Anyone know of any mods that make the galactic economy more reasonable?

[Commander Raymond]

I want to get back into this game but the wall i keep running into is the very low income returns of ships going on missions and stations now feeling like they no longer are viable as they are so expensive to upkeep, buy and maintain along with defend. is there any mods out there anyone knows of that makes/allows me to tune the economy at all?

[Slartibartfast]

The market is as big as your galaxy. Board pirates and apply your merchant ship design, supply the captain and you can have as many running as your machine can handle. The main issue is the micromanaging of every single one, and the eventual build up of goods in the hold every time they get attacked. I don't think there is a resume command. Just more micromanaging,

I thus only run 3 merchants and average just over a Million per trip. Since most trading missions take 15 minutes could get 3~4Mx3 per (usually too busy to get 4 done) hour. Multiply your factories and mines for fully automated making your own economy!

[rickcarson]

NB: trade ships tend to do better inside the core territory areas of a faction.

Stations are kind of slow, but their return is definitely positive if you're 'doing it right' (apologies for sounding like a gate-keeper ... though I am ancient, so ... an ancient gate-keeper??? It'd be on-brand)

If you're not making money off stations I'd guess you tried building a chain, and somewhere along the chain there's a bottleneck that you're somehow not accounting for. Or you're relying on NPC traders to turn up and supply you but when they do it's only in small amounts.

Oh, that reminds me - build stations closer to the core than you think they need to be. It effects NPC trader cargo size, and that affects how much they bring and take away, which directly impacts profitability.

That said ... sometimes maybe you just have to send around a space-whale (50k+ cargo) and do an inventory clean-out (i.e. load it up with the backlog and then just sell it with a sell mission).

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Scavenging missions used to be great, but then got hit with a nerf bat about ten times during the early days of 2.0 and 2.1 and IIRC even 2.2. That said ... according to the code there's a non-zero chance that the mission will fill your hold with high end trading goods ...??? So doing a salvage mission and then a sell mission might be a better way of assessing the overall effectiveness??? I dunno. My understanding is that the number of subsystems they find is capped low and time based. But it will be (IIRC) ~20% higher for an actual proper salvager captain.

Mining missions _are_ great and if you say they're not that's a filthy lie :D

The thing with mining missions is there's a whole bunch of hints in the UI about how to improve your yield but it never really comes out and says what exactly you should do.

E.g. step 1 is to use r mining lasers and _not_ have any salvaging lasers _at all_.*
Step 2: use a mining captain
Step 3: use a mining subsystem
Step 4: scout the area first with an explorer
Step 5: have adequate cargo space
Step 6: make sure the mining lasers are the appropriate material (i.e. if you're in the trinium area they should be trinium or higher (you _can_ mine in trinium with naonite mining lasers but for the same dps the naonite ones _will_ be slower)
Step 7: perks matter, but good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck figuring out how/why
Step 8: stack your miners for protection

(etc.)

Individually each of those things might only be worth an extra 10% (apart from #8 -> it doesn't increase your yield, just drops your ambush chance), but collectively they're basically doubling (or more!) your return from the mission.

Then we come to area selection, which like #1 can in itself basically double your yield. Yes the ambush chance is lower in core territory areas, (but see #8) but mining in the periphery can basically double (or more!) your yield. So (essentially) you want no overlap between your miners and your traders.

Also, the game doesn't hit you over the head with the _need_ to scout mission the area first, _until_ you compare the results from doing it vs not doing it, and then it'll make a believer out of you.

*NB: this bit I haven't been able to confirm, and I've looked at the code and I've looked at the code _specifically_ looking for it (to be fair my lua is not great). But other people swear on a stack of Unix manuals that it's true ... so I believe them.

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There's another type of mission - where basically the captain goes off and has a short choose your own adventure in the background and _might_ come back with a blueprint or something else... and I _think_ that mission type only exists to 'juice' the creativity of the modding community, i.e. it's just there to show what can be done... but in terms of actual returns it's _terrible_. So if you hate those I don't blame you. :D

[rickcarson]

On the topic of mods to use, I hear there's one where the traders repeat their trade loops by an amount scaling with their level. But I hear the guy maintaining it is a bit of an arsehole. So if that doesn't matter to you and you want your traders to do more than 2 legs without having to repeatedly order them what to do then that can increase your hands off time. NB: there's an obvious trade-off there, because if you send them on a bad or average trade route then that time _also_ gets multiplied. And good trade routes go fallow after being used. So in the _long_ run there's no great advantage to multiplying the length of the runs, other than just reducing the amount of fiddly overhead.

NB: by default the base trade runs have an extremely high probability of bombing out after 2 legs. So if you're doing vanilla, try to make sure that you can do the entire trade in 2 legs max.

In order to speed up the trade run you're looking for these three perks:

(1) navigator (universally amazing) (2) reckless (looks ♥♥♥♥♥ but is actually a lot better than it looks and at high (captain) levels the extra ambush chance goes away almost enitrely and it's functionally a second navigator (3) market expert

Also give your ship a decent single jump - jump range.

For profitability there's a bunch of perks like commoner and (IIRC) intimidating which help, and some negative perks which reduce profitability (boo!!!).

I've never done a _proper_ analysis of whether fast beats good, but I think it would be interesting. (The cargo size might also impact that, i.e. if you're trading a very large amount of low profitability goods (energy cells?) but you have the profitability perks then _maybe_ that suddenly becomes amazing?

It's _possible_ to get trade routes over 5mil per leg (i.e. get one with a base of 2.5mil and then crank $$ to the max), but those are relatively rare in my experience. Rather anything over 1.2 mil is pretty good (even for the early game).

The problem with money is that (and this scales with how many ships you have) eventually you're going to hit shields and you might want to spend well over a million credits _per ship_ on a yellow base shield, a yellow % shield, and a yellow (or blue) lightning bolt subsystem (to compensate for the horrible things the % shield will do to your nice neat power generation).

So if you've only got one trader running an 'okay' run, you can spend it just as fast as you make it. Thing is, if you stop spending it for a bit, pretty soon you'll have more than you know what to do with. Oh wait, you're building stations, scratch that, there'll always be more ways to spend money :D

[LM13]

Not sure what you mean by "tune" or "reasonable".
There is dynamic economy added by Xavorion, there are Trade Routes for manual plotting of routes, among stuff that has been already mentioned.