super station (Self-Sufficient Shipyards can kill PC performance lol) producing everything or alot of little stations supporting each other by producing a little bit of every ware in the game. :P

With VRO you can also make alot of money on Weapon & Engine components as the sheer number of S & M class ships that will get vaporized once the xenon really get moving will be hard for wharfs to keep up with. so expanding that way could also net some extra income.

EDIT: I rarely bother actually running a full Shipyard to sell to the AI. If i remember right, that is still artificially nerfed (profits wise) due to alot of exploitation & abuse over the years. Its still handy to have your own private shipyard eventually to make ships with custom loadouts (without having to chain them through multiple factions for refits) but its usually better to just feed the AI's shipyards.

[Ha!SpidersCan'tJump]

Originally posted by Bozz 💀:

split have very bad start even in 6.0, In 100h they lost already 5 sectors ^^

best way to make quick money would be boarding, terrans have a lot of ships they don't need, SCA doesn't need it's ships either, and vigor syndicate can also spare a lot of barbarossa's, plus you can find them far away from their main sector so if they go aggresive on you it's not a big deal.

I understand that boarding is good instamoney, but i really want to fucus more into money flow, where you don't need to get ships full of marines and dump them into osakas (don't know why, but SCA and VIG have a lot more marines in there ships and most of them are vets). Plus, sometimes i have ships in sectors with agro ship after i start the cap, and it is a bit problematic

[Ha!SpidersCan'tJump]

Originally posted by Pandorian:

First unless VRO drastically changes base game you are correct in assuming you can't EMP a Wharf to get the blueprint.

My advice for money is to find a major hole in the economy and work on filling it. For base game there is never enough minerals which lead to shortages basically everywhere. The most common seen result of this is Hull Part shortages which usually track to Refined Metals and then one step back with Ore.

If you insert yourself into supply and transport you'll find that money just falls into your pocket and it's hard to spend it all.

Oh, I now see a big hole with the ore needed in overall around the galaxy. Interresting. I guess i will start with mining dumping outposts and shoot traders from there to nearest needy station, thank you

[Troa Barton]

I'll echo what was stated for the most part. I always make stations Ill need later Hull parts, Claytronics, Silicon Carbide / metalic microlattice / computronic substrate, etc. Bottom up stuff that way I have no issues building defensive platforms or my shipyards later on. VRO needs a ton of hull parts, engine parts, advanced electronics, shield components, turret components, and weapon components. Aside from the hull parts I just make a lot more on my shipyards when I get to that stage, everyone needs hull parts though you can make one next to every shipyard. I also like putting a refinery complex in second contact flashpoint that turns tier 1 resources into tier 2 goods, graphine, refined metal, quantum tubes, etc just a couple of each makes good money.
The best customers are in order the HOP, FRF, and ZYA followed by ARG/HAT, TEL, PAR. The terrans are pretty good on their own but everyone else is blowing each other up and getting nuked by the xenon.

[Troa Barton]

Oh and dump a few tons of laser towers at the xenon gates it will help the AI recover between waves and if you have the mod "better kill credit" you'll get rep and money even when out of sector. Corvettes on the cheap do this well and the colossus is my go to tower launcher quick launch tubes spit out towers as fast as they do fighters. You can pause and launch all the towers from the ship loadout menu when out of sector to make a death ray.

[XceptOne]

Hmm, the tenor of the community, when it comes to wharfes/shipyards, seems to be that you should also produce all the needed resources for shipbuilding yourself to make you independent of AI economy.

Well, that's also where you should start. Build production lines for all the necessary materials, start with the ones that are in high demand. Then go on and sell that stuff to AI wharfes and shipyards. As you expand your production you'll earn more and more money and at some point affording the blueprints and building the shipyards won't seem much of a problem anymore.

Then, once the wharfes are built, you only need to stop supplying the AI and switch over to supplying yourself (can be as simple as changing a single trade rule) and basically start out with everything you need already there and in large supply.

To me that, at least, seems like the better alternative to aqquiring and building the shipyard first and then again having no money/materials to do much useful with it.

So, my advice is: The wharf/shipyard should be the last step, as otherwise its' cost and lack of ROI can heavily offset any progress you could have made otherwise. So, maybe just continue to buy ships from the AI for while and built up some economy first; money will come with it.

Good profits

[thekins]

lots of people have told me a bunch of ways to make "tons of money" doing XYZ it doesnt really work
The economy is weird in that it wants ABC products if you provide A you will make a ridiculous amount of money but only enough to barely cover the cost of the station producing A and your profits dry up VERY quickly as the market gets saturated
next you produce B and the cycle continues
The only way to make a bunch of money is to have the AI lose TONS of ships which will dry up supplies of ABC
The only way to make that happen is to be at war with faction A
faction A will lose tons of ships
faction A will now try to build ships
faction A will not buy from you because you are at war.....
so the only way to make tons of money is to somehow be aligned with faction B and then make sure faction A wins HARD
OR
build a small fleet of miners ore/silicon/w/e
have them drop off the ore into a station that you own
ship the ore to another "hub" that you own
build a small fleet of ships with repeat orders to drop off ore at every single station around the hub you own that buys said ore the price doesnt matter the ore was "free" just the time investment
once the market is absolutely FLOODED with base minerals/gas you can then build a fleet of trade ships because all base materials are basically free you can buy the tier 1 goods and ship them everywhere all over the galaxy
Tier 1 products "seem" to be the holdup a lot of times in this game
Tier 2/3 are just expensive

A station that makes tier 2/3 materials costs an absolute FORTUNE to build and will take HOURS even at seta going full blast

The fact is there really isnt a "hole" in the market that the player can actively fill and make money even tho a station should theoretically make 1 million an hour it will hardly ever make that even when you fill its goods for "free" a single trade ship will outdo most smaller stations

ships are like you state very expensive small/mediums fill basically no role that a destroyer wont do better and wont need to be replaced so every time you drop 50 ish million on a destroyer boop that is now an effectively unkillable murder machine

a fleet of smalls/mediums that cost 50 million will die basically instantly in a fight cuz the AI isnt the brightest and will suicide one by one in moronic ways

[Pandorian]

Originally posted by thekins:

lots of people have told me a bunch of ways to make "tons of money" doing XYZ it doesnt really work
The fact is there really isnt a "hole" in the market that the player can actively fill and make money even tho a station should theoretically make 1 million an hour it will hardly ever make that even when you fill its goods for "free" a single trade ship will outdo most smaller stations

There are, Egosoft intentionally leaves them there so players have a place to insert themselves in the economy. If there were no hole there would be no way to make money from mining or trading due to that resource being saturated. If there were no hole there'd be no High demand for any good.

If you need help identifying where those are there are plenty of people on the forums willing to help.

[Troa Barton]

There are a bunch of holes in the economy try building something in the midgame and you'll see them. Heck you can make money with a storage container and a few trade ships with trading stations dotted around the map buying stuff cheap and selling higher when a shortage hits. That simple refinery I gave as an example averages around 2.5 mill every 10 minutes.
here's the build if you want it.
http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator?l=@$module-module_gen_prod_antimattercells_01,count:2;,$module-module_gen_prod_graphene_01,count:2;,$module-module_gen_prod_refinedmetals_01,count:2;,$module-module_gen_prod_siliconwafers_01,count:2;,$module-module_gen_prod_superfluidcoolant_01,count:2;,$module-module_ter_prod_computronicsubstrate_01,count:2;,$module-module_ter_prod_metallicmicrolattice_01,count:2;,$module-module_ter_prod_siliconcarbide_01,count:2;,$module-module_gen_prod_energycells_01,count:3;,$module-module_ter_prod_energycells_01,count:16
sorry long link, and it would be more profitable with personnel.

[thekins]

The very nature of the way the economy works in X4 means producing items really doesnt make too much money
if you produce A > B > C then sell C you are missing out on the money A > B made not sure how to put that into "economic" terms
The economy works perfectly fine without you lifting a finger in terms of production there is more money to be made shipping A so that it is refined to B such that B fills up in an NPC station where you then buy B at a reduced price so that you can sell it to a station which makes C and the cycle continues.
One major problem is the way the NPCs view goods in terms of breakpoints
if it has 100 it will sell it at a ridiculous price you would never make profit on but the second it has 101 now its profitable to move said goods.

As far as "finding a hole" its pointless to try and fill it it doesnt scale at all
for example i saw a sector BEGGING for food
so i said aight heres a station it makes food the sector needed lets say 2k food per hour i made 3k and tried to sell the other 1k to whomever felt like grabbing it.
That station made money but it was a joke compared to me just finding a station that had said food buying it and shipping it.
the other problem was the game has traders all over the galaxy just waiting for the chance to sell their food to this sector so my station while being completely capable of providing said good rarely actually provided that good to the sector.

You can say this for pretty much every good in the game save for the higher tier goods but as a result there are significantly less stations looking for high tier goods
volume vrs markup lets say

ive had fully self sufficient stations making S class ships which made money but again not a lot the number one problem is the game needs ships to die in order to open up demand for goods but the galaxy isnt dangerous i was in Argon space and they kinda demolished the xenon at every turn so i couldnt sell them anything unless they lost a ton of small ships.

suffice to say moving goods around is better than making goods and selling
it is VERY easy to saturate an item to the point where it makes next to nothing and the station you built for millions is now useless.

as an example you make refined metal plates ahh cool now no one wants for RMP so you make hull parts now no one wants hull parts then you need to branch off into XYZ your station is now worth 300 million+ but makes a few million an hour where just simply buying trade ships would cost less and make pretty much the same amount

[Troa Barton]

Give VRO a whirl my dude, before you can afford a medium combat ship the galactic consortium will be out of hull parts.

[Pandorian]

Originally posted by thekins:

The economy works perfectly fine without you lifting a finger in terms of production there is more money to be made shipping A so that it is refined to B such that B fills up in an NPC station where you then buy B at a reduced price so that you can sell it to a station which makes C and the cycle continues.

As far as "finding a hole" its pointless to try and fill it it doesnt scale at all
for example i saw a sector BEGGING for food
so i said aight heres a station it makes food the sector needed lets say 2k food per hour i made 3k and tried to sell the other 1k to whomever felt like grabbing it.
That station made money but it was a joke compared to me just finding a station that had said food buying it and shipping it.

ive had fully self sufficient stations making S class ships which made money but again not a lot the number one problem is the game needs ships to die in order to open up demand for goods but the galaxy isnt dangerous i was in Argon space and they kinda demolished the xenon at every turn so i couldnt sell them anything unless they lost a ton of small ships.

suffice to say moving goods around is better than making goods and selling
it is VERY easy to saturate an item to the point where it makes next to nothing and the station you built for millions is now useless.

I've shortened the quote but you literally went from describing a hole in the economy "Transporting goods from A>B" to saying looking for holes are pointless because of food.
You say you lose out on money by building production chains then say you have a fully self sufficient station that makes S class ships. You finally end with describing a hole in the economy which is transporting goods.

With you previously citing a station that theoretically could make 1 million an hour(which is quite low) and now also citing food I don't think you've fully grasped how the economy works. The pieces are there but you haven't put them together yet.

---
Here are my rules/steps for economic dominance. Hopefully someone can get ideas/inspiration from them or even offer refinements.

1. The galaxy is in dire need of transport ships and ore/silicon mining ships. Fill this demand to make money. (I left out ice intentionally.)
2. Building production stations instead of doing #1 loses you potential profit from selling to those stations. In exchange you flood the market with a finished good.
3. Flooding the market with finished goods loses you money when the demand isn't constant.
4. Doing only #1 WILL expose holes in the economy. There are not enough AI generated stations to fill the full military demand of factions at war.
5. Building a production station for the hole made in #4 WON'T flood the market as in #2/#3 and you won't lose money as there is a demand that CANNOT be met without player intervention.
6. Using extra/cheap goods from doing #1 you can build a minimalist station for #5 thus lowering the cost of #5.
7. If you build habitats and gambling dens on #5 you now start kicking the food economy into gear and can now make huge amounts of goods for cheap because of workforce.
7a) At this point shipyards and wharfs will likely start reaching a full state as you are now supplying EVERY good faster than the ships are being destroyed.
8. With the food economy now cranking away you can now give it the same treatment as #1 and make money mining ice and transporting food.
9. With the whole galaxy now in economic super drive solar cells are a hot commodity. Build a solar station in a high solar area(lower cost, higher output), and set up a distribution chain to the whole galaxy.

Other notable rules to keep in mind:
A. Ships assigned to stations use the experience of the managers to dictate their operating area. So placing a mining/trading station and assigning max subordinates (256) is the same as having 256 max star captains operating in a 5 jump area around the station.
B. If you buy goods when their price is below average (station has large supply), then sell at above average (station has large demand), you will rake in large profits for a long time.
---
Most people I see jump to #8 or #9 without building up the demand for the galaxy. Others only do #2 but to the extreme(self contained stations) or try to skip to #5 without building up the economy needed to sustain it. You CAN make money skipping steps, but usually not as much as people want.

I used those steps to get XTREME Trade rank/achievement on a VANILLA game.