I need some advice spending 200.000.000

[sebbelino]

I managed to save up quite a (for me) hefty sum. Part of me is tempted to buy a huge fleet and push back Xenon to secure some sectors but the Xenon I's scare me. Not sure a huge army will stand against multiple Xenon I's. Any suggestions?

[conrado.lacerda]

I would suggest first making sure that the wharves and shipyards where you plan on buying your ships are well supplied, or else it's going to be very expensive and there will be a lot of waiting.

[Venerable_Sin]

Expand your station trading.

I think it's time for you to increase your passive income for even larger sums of cash. The largest, somewhat/sometimes actively managed, passive income is station trading. From there the galaxy will be your playground.

[Arkabanjo]

If you haven't already, you could invest in a S/M shipyard, blueprints, and a supporting logistics chain to be able to build your own fleet and more cost-effectively replace losses. You may need to save up a little more to do so, but if you start with the supporting stations you could sell the high-tech wares to finance the shipyard blueprint (quite expensive).

If you just want to buy some ships and fight, here is what has worked for me:

Against Xenon battleships: Use around 40 Heavy Fighters with exploding mortars MK2 to take out Xenon I's and K's with ease. Build another 20 regular fighters to guard them against enemy strike craft. Assign your bombers to the fleet using Attack command (not bombard) and the fighters to the Intercept command. Manually give your bombers the command to attack surface elements -> Turrets to minimize your losses. I personally like the Split Raptor as a Carrier because of its high S-tier Fighter capacity.

Against Xenon stations: This can be frustrating if you don't micromanage the turrets of your destroyers as they tend to fly too close and get annihilated by those graviton cannons (around 5km range). They do that to get their M turrets into range and then get taken out in seconds. Be sure to change your turrets from 'Attack all Enemies' to 'Only Attack Fighters' or 'Defense' or just deactivate all turrets before giving the attack command. Put Plasma cannons on the L turrets and set them to 'Only attack Capital ships', that counts for stations, too, and they outrange the graviton cannons.

A mass of bombers will do a decent job against most Xenon stations except their Shipyards and Spacedocks. To attack those stations, I use a few Behemoths E with their turrets set to disabled.

A Split Rattlesnake is a great player ship against the Xenon, just stay out of their turret range as you won't survive a lot of hits. A trade off for its great offensive power. Use the VE-zoom to manually select enemy turrets, then unload your main batteries on one turret after another (you will have a little over 6km range, so only 1km more than them).

There is a story mission to clear out Tharka's Cascade and neighboring Xenon sectors if you want to complete a quest while fighting.

[zpc]

You should invest in a S/M wharf for sure - you don't need complexes for the goods - the NPC economy can provide you to build your own ships and get some nice profits from NPCs buying your ships. Just place it near the highway and at a junction where many races are connected (especially those waging war with each other ^^)

After that, next step is to buy L and XL shipyards to build those nice Terran destroyers & battleships [which is the only possibility to get those besides boarding them].

[sebbelino]

Thanks!

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Originally posted by zpc:

You should invest in a S/M wharf for sure - you don't need complexes for the goods - the NPC economy can provide you to build your own ships and get some nice profits from NPCs buying your ships. Just place it near the highway and at a junction where many races are connected (especially those waging war with each other ^^)

After that, next step is to buy L and XL shipyards to build those nice Terran destroyers & battleships [which is the only possibility to get those besides boarding them].

Totally agree. Getting a Wharf and Shipyard self sufficient is more than just the parts... I would add to your [zpc] comments that making those facilities big enough to build a small fleet in one go [ie all those extra storage bins] will help you get Faction orders later AND make the building of your own fleets a lot easier.

On location, I recommend place them about 1 sector away from the enemy incursions and once you have enough money left build up that gates defences.

[Humble]

Yes, you better off investment shipyard or factory station, not fleet, as fleet isn't one time, but repent need fund all the time when resupply need more, or ship got destroyed and need replaced, so there is no one time I win button invincible, even Aagard, I assumed it's might cost 2 billion all together to get product working from there at very least, buy ship and weapon bluepirnt (of course someone suggest steal, but I like to roleplaying honorable guy, not thief type) and build shipyard and all resource it need to product.

[db48x]

Do the story missions. End the Paranid Civil War, or make the Argon declare war on Terra, etc.

[Azunai]

200 million is not enough, imo. I pushed the xenon out of multiple sectors and by far the most reliable way to deal with their K and I battleships is to bring a terran Asgard battleship. The main gun of an asgard deletes a K or I from full shield and HP to dead within seconds. It takes a while to cool down but the firepower is staggering. They are also pretty good at deleting stations.

I don't think you can order an asgard from NPC shipyards, so you need an XL shipyard Module and the blueprints for the Asgard and the weapons. Those alone items are like 500 millions or more.

For now i'd suggest plugging all Xenon jumpgates with defense stations to hold them off while you prepare. A few (maybe 5 or so per station) defense discs with L plasma, L beam an M flak can hold off pretty much any invasion. Not super expensive either (5 millions per station or so). You can even make money from them by setting a fast scout on repeat orders (collect drops and deposit Drops so they pick up all the items and ferry them to your HQ when they have nothing better to do). Then you occasionally visit the HQ, get all the items and sell them at the next pirate harbor. Can earn you millions quickly.

Once you have the defense secured, you can build up your infrastructure so you can mass produce whatever fleets you want and have some fun playing the game like an RTS

[Der Zed]

From my experience so far:
The worst thing you can do is attacking the xenon yourself and especially their capital ships. The entire game economy is build around npc ships getting destroyed so

less xenon ships -> less faction ships/stations destroyed -> less demand of ships and ressources

For me what worked best was:

1) wharf in 2nd contact flashpoint set to only sell to ARG and ANT while using closed loop production, so only ecells, hupp parts and claytronics are needed. With all the xenon and hop ships attacking the sector, the average lifetime of a s/m ship produced in that wharf is less than 10 minutes, you can expand this wharf later to make infinite+2 cash after finishing the paranid civil war story

2) Let the xenon destroy all HAT stations in hatikvahs choice (or destroy the admin modules yourself) so ARG will capture the sector, this will lead to ARG pushing hard into tharkas cascade and family zhin, causing losses due to battling xenon and ZYA forces

3) While 2) is happening you can build a 2nd wharf + supplier stations in ZYA territory so that you are supplying both sides with ships in the end

-> Important: Keep an eye on all ongoing faction conflicts so you can ban the faction from purchasing ships once they get the upper hand -> the other side will push them back into a stalemate -> repeat the entire process

[Humble]

Originally posted by Der Zed:

From my experience so far:
The worst thing you can do is attacking the xenon yourself and especially their capital ships. The entire game economy is build around npc ships getting destroyed so

less xenon ships -> less faction ships/stations destroyed -> less demand of ships and ressources

For me what worked best was:

1) wharf in 2nd contact flashpoint set to only sell to ARG and ANT while using closed loop production, so only ecells, hupp parts and claytronics are needed. With all the xenon and hop ships attacking the sector, the average lifetime of a s/m ship produced in that wharf is less than 10 minutes, you can expand this wharf later to make infinite+2 cash after finishing the paranid civil war story

2) Let the xenon destroy all HAT stations in hatikvahs choice (or destroy the admin modules yourself) so ARG will capture the sector, this will lead to ARG pushing hard into tharkas cascade and family zhin, causing losses due to battling xenon and ZYA forces

3) While 2) is happening you can build a 2nd wharf + supplier stations in ZYA territory so that you are supplying both sides with ships in the end

-> Important: Keep an eye on all ongoing faction conflicts so you can ban the faction from purchasing ships once they get the upper hand -> the other side will push them back into a stalemate -> repeat the entire process

While that might be good for pure profit but problem some player want attack Xenon to collect drop for upgrade ship, at least basic 1 level upgrade. I am doing this set patrol and set station as homebase for fast ship that collect drop from xenon, but problem, you want keep fast ship safe, so you end up ensure strong fleet area where xenon attacking, and less attacking on fast ship where collect drop.

[Gibbo]

You'll have problems with the Xenon with no Asgards and a blueprint for one of them is over a quarter of a billion and another 180 million for the gun and another 150 millionish for mk3 thrusters so as you can see you still have a long way to go.

I'd pump every credit into a shipyard. Those make more than anything once they are up and running and allow you to build your own fleets. Let the Xenon run rampant. You'll enjoy it more later.

[Humble]

To build Asgards and set up station of everything resource and product, along buy blueprint (if role playing honorable, it's took 2 billion every time, more or less, but if steal blueprint, I would get it's might took one billion less, (Not just Asgards but shield bluprint, weapon blueprint and all other sort of blueprint if one buying, that is.

So it's lot more than billion to get that Asgrad going (I'm not sure player able to steal Asgrad and Asgrad weapon blueprint? I know they can steal station's blueprint, but not all of them.

[Gibbo]

Oh yeah shields cost quite a bit. Everything does for XL ships. I was just trying to give OP some idea of how far away they are. It takes me ages to get Asgards built. I focus on S and M ships to sell to npcs. They don't stop buying them if you have the wares. That's what pays for my Asgards.

A mega shipyard that builds everything itself will earn you a few hundred million in profits every hour? It's hard to say? But about 10 minutes on seta and I have hundreds of millions of profit so it's well worth doing. Takes a lot though. 40 hull,weapon and engine parts at least. Same for medkits. Not quite as much for food. You should have about 120,000 workers lol. That's what my shipyards are.

[sebbelino]

Thanks for all the tips!