Looking for some trade and factory building tips

[Dis Astranagant]

Well, as the title says I'm looking for a good setup for trading and stations to build.
I'm somewhat newish to this game (I did do some 60h in previous patches ) and I have never even touched the whole TRADE and BUILD thingies so I say it's time to learn and earn some cash in process

Now, I have started as Terran Cadet, It's 1d ingame I have good relations with most factions except HOP and I have 85 millions on my account (piracy....... ) some 8 L class destroyers and a couple of L class freighters and NO idea how to setup profitable factory and traders ( i do miss my autotraders from X3)

My end goal is to make a region of my own, have a self sufficient PHQ with ship building capabilities and to be free of all other races but I suspect that is very very far away.


So, I would be really grateful if you could share with me your tips, strategies, schemes, etc. and in the process also help some other confused newcomers with this section of the game.
Thanks in advance

[KextV8]

So, Terran space is generally short on E-cells since a good portion of their territory doesn't have enough sunlight. A good easy profitable station is to plop down a solar power plant in Getsu Fune and the Pioneer system next to Neptune. I think thats Brennans Triumph but I might be wrong. Terrans will constantly buy ecells from those and you won't need to do anything other than put a dock, manager, and storage on it to turn a profit. Theyll come buy it all by themselves, no need for you to assign it traders or anything.

I call that the tutorial profit station.

To take it a step further start looking at what shipyards/warfs are typically running low on. Split often need engine parts at their shipyards, hell honestly the entire split economy is pretty well falling apart most games. Hull parts, claytronics and advanced electronics are also used quite a bit so tend to do well in various places.

Additionally, a lot of factions have the parts they need, they just do a piss poor job of moving them around. So you can get into logistics too. The biggest drawback of trading is that 3 star pilots are required to auto trade, and manual trading is kinda a hassle.

[Karmaticdamage]

Choose a sector you want to operate out of. Your going to want to make hull part production first. Then advanced electronics and weapon components. Then stations that produce everything else needed to make ships. Always attach at least one resource gathering mod to every station such as refined metals, methane, etc. Once you produce all the wares to make ships, save up about 250mil to get wharf blueprint and your first set of blueprints.
Once your wharf is up and running it will make you the money you need to get the rest of the S/M blueprints. After you have all S/M blueprints save up about 1 bil and get the L/XL Fab blueprints along with the blueprints to build ships, I usually get all the destroyer BPs first as they sell the most. Shipyard and wharf combined will make you super rich over time. Buy all the blueprints, complete all the plots.

[Fenris321]

I agree with the E-cells as being a good starting station for Terrans. And like KextV8 said, Brennans Triumph is a nice place, especially with the sunlight bonus. Also if you overproduce some food and medical those will sell as well. I have one there and another one in Mars despite Mars only having 44% sunlight it still makes a a good amount of cash. I also overproduce food and medical in Mars for an added income.

Personally I feel like Mercury with it's 680% sunlight is a trap unless you want to haul E-cells around with your transporters. I thought about building there but when I scanned down the E-cells factories there, they were all full with nearly a million E-cells and no one was buying. It seems as though the NPCs do take travel time into account as my Mars facility was making a decent income even though the prices were twice as high. And at least if your producing your own E-cells you can build anywhere in Terran space and just ship them to yourself.

I used the commonwealth energy cell production mods though, not sure thats necessary and getting the wares to build them can take time.

I also made a station with 2 Computronic Substrate Production modules in Asteroid Belt and that makes between 10 to 15 million an hour (usually around 12). Getting all the miners to gather resources was more expensive than the station it's self if I remember correctly.

[Dis Astranagant]

Hmmm, so Ecells first followed with what ever desired faction needs.....gotcha guys.

I'm kinda curios is it ok to put E-cell production fab in all my other factories cause from what I can see every single thing needs E-cell so it seems to be a good idea to put it in? Especially cause you need good pilots for automating buying/selling?
Also, is there a way to train pilots like in x3 or do I have to jump all the factories in universe to find good ones?


On a side note, I have just captured a HOP Heracles (construction xl ship) so I'm wondering is there any good use for him or should I sell it? I mean, he could be a poor mans carrier and a builder + fresh marines transporter but I don't know how exactly that works in this game......a noob I am

[Fenris321]

Hmmm, so Ecells first followed with what ever desired faction needs.....gotcha guys.

I'm kinda curios is it ok to put E-cell production fab in all my other factories cause from what I can see every single thing needs E-cell so it seems to be a good idea to put it in? Especially cause you need good pilots for automating buying/selling?
Also, is there a way to train pilots like in x3 or do I have to jump all the factories in universe to find good ones?


On a side note, I have just captured a HOP Heracles (construction xl ship) so I'm wondering is there any good use for him or should I sell it? I mean, he could be a poor mans carrier and a builder + fresh marines transporter but I don't know how exactly that works in this game......a noob I am

Personally, I'd keep the construction ship. Fill it full of service crew and when you start building your own stations they will level up fast. On a largish station they can go from apprentice to specialist pretty quickly. Then if you have L miners swap the crew to those and the L miners will mine faster.

Also try to make sure you have 30 construction drones on the ship, that's the most they will use. If you have a low amount the time to build is much longer.

For energy cells, yeah I put those on all my builds sunlight permitting. Some of the Terran sectors have such a low amount of sunlight it's not worth it, you're better off shipping in energy cells.

[jlehtone]

Personally, I'd keep the construction ship. Fill it full of service crew and when you start building your own stations they will level up fast.

Indeed.

NPC do occasionally offer Build mission. Their demands are usually not very high, so even with lazy build you make profit. More importantly, you can practice planning a build and hauling resources to build storage. The moment all required pieces are ready the station will transfer ownership to the client. Why test ideas on your own assets when someone is willing to take even the worst architectonic plunders and pay for it?

[palentier]

Use this site to build self sustaining stations once you have around 50mil credits you can start to build larger stations with 10+ Large Habitation mods on them and start making 10mil+ per hour. You will need to build food and medicine mods on those stations and this site will do all the necessary calculations for you.

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

This is also a great resource for figuring out where to build what kind of stations. It will show you where what kinds of resources are located. The other shows what Mods produce what wares and what is needed for your final intended product.

https://www.qsna.eu/x4/resources/ (locations spoiler warning)

https://gameplay.tips/uploads/posts/201 ... 0099_1.png

Also If I were just starting out I would make an E-Cell and water supply factory in Getsu Fune, as those two blue prints are some of the cheapest. Lots of Ice there, it will be easy to expand that once you have a few more credits into a self sustaining Ag Station as those blueprints for food and med supplies are the cheaper ones (if you don't want to figure out how to steal blueprints, finding loadstones is a hassle in my experience). And water (and Ice) is what seems to always be a limiting factor for my self sustaining mega stations. On my next play through I will be doing Terran start with a big Water production -> Ag station in Gestu and also one in Grand Exchange where your player HQ will be located to start. Lots of Ice in both locations and great for hauling water around to your self sustaining mega stations later on.

That being said you can really kick start your station building early if you do go the Blueprint theft method. I personally would recommend doing it for at least the Habitation modules because those are locked behind faction rep and are some of the most expensive blueprints, because they really do increase production quite a lot.

[Ezarkal]

If you just want to dabble in the occasional building, then build whatever you want depending on supply/demand of the region. If you're in commonwealth sectors, I would recommend scanning shipyards and identifying what wares it is missing the most, then add a station with a couple building modules producing said ware (and perhaps the rest of the production chain. ie. if the station wants smart chips you can add a silicon refinery as well, so the station will only need raw resources.)
I don't know enough yet about terran sectors to make suggestion for them.
This is a good way to get acquainted with the building mechanics, and will reap quite a bit of credits ad you supply shipyards directly.

If you really want to start an empire of your own, then start with the wares that are needed to build stations. For commonwealth, Hull part is your top priority, then Claytronics. Make big complexes of them and include the whole production chain of the ware if you can. The station calculator is your best friend. (I tend to skip energy cells as they are very cheap and very easy to acquire from NPCs)
From there, add stations that are needed for building defenses (turret, shields, field coils and adv. electronics), then build whatever you want until you get your shipyard.

Same rules apply for Terran, except their economy is much simpler, although much harder to feed in raw materials.

[Ezarkal]

I'm kinda curios is it ok to put E-cell production fab in all my other factories cause from what I can see every single thing needs E-cell so it seems to be a good idea to put it in? Especially cause you need good pilots for automating buying/selling?

Is it okay? I would actually recommend it! Unless maybe you make stations with only 1-2 production modules. Then you only need a few S/M traders to keep it fed. Relying on NPCs for energy is also very viable for only a few production modules.

Personally, I equip all of my complexes with their own energy production. And as soon as the complex gets to what I consider medium-large size, I also include enough food/medical supply production for the population. Feeding large complex with trade ships can be a pain, and I'd rather just assign a few more miners to get some ice for food production.

[Dis Astranagant]

Hello again fellow X-denizens

After a really long and tiresome week spent doing the usual work grind I'm in the need for some space relaxation so here I am again

First of all, thank you all for a very useful batch of tips and tools, and secondly since I'm now a proud full owner of a solar stations I'm searching for a new path to expand my business.
I have found it in the form of advanced electronics which are very very very rare in my game and I also need over 10000 of them for a certain research so I thought why not kill 2 birds with one stone.

Now, I'm planning to build this project in Trinity Sanctum and there are a couple of wharfs and shipyards in close vicinity who are empty of AD. Electronics (the whole universe is since there is only 1 factory with it )
As for my complex, this is it:

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calcul ... 01,count:2

But I do need some insight of yours since I don't wanna spend this much of time/money on things that may not work:

1. Is this an overkill or could i push it even further? My game is de voided of these things but I'm not sure how much the AI is spending them vs production of this complex
2. How many miners do I need for this (I have a couple of L miners courtesy of pirate life) and do I equip them with all mining drones or do I put a couple of cargo drones in the mix?
3. Will ore/gas yields In Trinity Sanctum last indefinitely or do they have a finite amount ? If so, do they respawn?
4. What about storage? How much storage do I need for this thingie? There is no tool or info I could find on how much do I need....please don't tell me I need to calculate it manually
5. Do my traders need to be high level or is it all about manager (I do have one which is 5 star) and is it better to use M or L traders for this?
6. Am i bothering you all with this stupid questions?


I do wish that Egosoft would put this info in ingame encyclopedia + some kind of calculator would be very appreciated since there is surprisingly little info on Internet on this game...even tho there are over 2300 people ingame at the moment I'm writing this post.

[Midnitewolf]

Most of the time you can make stupid money just selling E-cells. I have one mega sized E-cell factory that makes me something silly like 20 million and hour in one of my run throughs. It is quite large though, probably something like 40+ E-cell production modules. Best part, you need nothing to keep the production running except sunlight.

Also a good way to figure out what is needed in the verse is to try to build the largest ship you can at every wharf and shipyard you have access to. Don't actually build them but configure them on high preset and look at the warning on the bottom if any. Generally speaking they will be short on something. Hull Parts and Engine Parts shortages are common. Advanced Electronics and Turret Components are also usually in high demand.

You can can also select these stations including the trading station and I believe it is on the info tab, you can see what resources they have in stock and this allows you to see what might be a shortage especially if all the stations and docks are looking for the same thing.

Keep in mind resource availability when building because you have to get what you build to build somewhere. If you build a metal refinery but there are no systems with ore in a 5 jump radius, your probably going to run into supply shortages with ore.

Here is a good map that breaks down the raw resource distribution. Spoiler alert though as it is a full map of every sector and will remove a huge chunk of the exploration factor.

https://www.qsna.eu/x4/map/

[Baddieus]

Here's my current plan in-progress, which is working well so far ...

I built a Teladianium/Graphine refinery in a central Teladi area 1st, which has an extra solar panel for the e-cells on it. The purpose of starting here is because these are the primary ingredients for Teladi Hull Parts, which are the primary part you will be purchasing at first from the economy to build more stations. It has been so successful that all of the EQ's, Wharf's, & Shipyards are full of hull parts, and the Hull Part producing stations maintain really high levels of stock. My 2nd station is a Nostrop Oil & Medical Supply station to feed the workers once added to the original T&G refinery, as well as to supply the NPC workers and those of my other future stations. The food & med station I built had an estimated price of $32M which I accepted, however when complete due to the abundance of cheap hull parts, it still had a little over $3M remaining in the construction account when fully constructed. So I not only profited from selling supplies to the hull part makers, but saved a lot of profit from the cheaper hull parts on station build its self.

For other races, look at what makes Hull Parts & start supplying the NPC stations, then move to their food & medical, then start looking to supply the Claytronics factories, as they are the next big ticket item after Hull Parts for building stations.

=Baddieus=

[Nort The Fragrent]

Primary start up station, Solar power plant in Brenhams Triumph. It’s a winner. You can never make enough, as long as you keep the sell price low. I had one that had 16 Std generators, and 16 Terran flats, It never ever filled up as the cells got snapped up as soon as they were made. So best to not bother with too much storage, !

[grapedog]

For actual building tips....

You can build OUTSIDE of your plot.... say you have a spot for an ECell panel but won't fit in the plot. Put down a connector anywhere, connect an ECell panel to it, then put the connector where you wanted to originally attach the ecell panel. The ecell panel will now stick outside the plot, but will work fine.

Not all pieces have to be connected. I haven't done extensive research on what does or does not need connectors, but modules like habitation and defense disks can be free floating in a plot with no downsides.

The more storage you have the more it needs to be filled. If you are letting the price get automatically adjusted(which is usually the best way), that price is based on % of storage used. It is MUCH better to go with as small storage as you can... the smaller the storage, the quicker it fills and empties, and the emptier it is the bettee the price you sell at. For example, if your L container storage can store 20k hull parts... if you produce hull parts faster than you sell, thr storage will fill, and it will cause you to sell them at a low price to try and empty the storage. But if you have a smaller storage, each order of hull parts will take a larger chunk of stock causing sell prices to rise quicker. So, go small or medium storage to start, and upgrade slowly if you need it.

Personally i always build by need and by tier. If i am making hull parts for example.... ill build my dock/pier, then container storage, then ecells, then a habitat, then raw resource storage for liquid and gas, then my tier 1 products like refined metals and graphene. Once all the tier 1 is built, then build tier 2, hull parts in this case, along with more habs or storage. In this way you can start getting ecells stocked, then you can assign traders and miners, and once the tier 1 finishes, your miners jet off to start collecting. You'll be building stock of tier 1 materials so as soon as tier 2 is built, it can start producing. I like to build a hab early to start getting workers early, but they arrive slow so just one or two habs during the build is usually enough and can build the rest at the end.

Look at where you plot is placed, and how that works with traffic. I always stick my plots to one side or the other of traffic lanes. A traffic lane is any direct line ships will take from gate to gate. Then ill place my piers and docks so it is easy for ships to aim directly at my station. Quicker in and out is good for business.