🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 20:43:30 +1200, Peter Huebner <no.one@this.address>
wrote:

>In article <3iro035f1po6dkustuu7hd2ntkgr4b5e58@4ax.com>, 
>nospam_Holinski@shaw.ca says...
>> 
>> Any advice would be appreciated.  :^)
>> 
>
>Hi Jeff, you obviously have more experience than I do (I am just about to crack 
>my first million cash) so ....
>
Nice to hear there's SOMEBODY doing worse than I am in the game.  :^) 

>However, I have to say that I've turned my first mercury (vanilla, not tanker) 
>loose in Empire's Edge as a system trader and he's made around 800,000 in about 
>3 hours of realtime. Last time I looked he was level 10. Of course he's also 
>hugely improved my standing with the Paranid. Had to manually trade energy 
>there before they would even let me dock most stations.
>
>I find there's a lot of advantage in speed. My two traders, the said Mercury (~
>3200 cargo space) and the Tucan (?)(1000 cargo space)  I have, both have 
>improved their performance out of sight after I got their speed cranked up to 
>max. Have to beat those supertankers to the good bargains!
>
>I have read that traders, especially universe traders, can get stuck in stupid 
>unprofitable loops and supposedly you can fix it by re-initializing them. I 
>don't _think_ the pilot will lose his experience level that way. 
>
>Do you have some navigation satellites scattered about? I am not sure if the AI 
>pilots look at that info --- come to think of it, I think they start using that 
>info from a certain level onwards.
>
Well, it looks like my trading pilot finally managed to extract his
head from his ass and start making some money. He managed to make
about 2 mil while I was at work today. 

For some reason he seems to want to work the systems south of Teladi
space. I've sent him back to Argon Prime twice and told him to
universe trade and he seems to soon make his way back to this area.
I'm surprised he's survived since last night. I see a lot of pirates
in this area and there are a bunch of pirate systems just south of
here.
I'm about ready to get another copy of the Mk3 software for the
mercury and see how a small fast ship does. It's just sitting now
anyways.

If you're still around your first mil you may want to get a 2nd cargo
ship and do some trading yourself. I find bigger is better when I'm
flying.
If you can afford one the Mercury Super Freighter is pretty cool. They
sell for about 1.3m, can do 72m/sec with full upgrading. They start at
8850m of cargo space and go up to 11800m with ful expansion.

Running a high volume item like sunrise flowers you can make 253k per
run on the unexpanded ship or 339k per run on the fully expanded ship.
This assumes 100m of energy cells to feed the jump drive and that
you're buying at 5 and selling at 34.
If you want a Super Freighter you'll need to go to the Argon shipyard
at Omicron Lyrae. It's way southeast of Argon Prime. You need to go
through split space starting at Family Whi and heading southeast.

If you can't afford the Super Freighter, you can still do pretty good
with the Teladi Vulture Hauler. It starts with 7000m cargo and can be
expanded to 9000m. It only does 63m/sec with full upgrade though.
They're only about 600k

Once you get your big ship I've found I can do pretty well with these
items:
Sunrise flowers. Buy at flower farms, sell at sun oil refineries.
Minimum buy price is 5 and max sell price is 34 for a profit of 29 per
meter.
Scruffin fruits. Buy at scruffin farms, sell at massom mills. Minimum
buy price is about 7 max sell price is 32 for a profit of 25 per
meter.

Silicone wafers. Buy at silicon mine, sell at chip plant. Minimum buy
price is about 223 and max sell price is about 776 for a profit of
about 553 per unit. But they're 18 cubic meters each so that drops the
profit down to about 30 per meter. Also, chip plants have limited buy
quantities so you probably can't sell an entire load at one station. 

Of course you'll want to use a jump drive for trading and I usually
try to fill up on energy cells for the return leg of my trading runs.
There's always some profit on them and often at the station you were
going to anyways. You need to buy then anyways to fuel the jump drive
so you may as well get extra and sell them at a profit.
 It also helps to buy a docking computer. This will let you insta-dock
once you get within 5km.

As you mentioned, satellites are pretty much a requirement. I drop one
in pretty much every system I go through now, but if cost is an issue,
plant them in systems where you want to trade first. 
By the way, if you have the best buy/best sell software you can use it
in other systems by going through the satellites command screen.


>As for making money off combat:
>Me, I've had absolutely no luck trying to capture ships. The only time I've 
>been lucky and had a pirate eject, I was still a raw newb and didn't know that 
>you can not reduce speed with a menu open, susequently I smacked into an 
>obstacle and died while frantically pressing x and z keys trying to remember 
>which one of the two slows you down. Heh. Only time anything ever ejected for 
>me. It's a good way of quickly boosting your rep with a race though - that's 
>how I got the Paranid to start opening their stations to me.
>
>Trying to figure out what would be a better combat ship that my startup-Buster.
>The moment I try to take on any group that has an M3+2@M5 or a couple of M4s in 
>it I am toast. <sigh> Do you take other ships along as support craft?
>
>Any insights you would like to share in return, will be appreciated ;-)
>
>-P.
As for capturing ships, don't even bother to try. Just try to  kill
the ship and stop shooting if he bails. They never surrender so the
comm screen is pointless in battle and going easy and giving him a
chance to bail will just get you killed. 
So far I've only captured 3 ships. A pair of Falcons (m3) and an M5.
Don't recall which one. All of the ships were severly damaged by the
time the pilot bailed. (less than 50% hull and no modules left)
Of course in X3, repairing 50% hull damage costs half the value of the
ship so most often it's better to just sell them rather than fix them.

Surprisingly, all of the captures have happened when I was flying an
M5. I've got a Discoverer Hauler that I got for exploring. It does
363m/sec with a full upgrade. I use 4 identical ships as wingmen. I
usually just tell them to protect me and forget about them till after
the battle.  They're pretty good against 1 or 2 ships, but if I go
after a group of 3 pirates I always lose at least one of them and have
to reload.  :^(
You also have to be carefull when docking. They have a habit of flying
into the side of the station and they never survive a full speed
impact with anything.

I recently switched to a Split Jaguar Raider for exploring. This ship
will do 593m/sec with the full upgrade. As far as I know it's the
fastest ship in the unmodded game. It's only got a single 1mj sheild
so you'll die if anyone even frowns in your direction, but I've still
managed to kill a few ships with it. If you want one you'll need to go
to the shipyard in Cho's Defeat and you'll need decent relations with
the split. Like most M5's they're about 100k equipped.

Currently I"m playing around with trading and am working towards an
M6. Once I get that I'll start looking at the story missions again.
:^)


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Jeff H........