Tips for Buying Avarice

[Blown]

(In advance) YES, I know that there have been many topics about this before, but what is the best way to accumulate the 615 million credits for the first bid?

I'm in Game Day 4, and I currently have a Silicon mine in Antigone memorial (supplemented by a silicon miner, with one Jumpdrive-fitted CAG, which is always busy) a Majaglit complex in Home of light, (again, one Jumpdrive-fitted CAG), a Nostrop Complex in Rhonkar's Clouds (see above complexes for ship details), the plot required ore mine, and between 5-7 Universe traders, with between 3-5 million in cash, what investments should I take? (YES, I know UTs are good, but I want to get many, many such investments, and grow the galactic economy, still doing the bala gi missions, but those cost about 47 Million by the end of the day (A TL, and the Argon Trading Station, As I recall anyway)

[Droflek]

Keep building up UT's until you have around 25-30, any more will over-saturate the universe. I prefer to use the Caiman Haulers in Family Rhy for all of my supply and trade ships; they provide a good balance of cargo space and speed.

If you have the bonus pack installed, then I also recommend creating a few fleets of miners. You can procure decent mining ships from Family Pride, and a nice target sector is Seizewell. Just remember, you only need a couple of these ships actually mounted with Mining Drills to break up the main asteroids, the rest can work perfectly well using normal lasers to break up the debris. With 10 ships in a sector, the income from these isn't fast, but it is steady, and every credit helps.

Also try to keep such mining fleets about 8-10 sectors apart radially; more than 6 fleets per game may be too many and result in market oversupply.

[Turricanion]

DO Bala Gi.

Get the Hyperion.

Do as many assassination missions and xenon invasion missions as u can while all your automated traders and factories earn credits. After a little bit xenon invasion missions can net 12 - 60 million credits depending on the number of J's and K's.

Also Assassination missions may suck early on, but eventually start giving u 1 million+ a go. Sometimes up to 6 or 8 million.

Mine like the above poster said, and get UT's.

Dont waste credits yet on the HQ or on a capital ship (unless u really really wanna)

Once all this is happening, and u have a good set of credits, u can try farming xenon. (go to a xenon sector, shoot their big ships, and have anotehr ship pick up all the dropped guns. They have guns that sell for 900,000 credits a go, and ive seen crates drop with 32+ of these type of guns in them.)

And if ur still short, then Nividium mining. (look it up on the forums, its practically a cheat the cash is so easy.)

[maphys]

Mine all those Nividium asteroids and collect the Nividium rock clusters out there. I don't use UTs because I like having an HQ and I have never worked out an easy way to keep them from stuffing it things I don't want. I know there are ways but they all seem like more hassle than the UT is worth! Flood the universe with Space fuel and Space weed - a complex every third sector might just about do it.


M

[Blown]

I said grow the economy, not flood it with narcotics and booze, last thing I need is putting the economy in the toilet because all the space pilots are stoned off their rockers! (could make for a good script actually, flood the universe with the stuff, and pilots start randomly shooting... nobody would notice if the flying went batty.)

Point is, I want to be the good guy, maybe some space fuel, but not flooding it!

besides, those 'weed and fuel super complex' comments come up all the time, I'd rather earn avarice, than cheating for it.

About the mining fleets...

If I attach several CAGs to my mines, and unleash a tethered mining fleet to feed them, how effective would they be?

EDIT: Done one of the XI missions, netted me a tidy 6 Million, invested that in 3 Mercury Super-Freighters, they are running about as UTs at the moment.

[maphys]

Point is, I want to be the good guy, maybe some space fuel, but not flooding it!

So did I until I worked out that the profits were better when you were bad... You could put your complexes in Teladi space where, IIRC, just about everything in is legal. As for cheating - real cheating is scripting in a billion credits. Supplying drunken pilots doesn't even register on that scale!!

Otherwise you'll probably have to go Xenon farming - play hunt the PPC. Most legal factories take quite a bit of time to pay off the initial investment. I run a lot of alien secondaries (i.e. Bo Gas/Scuffin fruit in Argon space because it is used for their food production) but they make money slowly. Add them to ore and silicon mines, use a CAG to buy in e-cells and sell the proceeds. Closed loop complexes are not cost efficient if you are going for money quickly.

The trouble with a 'how to' in this case is that universe will react and change around you and it is different for every game. The only way to make money fast in this case is to look at the local market and supply it. That is why people talk about illegal complexes - they sell anywhere and take some of the headache out of analysing what is missing in each sector and then supplying it.

And if you wanted to be really good-guy then you could sit near your fuel fabs and blow up anyone who trades with it. Then you could claim that the factory is simply a way to lure out those pesky smugglers and you are doing the universe a favour by raking in your 20%.


M

[Poobah]

Self-Sufficient complexes, especially weapons complexes, are great money makers in the ultra long term, but short term you should be looking at XI missions, Assassination Missions, even Taxi Missions at high Trade Rankings and using the Starburst/Arrow are great and will easily bring in millions if you know where you're going.

Killing Xenon in their own sectors for PPC/FAA/HEPT is nice too, but will need a half decent ship, especially if you want to do that efficiently.

Manually trading also works well, if you have the patience for it -> just get some really big superfreighters and work out some routes - for instance I have a whole load of Soyfarms in Trinity Sanctum and Soyery in Preachers Void, whenever the farms fill up, I fill all my superfreighters up with really really cheap Soja Beans (IIRC the minimum price for them is 14 or thereabout) then transport them all to Preachers Void and sell them for the max or close to the max price (42credits). I should use the Dolphins so I can buy more from the Large farms, but I bought Demeters in Trinity Sanctum when I noticed the cheap Soja Beans so I can transport 11210*2 and 10000*4 (the M farms only have 10K max Beans in there) = 62420 Soja Beans, being sold for 28cr profit each, that's a profit of 1.75million, give or take, or even at a stretch, only making a profit of 25cr per 1.5million per run

There are similar runs around Split territory involving Rastar and Chelt, but I havent looked into that yet.

[perkint]

As has been said - get the M7. Doesn't cost much (you need something capable of towing and a decent fighter - that's all the required investment) and is great as a money earner. Quickest way to rake in big cash is to do it yourself - XIs, Assassination missions and Xenon farming. Xenon farming doesn't need fight rank, but XIs and assassinations are only really rich with good fight ranks. XIs comfortably pay 60M+ and I've seen assassination missions at 22M+ (and I never got to the top fight ranks).

Also, the taxi missions can be very generous. I have run them at over 1M per trip! It's also a good way to run round checking the BBSs of various stations for assassinations

UTs always help - get the balance right and they will be running round keeping the economy ticking along. They help themselves as well - without you adding UTs a lot of stations struggle to get the resources they need to produce. Your UTs supplying resources (making a profit) means there will be more final products which usually rake in significantly more!

OK - nothing really new here, but felt like agreeing with some of the advice that had been given

Tim

[Fred_Sanford]

I've got a screenie of an assassination worth 20mil. Unfortunately, I didn't have the rank to take it at the time

I agree with everyone else: UTs, XIs, and Assassinations. Booze complexes are ok as well. Xenon hunting for GPPC can turn a bit of profit but takes time and strategy.

[Coffee-Man]

You dont need anything to tow the M7, a Nemesis M6 is waiting to be captured next to the M7, just have a transportdevice and a tractorbeam ready, transfer both to the nemesis and you can tow the M7 with the nemesis (and the nemesis will be repaired like the M7 at the teladi-shipyard ).
Takes a bit longer as the nemesis is damaged and very slow, but it's also easy credits.
With the M7 it don't need strategy or time to farm Xenon-sectors. Go in, kill all, collect the leftovers. Easy is that!

[Droflek]

I went in there with a fully equipped Hydra that had 1 x special speed and one turning upgrade... 174 speed, yay! It is a shame you cannot transfer the extensions, my yacht is so slow!

[Starcub]

Just remember, you only need a couple of these ships actually mounted with Mining Drills to break up the main asteroids, the rest can work perfectly well using normal lasers to break up the debris.

Someone else told me it wasn't possible to get a miner to blow up an asteroid. What command did you use to get your miner to blow them up?

Also try to keep such mining fleets about 8-10 sectors apart radially; more than 6 fleets per game may be too many and result in market oversupply.

IIRC, miners which use the mobile mining script only sell in a one sector radius. However, primary considerations for fleet distribution should be that they be located in a sector with collectable rock fragments or rocks that can be broken into collectable fragments (I use capped fighters that I fix up for this purpose instead of miner mounted lasers as I find it to be more effective) and that the sector be adjacent to other sectors that have factories that use ore and silicon.

Another suggestion for the OP: get a 1MJ shield factory and use it to train CAG's. When you get your CAG's trained up, buy an SPP and maybe some food factories (I've found Soja Husks to be a good choice) and staff them with CAG's. You won't want to run complexes this early in the game; you need fast payoffs to build funds for Avorice. These factories will stimulate stagnant economies and make your UT's trade for more profits.

[Melter]

I hadn't tried for Avarice in previous games, so this time I thought I'd go all out.
I hate farming Xenon Cap ships, the harvesting of the drops can be infuriating at times, so I decided not to bother.
I decided to go with some Nividium mining, XI missions, around 12 UTs and massive reinvestment in complexes.

My Nividium mining I have restricted compared to some previous setups; I just have 4 blasters and 4 collectors in the Wellknown Unknown sector.
I collect from them with a remote transporter who lands 12k - value around 22mil probably every 8 or 10 hours, not really sure about that...
On top of that I take the XI missions every 8 hours ish... that only nets around 16mil at my fight rank - I feel I should be getting more Cap ships but just the one still at Crusader (although only just got there) it seems.

Anyway, All this dosh is reinvested as soon as possible in some serious plexedge. My real motive is to see if I can keep ploughing all my cash into fabs and find enough time at the end for it to earn me the 700mil for the Tropical Nirvana of Avarice. Never having really had a game of mega wealth, I thought I would be a raging bull in this one, and I will not let any money sit around uninvested, as soon as I can use any profits, I do.

I was lucky to capture an LX at my first encounter which made fighting easy at the start...

I'm now at day 7 and starting to get nervous, but then XI missions will soon make some big cash and already some assasinations are fetching over 2mil.
My next Pandora Engine will go on the Free Toucan - I might even put 2 on it, so that I can take the tourist transport missions and make them pay too. Previously I used the Pandora tunings on Cap ships, but my aims are different this time.

[Blown]

(resurrects thread)

1 more question, If I get the Headquarters, Reverse-Engineer a Xenon N, buy all the resources at their base prices, (with a CAG) and begin mass-producing and selling them, would I turn enough of a profit to make it worthwhile? I have done the math at an average price, and it was something like 7 days to break even, , wondering if anyone has tried it yet...

EDIT: Just tried the math at 75% Avg. Price, now only 4 days to break even... may yet try it.

[Turricanion]

it is not worth it, as you sell ship for half price, not full price

[Carlo the Curious]

The selling price for ships depends on your rep, iirc (and sometimes the race of the ship & the buyer).

You can make a profit building ships, but it's not really worth the effort.

[Blown]

maybe... But I have this awful compulsion to finish what I start, and that HQ might now turn a profit, Can't ignore that now can I... and with a CAG or 2 supplying the resources, some UTs keeping the balance sheet in the black, and a long queue... according to a spreadsheet I have, I would be making about 8K per ship, at the top Race relation level (plot gives you that, right?) , churning out a Xenon N (I already have one to RE) every 173 Seconds, the spreadsheet works it out to be about 170K an hour, a bit less than a UT, but that's a steady cash flow, with little to no hazard to me, meanwhile I can go galavanting about, collecting Nividium, (could alternate with freighters, make even more from nividium loaded mercurys), bashing Xenon, and otherwise having a ball, trying to get the Avarice System, besides, My own elephant? save a bit on rental fees from those transporters! (or time, hire one of those to carry still more stations)

[NeckCuttah]

I was able to get past the defenses of the hidden depository in Paranid Prime and robbed the place. Walked with 793 million credits. Then the wife woke me up ... Good luck!

[Starcub]

maybe... But I have this awful compulsion to finish what I start, and that HQ might now turn a profit, Can't ignore that now can I... and with a CAG or 2 supplying the resources, some UTs keeping the balance sheet in the black, and a long queue... according to a spreadsheet I have, I would be making about 8K per ship, at the top Race relation level (plot gives you that, right?) , churning out a Xenon N (I already have one to RE) every 173 Seconds, the spreadsheet works it out to be about 170K an hour, a bit less than a UT, but that's a steady cash flow, with little to no hazard to me, meanwhile I can go galavanting about, collecting Nividium, (could alternate with freighters, make even more from nividium loaded mercurys), bashing Xenon, and otherwise having a ball, trying to get the Avarice System, besides, My own elephant? save a bit on rental fees from those transporters! (or time, hire one of those to carry still more stations)

If you are manufacturing ships strictly for profit, there are much better choices than the Xenon N...

Spoiler

Show

...my spreadsheet indicates that the best choice is the split jaguar raider at nearly 350000 cr/hr. I think the extra profitablility comes from the ship extensions installed by default.

I'm guessing you've already bought the PHQ? If so, by my rough calculations, assuming you sell what I think you should be selling, you should have no problem netting at least 50 million cr from it for the auction.

However, unless you're using some special script, that seems like a lot of ships to manually transfer and sell. I'm still not sure it's worth the effort. I supppose if you're really racing it might be worth it. Personally I'm finding that I'm doing pretty good w/o a PHQ. Maintaining my network of UT's, miners, and factories allows me just enough time (and sanity) to hit most of the BBS missions I need to as well as harrass the Zenon

[Blown]

actually... I dont have it yet, might just see if I can get the 30 Mil to buy the trading station, at the moment, I'm starting to look a little cash-strapped, built a few factories/complexes now, but I'm only playing on fridays, and weekends, in between studying.

The auction hasn't started yet, but the sector is now named... I must hurry.