Station construction and operation

[RJS]

I've carved out my own system, kind of a starter to learn more as it's only in naonite territory, and built a Shipyard, asteroid mine and resource station.
I used shipyard built freighters as station founders, and not very large ones.

My questions include how do yall fit your stations? What should I add when I transform the freighter to station?
So far I've: Fit a few subsystems, for weapons, shield, energy etc. (I know to appoint captain arm it and set autopilot attack all enemies). Anything else?
I added: Cargo, crew quarters, dock tubes, energy and en. storage, armor, shields. Just randomly, I don't know what I'm aiming for.
Do things like inertia dampeners have any effect on a station (like when I crash my ship into it)
Any settings I'm supposed to set up?
What about weapons, do they just have to be put on every side to cover every field of fire and do npc's take advantage of blind spots?
These are vanilla service stations, btw, I've read about manufacturing (like the 3-station steel factory) but haven't got there yet until closer to center.

The noble metals mining station: same things, cargo (more since it's producing stuff), armor shields energy etc.
The settings on the mine I'm not understanding are:

Buy goods from others
Sell goods to others
Actively request goods
Actively sell goods

I don't know whether these refer to the 'trade goods' or the gold/platinum that the mine is producing and I'm hoping for faction traders to buy straight from station.
What should the settings be? Will faction traders buy/sell the 'trade goods' as well if I check all the boxes?

Also the default base price, I've noticed it to be auto-set, should I mess with it when I found an asteroid mine or is it already set proper to reflect the supply/demand for sector?

An unrelated question, how does respawning work? If I strip out all the minerals in a sector, like my home base sector, how long before it's fully replenished?

Thanks!

[RJS]

One additional question-
Do regular crew grow in experience when they get auto-assigned to specialized positions?
If I have massive crew quarters on my station, or a ship, can I raid faction stations to recruit all their specialized crew en mass and just kinda store them for a ship/station building spree? Is that a decent strategy besides the upkeep of paying them?

[Fairin the Drakitty]

my preface when answering questions like this, i only play on insane, i don't use super gamechanging mods just some ui things and that one adventuring subsystem cause i hate collecting lootboxes manually or with fighters.


1) (how do i fit all my stations?) - i always transform it to the station i built, im boring like that, all my stations look the same, there are 2, the motherstation and the stations that dock to the motherstation. (using a tug ship with tons of manuverability)
1a) my stations do not have weapons subsystems or captains or even fighters (since being docked disables all of them anyway) the motherstation is always a station i don't want to actively sell its goods like a energy station, i'll use all of those for my production line, just so the station can stay in transport mode (so i can dock other stations to it)

2)(what to put on the stations?) the max cargo space per station varies - i find 25k to be a very decent amount of cargo room, the only thing else that matters is crew quarters and Health from **insert your highest tier stone**, not rich stone just stone is fine, each station needs at least 1 dock, i don't really see a benefit for having more than one. since they push each other away if they can "see" each other in the docking area.

2a) my motherstation has hangars and assembleys to manufacture fighters as fast as possible, this is **VERY** expensive so i only feel like doing it once, its also the only station with shields, and just enough incase a few stray shots fly their way, around 100k. which is enough for the fighters to be deployed and any patrol ships engage, even on insane difficulty outside the barrier.

2b) (Inerta dampeners?) no, stations don't move easily and stop quickly if they are.

2c) (Advanced midgametip) my Turret station uses teleportation software, at least 10km worth (stacking) and can interact with all the other stations on the motherstation inorder to buy parts to make turrets so it eliminates the annoyance of doing it with a ship.

2d) (the best tip) since stations can only have 3 delivery and 3 fetch requests, you should keep that in mind, if my corn station can fetch its energy and water, then my energy and water stations do not need to deliver to my corn station, and if my corn station can deliver to my carbon station, it doesn't need to fetch ect... this seemingly simple example applies when suddenly a station needs 6 somethings from various stations, and some of those stations are so needed you might be better off making a second one.

3)(settings on stations?) each situation varies, i.e. if im making carbon for my steel XXL factory and i have too much carbon, then i will contract one of my merchant fleets to sell my excess goods, if i am lazy i will openly sell it, which could end up hurting my steel production. ps, im usually lazy about this.

4) (Protecting your station?) - the ship set to attack all enemies handles attacks on the stations sector, if the ship cannot handle the largest wave of xotan by itself, on insane difficulty leave 2 warships with 5 groups of combat fighters at minimum, **you can afford warships if you can afford stations you absolutely have to defend**

4a) use the energy suppression satalite in your sector(s), 10 hour duration and 100k to prevent 99% of attacks.

5) (not making stations till the border?) - you can move stations, its a pain, but doable, everyone that says "wait till the boundry to build stations" plays on normal diff =)

6) (Buy / sell / active ?) Mines (and some other stations) have the option to assist the area increasing demand by requesting goods to buy (like acid mining drones solvents ect) the station does not need these to function, it is solely to increase demand and keep the economy flowing, in your example of a mine requesting goods **and** switching the tab to trade goods and clicking the box in the upper right of the UI to allow traders to sell to this station allows you to increase demand and make a little profit on the side, it is off by default for **you** to supply to your station and have an end result for those products.

6a) if your station buys say, acid, its population will use the acid (deleting it from the world) and pay you for it, to the tune of 5 to 10% extra from what the going price is, so you make a little on the side for increasing demand, **be mindful that it takes somewhere in the area of 30 million creds and an hour to fill a single mining station via npc traders** and the payoff is random, i would not check this box personally until im rolling in money passively incomming

6b) As for other stations using buy/sell/active they're literal, do i want my coal mine selling to NPCS or do i want to save it all for my steel production and manually tell my merchant fleet to off my product to the locals around?

6c) You can make habitats casinos and whatnot **explictly** to increase demand of everything in a large radius around the sector, if something is not profitable you actually can (eventually) make it profitable

6d) THE primary difference in sell goods and actively sell goods is how often a trader will come to buy the stations wares, if playing co-operatively you need at least the normal sells goods to sell to other players, so i'd say thats the biggest difference in actively attracting npc's and just offering it for sale. and vice-versa

7) (Auto priceing?) time to practice capitalism, too high price and you don't sell any, too low price and you cant keep it in stock, find a happy middle ground in your galactic area, or increase demand and upcharge that 30% **i tend to leave this alone**



8)(bonus asteroid question) The Wiki says when less than 1.5% of the roids are mined including hidden ones, personally i've never timed it as i tend to move my roaming locusts around when building up resources for the next area, by midgame (when i got just enough and a new mining laser to make into fighters) i switch to map order mining which doesn't suffer from "cant find anymore asteriods"

8a) there is a mod for detecting a respawning asteroid field, i've never used it as im not sure if its even viable in this update as i've never had an issue of running out of asteroids for long periods of time.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

Originally posted by RJS:

One additional question-
Do regular crew grow in experience when they get auto-assigned to specialized positions?
If I have massive crew quarters on my station, or a ship, can I raid faction stations to recruit all their specialized crew en mass and just kinda store them for a ship/station building spree? Is that a decent strategy besides the upkeep of paying them?

i am not saying don't hire the specalists. i tend to fill my ships out with specalists then forget about them tbh, if i want 200% i get 200% repair/manuverability and crew skill is not relevant to me... however keep in mind that...

the only crew that experience matters in are pilots,

untrained crew do not gain experience

theres no reason to have trained crew in any job other than pilots on ships you are not going to actively pilot,

increased hull regen is great before shields

increased manuverability is great for the ship your piloting or may want to pilot.

but i'd never **ever** store experienced crew somewhere incase i needed them,

Minmaxing for the perfect crew to save on crew quarters space ends up in pain getting you that extra 1k shields at the expense of "oh damnit i rescued this captain and now theres a red thingy for crew morale

im not even bothering to mention cost, it should never matter unless you suddenly field a subsystem 15+ flagship that costs a million every 3 hours to maintain and you somehow don't have ten times that in passive income.

[RJS]

Good stuff thanks

[RJS]

One question I have is for regular player owned stations that like a trading post etc, and others that have a trade goods tab (repair dock, shipyard, resource depot) is there any interaction to do with trade settings. I can't find any similar to a mine. My new trading post for example just sits there with no inventory, and no menus or settings I can find to have it buy/sell etc. Do they do stuff? Will NPC's eventually start selling goods to them and then buying also?

[LORDSOL]

engines and dampeners can be transmuted thrusters will do the station keeping

[Bobucles]

Pirates will spawn and raid your stations anywhere. They are leveled to the region, so for the best safety put your stations on the rim.

Only a handful of stations need to be placed near the core. Research, turret fabs and equipment docks are all as strong as the zone they're in. This also places them at the greatest risk from raids.

For station defense, thick walls of rock are cheap and give tons of core HP. Seeker turrets are generally the most versatile and long range, but keep a battleship handy to mop up what they miss. Stations don't seem to have any unique weapon bonuses so giving them full coverage is always a disadvantage against mobile ships.

[Hashy1000]

I like to put about 40 stations in a sector but there is really no limit, if this means moving asteroids/mines its worth the effort.

Use a trading subsystem and study the overview and pick a good product/ in demand to build into a station

I like to apply the whole supply chain to what product i am building, you can use the website to do this

https://avofactory.scrap-yard.org/en/factory-overview.html

"Buy goods from others
Sell goods to others
Actively request goods
Actively sell goods"

that way I only have sell goods to others and Actively sell goods turned on.

I like to have 1 main station in the sector, usually a shipyard, which i turn on the passive trading, this will be the only station that needs a captain and can be set on auto pilot to attack all enemies,

when you get hangers this station will protect the whole sector with fighters automatically.

Its best if your sector is near a scrapyard then all the materials from the scrapped turrets can be stored in the station, makes it easier to get the materials to build turrets (even better if you dock multiple turrets factories to the shipyard(drop station))

another good tip is to make big assemblies at your station and build all fighter at the station and transfer to carriers for mining etc ( 2 mins build times instead of 20-30 mins per fighter)

the same goes for cloning and academies, all only in that main station( any new ships get upgraded staff transferred straight over)