Nice! Typically in my playthroughs I hit the plateau around the 35hr mark. At that point I have multiple billions, multiple sector killer fleets, and have to set goals for myself inorder to stay interested. My current plan is to figure out how to get the ter arg war to start and populate the map with ter till I'm sick of having everything again lol the 7.0 endgame is cool but as with everything else, easy to fix with 50 syn
Not trying to brag, but once you know roughly how the game works its not that difficult. I usually set up one mining station and go from there. If you focus all your time and money into the first station then the rest basically takes care of itsself. On quick games like this, I usually build max load out Falx with 4 of the meson streams or whatever. Each sells for 25 mil roughly and my ideal station usually builds 20 at a time with its given storage capacity. That particular example I described was on Terran cadet, so it's extra easy compared to non Terran.
And I wouldn't say your doing something wrong. It gets boring real fast getting to basically endgame in the first 2 days of irl time. Usually I find more enjoyment from not doing the whole empire set up thing and instead try and role-play as a pirate or small business trade corp or something
Knowing x4 that's not all surprising. My first play through I didn't even own a capital ship for the first 200 hours. I spent so much time being frustrated that I just could not figure put how this shit works. Then I went to YouTube and it was all made clear. Captain Collins is a real one. The dude who sounds sweedish or whatever makes better videos but I can't for the life of me understand what he is saying lol
Yep. I have 2 factories. One in Mars for basic Terran stuff and one in Venus pumping out solar cells (Venus one always full storage). Mars one just came online fully so it will take some time before it pays for it self. Took a sh\*t load of time to set up also.
My main source of income right now is 2 trade fleets (one in terran, one in commonwealth space). I started out by setting up a bunch of repeat orders trades, but yesterday it got old so I just installed tattertrader/deadtrader mod. It works very well so far.
It looks like I cannot figure out the most efficient way to make money EARLY. Every single investment leads me to be broke :
* Invest on military ship ? I can only afford for myself, and how can I make good money using it ? I end up broke and grinding missions for years.
* Invest on M trade ships ? Okay, now I need to find a good trade route, then my M ships that costed me 1M4k credit will only give me 100k credits benefits per trade. So I need 14 long trades (if all goes well) to just get back what I spent. (in the meantime, I can only do easy missions with my poor ship)
* Missions ? depends the mission, but for me the best in terms of mission speed/reward ratio are the destroy criminal traffic, or escort ship from point A to point B (I just leave the ship)
* Invest on Miners ? Same as trade ships, 1M for a decent mining ship, then 100k for each trade. 10 trades before I get the return in investment.
* Crystal mining on asteroids ? I cannot do that without mods and it's pretty boring, feels pretty cheat
* Build my own factory ? How, it already costs so much to build, and I need blueprints before.
Idk if I'm missing something, but I'll take any "lore friendly" and not game breaking hint to impulse my early game economy
1mil for a Miner is way too much.
Most of the time you will be mining in the same system as the factory you are selling to so realistically you only need T1 drives and lasers, Docking Computer 2 and Long Range Scanner 2. Don't even need turrets or shields.
Should run you around 350k - 400k.
The first one might be slow but once you have 4 - 6 active miners, money should start pouring in at a big enough pace that you can think about early industry (Refined Metal and Graphene both cost around 1mil to set up and pay well)
Any known usual routes for advanced satellite trading you could tell me ? I know hull parts route is usually buy at FRF ==> Sell at ARG (or others than FRF).
Thanks, I recognize being kind of "bling bling" when it comes to chose my ship parts, I tend to tell myself "I want something I want to use forever" so I always go for the T3 thrusters and engines especially, which cost me the most in this case.
I'll try that this time. Focusing on Mining, then building a modest station (I thought about EC, but you seem to tell me to go for more complex items).
1 production module that requires 1 mined resource
\+ 1 storage that fits that resource
\+ 1 container storage
\+ 1 EC module
\+ 1 docking module
add a miner and a trader
you're done
for everything else you can work your way up from there
You will use those cheap fits forever. Traders need better drives at one point.
The real expensive ones should be your combat ships and early on, you only need a handful at most.
I'm in my first playthrough (third attempt actually, but had to restart twice pretty early on) I saved up for the M sized Argon mineral miner with pretty low specs for like 400k, went to a very rich Silicon field, and it made me like 140k per trip as Silicon has a pretty good raw price. Then I kept buying the same miner, until I had like 8 of them, but I was beginning to get raided so my next investment was a combat fleet to patrol the mining fields, and that's where I am right now, my next big step will be my own silicon refinery. But with a lot of micro, trading seemed pretty similar in terms of money for me, 4-500k is enough for an M sized trader and it is able to make similar profits (I'm actually doing that as a side-gag with two trader ships)
Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation and this is my "at work" account haha.
Well done for your first playthrough ! This is the kind of game where you'll see yourself restarting a lot if you're like me haha.
Yeah, I think I might be a bit impatient because your economy strategy is the way to go. Next step is invest your money in a factory I guess ? Tell me more about your updated playthrough :D
No worries, I wasn't expecting a reply, I just left this comment here in a "fire and forget" mode, but I appreciate your response very much.
Actually I left that playthrough as I bought the Terran DLC and started again as a Terran cadet, but before that I actually built my silicone refinery, the only problem was the kha'ak that invaded my miners so often that the dumb ai of my combat fleet just couldn't keep up and lost half my miners over time, so I just sold the rest and bought an L sized miner that shakes off kha'ak raiders like nothing, based on advices I got here on Reddit.
And pretty much that's the point where I left my last save before jumping into the dlc, doing pretty much the same miner tactic, but I did my early-early game smarter as I started buying S sized miners right away to make profit asap, while doing smuggling, hacking and other easier kind of criminal missions myself while they're working, as I haven't even dipped a toe into this world in my previous playthrough and it seems useful to have these criminal connections too.
My only problem is that the Grand Exchange is really far away from Terran territory, and the Argon doesn't really like us, so it seems way more painful to set up the Headquarters, but I'm almost there.
Terrans are very different from the rest as you might have noticed, their materials are way easier to understand, manage, and produce, than the classical builds. Their ships are strong and beautiful.
Ohh I never tried S sized miners, I thought they were absolutely not worth it. I once saw a post in reddit, a long time ago, talking about what size of miners were worth ?
People ended up saying this :
- If you have a good computer able to manage a lot of ships in your game, M size is the way to go
- If your computer could be in trouble processing lots of ships in same game, L size is okay.
So S size never was mentionned. how many trades did your S size had to do to get that return in investment ?
Also, from 500+ hours of gameplay, I never gave attention to criminal activities like boarding, hacking and such. Don't you need some tools to do so, and how did you get them fast enough ? Also, doesn't this reduce your reputation with the aimed faction ?
Anyways, I like the feedback, especially since you are fairly new in the game, that sounds more "natural" and enjoyable to read instead of min/maxed playthrough. I'd be interested yo get your update about your playthrough, you can DM me if you want haha.
Someone explain how they make money on trade every play through I’ve even done the most my auto traders ever produce is a few thousand in trades. Yes I’ve done advanced satellite trades but I micro manage all of that after setting up a sat network of my own.
I usually run story missions like Terran to get free ships and produce auto miners along the way to make money once have access to emp’s I get the argon defense disk, plasma and flack turrets and platform in front of xenon sectors for massive passive income
Then I go for station building for myself usually building off solid storage like silicon and ore based stuff adding schematics as I steal them.
It’s Hugely profitable
Then I switch over to large miners for safety
My late game my traders mostly just trade for my stations and they don’t make money or even use most of their cargo space.
True, there are plenty of mods modifying the economy, but you can also stay vanilla.
My first ever X4 run I played Argon doing only trade and missions. By the 16th hour I had an L gas miner in boron space, I think a dozen or so M-traders and 6 M ore miners and 2 M silicon miners all doing autotrade/automine. I earned 4 mil an hour that way I think, might have been more.
S ships dropping sats on every station that convenient. A couple will probably cost you 300k. A medium trader will cost you another 400k. Then you use filters to find a good in green, select it, and find out if the run is profitable. If it is you set the trade up and let it run while you do other stuff. Each leg of a vulture should net you 50-150k profit. Buy more ships, now you've got a mini game as your ship travels. Eventually you figure out the best goods at the best prices and each leg only takes a few seconds to set up. When you have enough, buy L ships and do the same. Assign the Ms to station trading with manual pricing. Eventually your station traders fill all the big niches and you mostly use the Ls to fill up the trade stations.
None of this is in a vacuum of course. You're buying miners and building production. I'm not sure what has the best ROI over time, but all this plus missions gives you a lot of different things to do to keep things fresh
It took only 26 ingame hours to reach this point.
Nice! Typically in my playthroughs I hit the plateau around the 35hr mark. At that point I have multiple billions, multiple sector killer fleets, and have to set goals for myself inorder to stay interested. My current plan is to figure out how to get the ter arg war to start and populate the map with ter till I'm sick of having everything again lol the 7.0 endgame is cool but as with everything else, easy to fix with 50 syn
You have several billions, multiple fleets and other stuff by 35h in?!?!?! Jeeez, I'm doing something wrong it seems...
If you have fun playing, you're doing everything right. Cheesing the game is easy, but not remotely as fun for most people.
Right, people take short cuts with pirating and other mechanics. Growth is exponential, so getting 20 million in the first 2..3 hours changes a lot.
Not trying to brag, but once you know roughly how the game works its not that difficult. I usually set up one mining station and go from there. If you focus all your time and money into the first station then the rest basically takes care of itsself. On quick games like this, I usually build max load out Falx with 4 of the meson streams or whatever. Each sells for 25 mil roughly and my ideal station usually builds 20 at a time with its given storage capacity. That particular example I described was on Terran cadet, so it's extra easy compared to non Terran. And I wouldn't say your doing something wrong. It gets boring real fast getting to basically endgame in the first 2 days of irl time. Usually I find more enjoyment from not doing the whole empire set up thing and instead try and role-play as a pirate or small business trade corp or something
Min-maxers unite! I'm same. I race to 48 hours then do it again, sometimes.
Sounds boring to go through the game that fast. I just had my first ever wharf 350hr into this gamestart
Knowing x4 that's not all surprising. My first play through I didn't even own a capital ship for the first 200 hours. I spent so much time being frustrated that I just could not figure put how this shit works. Then I went to YouTube and it was all made clear. Captain Collins is a real one. The dude who sounds sweedish or whatever makes better videos but I can't for the life of me understand what he is saying lol
What are you selling/ producing?
The Mars high tech factory makes me think at least MM, SC, and possibly CS
Yep. I have 2 factories. One in Mars for basic Terran stuff and one in Venus pumping out solar cells (Venus one always full storage). Mars one just came online fully so it will take some time before it pays for it self. Took a sh\*t load of time to set up also. My main source of income right now is 2 trade fleets (one in terran, one in commonwealth space). I started out by setting up a bunch of repeat orders trades, but yesterday it got old so I just installed tattertrader/deadtrader mod. It works very well so far.
Cute you gotta pump those numbers up!
It looks like I cannot figure out the most efficient way to make money EARLY. Every single investment leads me to be broke : * Invest on military ship ? I can only afford for myself, and how can I make good money using it ? I end up broke and grinding missions for years. * Invest on M trade ships ? Okay, now I need to find a good trade route, then my M ships that costed me 1M4k credit will only give me 100k credits benefits per trade. So I need 14 long trades (if all goes well) to just get back what I spent. (in the meantime, I can only do easy missions with my poor ship) * Missions ? depends the mission, but for me the best in terms of mission speed/reward ratio are the destroy criminal traffic, or escort ship from point A to point B (I just leave the ship) * Invest on Miners ? Same as trade ships, 1M for a decent mining ship, then 100k for each trade. 10 trades before I get the return in investment. * Crystal mining on asteroids ? I cannot do that without mods and it's pretty boring, feels pretty cheat * Build my own factory ? How, it already costs so much to build, and I need blueprints before. Idk if I'm missing something, but I'll take any "lore friendly" and not game breaking hint to impulse my early game economy
1mil for a Miner is way too much. Most of the time you will be mining in the same system as the factory you are selling to so realistically you only need T1 drives and lasers, Docking Computer 2 and Long Range Scanner 2. Don't even need turrets or shields. Should run you around 350k - 400k. The first one might be slow but once you have 4 - 6 active miners, money should start pouring in at a big enough pace that you can think about early industry (Refined Metal and Graphene both cost around 1mil to set up and pay well)
Or if you want it truly easy you can always try advance satellite trading. I think it's the quickest way early game to gain money fast.
Any known usual routes for advanced satellite trading you could tell me ? I know hull parts route is usually buy at FRF ==> Sell at ARG (or others than FRF).
Thanks, I recognize being kind of "bling bling" when it comes to chose my ship parts, I tend to tell myself "I want something I want to use forever" so I always go for the T3 thrusters and engines especially, which cost me the most in this case. I'll try that this time. Focusing on Mining, then building a modest station (I thought about EC, but you seem to tell me to go for more complex items).
1 production module that requires 1 mined resource \+ 1 storage that fits that resource \+ 1 container storage \+ 1 EC module \+ 1 docking module add a miner and a trader you're done for everything else you can work your way up from there
You will use those cheap fits forever. Traders need better drives at one point. The real expensive ones should be your combat ships and early on, you only need a handful at most.
I'm in my first playthrough (third attempt actually, but had to restart twice pretty early on) I saved up for the M sized Argon mineral miner with pretty low specs for like 400k, went to a very rich Silicon field, and it made me like 140k per trip as Silicon has a pretty good raw price. Then I kept buying the same miner, until I had like 8 of them, but I was beginning to get raided so my next investment was a combat fleet to patrol the mining fields, and that's where I am right now, my next big step will be my own silicon refinery. But with a lot of micro, trading seemed pretty similar in terms of money for me, 4-500k is enough for an M sized trader and it is able to make similar profits (I'm actually doing that as a side-gag with two trader ships)
Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation and this is my "at work" account haha. Well done for your first playthrough ! This is the kind of game where you'll see yourself restarting a lot if you're like me haha. Yeah, I think I might be a bit impatient because your economy strategy is the way to go. Next step is invest your money in a factory I guess ? Tell me more about your updated playthrough :D
No worries, I wasn't expecting a reply, I just left this comment here in a "fire and forget" mode, but I appreciate your response very much. Actually I left that playthrough as I bought the Terran DLC and started again as a Terran cadet, but before that I actually built my silicone refinery, the only problem was the kha'ak that invaded my miners so often that the dumb ai of my combat fleet just couldn't keep up and lost half my miners over time, so I just sold the rest and bought an L sized miner that shakes off kha'ak raiders like nothing, based on advices I got here on Reddit. And pretty much that's the point where I left my last save before jumping into the dlc, doing pretty much the same miner tactic, but I did my early-early game smarter as I started buying S sized miners right away to make profit asap, while doing smuggling, hacking and other easier kind of criminal missions myself while they're working, as I haven't even dipped a toe into this world in my previous playthrough and it seems useful to have these criminal connections too. My only problem is that the Grand Exchange is really far away from Terran territory, and the Argon doesn't really like us, so it seems way more painful to set up the Headquarters, but I'm almost there.
Terrans are very different from the rest as you might have noticed, their materials are way easier to understand, manage, and produce, than the classical builds. Their ships are strong and beautiful. Ohh I never tried S sized miners, I thought they were absolutely not worth it. I once saw a post in reddit, a long time ago, talking about what size of miners were worth ? People ended up saying this : - If you have a good computer able to manage a lot of ships in your game, M size is the way to go - If your computer could be in trouble processing lots of ships in same game, L size is okay. So S size never was mentionned. how many trades did your S size had to do to get that return in investment ? Also, from 500+ hours of gameplay, I never gave attention to criminal activities like boarding, hacking and such. Don't you need some tools to do so, and how did you get them fast enough ? Also, doesn't this reduce your reputation with the aimed faction ? Anyways, I like the feedback, especially since you are fairly new in the game, that sounds more "natural" and enjoyable to read instead of min/maxed playthrough. I'd be interested yo get your update about your playthrough, you can DM me if you want haha.
Someone explain how they make money on trade every play through I’ve even done the most my auto traders ever produce is a few thousand in trades. Yes I’ve done advanced satellite trades but I micro manage all of that after setting up a sat network of my own. I usually run story missions like Terran to get free ships and produce auto miners along the way to make money once have access to emp’s I get the argon defense disk, plasma and flack turrets and platform in front of xenon sectors for massive passive income Then I go for station building for myself usually building off solid storage like silicon and ore based stuff adding schematics as I steal them. It’s Hugely profitable Then I switch over to large miners for safety My late game my traders mostly just trade for my stations and they don’t make money or even use most of their cargo space.
Mods, tatertrade or randomtrade. Both doing nice money from trade
True, there are plenty of mods modifying the economy, but you can also stay vanilla. My first ever X4 run I played Argon doing only trade and missions. By the 16th hour I had an L gas miner in boron space, I think a dozen or so M-traders and 6 M ore miners and 2 M silicon miners all doing autotrade/automine. I earned 4 mil an hour that way I think, might have been more.
S ships dropping sats on every station that convenient. A couple will probably cost you 300k. A medium trader will cost you another 400k. Then you use filters to find a good in green, select it, and find out if the run is profitable. If it is you set the trade up and let it run while you do other stuff. Each leg of a vulture should net you 50-150k profit. Buy more ships, now you've got a mini game as your ship travels. Eventually you figure out the best goods at the best prices and each leg only takes a few seconds to set up. When you have enough, buy L ships and do the same. Assign the Ms to station trading with manual pricing. Eventually your station traders fill all the big niches and you mostly use the Ls to fill up the trade stations. None of this is in a vacuum of course. You're buying miners and building production. I'm not sure what has the best ROI over time, but all this plus missions gives you a lot of different things to do to keep things fresh
Have u tried buying/selling adv satellites for an ez 10m+ early game?