In this post, I want to give new players a hint, how make ridiculous money at the start of your campaign. With ridiculous, I mean having 1 billion worth of ships after about 12hours.
All without any repurcussions reputation-wise! This will be from the perspective of the Terran Cadet start, but it is generally applicable to all starts. This is not my finding, but of many different users on this subreddit. Therefore I want to extend my thanks to all you users out there who shared their findings.
So let's get started:
As you propably already know: Crystal hunting, mining and adv. sattelites trading have all been nerfed into oblivion as of 4.0 and onwards.
The only way to fast money in ealy game now, is piracy. This means making pilots abandon their S- and M-ships or boarding L-ships and above. If you don't want to do criminal things in the game, then this is sadly not for you. And why specifically terran ships?
Answer: Not only the ships, but rather also their space: It seems to be hard-coded, that at all times, there are always a number of XL-ships present. If you don't look, you might think they just spawn in. It's propably thanks to their simplified economy in resource rich and safe sectors. Unlike the Split who are surrounded by Xenon-Strongholds. Also they don't start at war with anyone, but you can change that as player in later missions. In fact, it's the opposite really. They easily and happily destroy the Xenon and when they do go to war with anyone else, they usually steamroll them.
Again, this applies to the Terran Cadet start, but it should be valid for all gamestarts with minor differences.
Bar a custom gamestart, all of us start in an S-class ship. Some with a small fighter, others in a scout. The Terran cadet starts in a Kukri fighter. A very bad ship in my opinion, very slow and low shield capacity. I recommend to play the story for now until you get the Gladius heavy fighter from your fellow cadet. Not a good ship too, even slower, but with a bit more shields and 4 weapon slots.
If you are confident in your piloting skills, you can instead immediately travel towards the outer edges of Sol and look for Kuraokami and Moreyas, both ships from the Yaki Pirates. Their icons on the map and radar are pink, as they are hostile.
These ships will get destroyed relatively fast after gamestart and won't appear again after that. The reason is explained later. It is not quite easy, but certainly possible to pirate them in your inital ship. Terran engines favor boosting at right times and drifting with timed switching flight assist on and off. Look at the video from Youtuber Alectus on terran engines. First try to catch any isolated Moreyas which usually act as escorts to the kuraokami. Then go for the kuraokami, they are usually not fully armed. The Moreyas have especially low shields. I myself got lucky once, because multiple Kuraokami lost some moreyas escorts. I first fought the Moreya and by the time the Kuraokami came, the Moreya already bailed. They are present in other Terran and Segaris sectors as well. Often you meet them busy with fighting the Terrans and sometimes they bail on their own or with a little help of yourself. Watch out for Yaki boarding pods. They often try to reclaim abandoned ships. Just shoot the down, they travel a long distance at only 100m/s. If you got one of these ships, there is no no need to do the plot for the Gladius fighter.
If you however don't want to do that:
After the tutorial, you need to earn any amount of reputation, before the commander gives you the next story mission. Just fly to the wharf or any other station and shoot down one criminal mass traffic ship. This usually is enough, otherwise complete a mission.
While at the wharf, hire a pilot and service-crew you can afford with your 40000 credits for now.
You will get a call and can start the next story mission. Progress the story to the point, where your fellow cadet vanishes after you entered the sector "Savage Spur". Don't bother flying deeper into it, because the commander calls you back to the outpost anyway. Only get out of the way of the incoming Xenon. Go back through the gate to "Getsu Fune".
The Gladius is directly at the gate to Savage Spur on the Getsu Fune side. It's easily missable, because only a message for a ship claiming tutorial pops up when you return. You might not think much of it and rush to defend the outpost, therefore missing the fighter outright. The ship name is "Velvet Thunder" and it's abandoned, so you have to claim it in your spacesuit. I don't recommend using a marine to do the job, because these idiots always damage the ships they claim outside of boarding ops.
If you bought Service Crew, or Marines beforehand, you can now promote them to pilot of the Kukri and tell them to escort you or do other things. I used the Kukri to plot the way to the Segaris Pioneer Sectors and to "Grand Exchange I". Refer to this map by Quantum Anomaly Gaming for general directions: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/map/
After that, find and put them on the Super-Highway-Ring by ordering them to fly somewhere where they will need to ride the highway. Then abort the flight order by removing it on the que while they are still on the highway. With the default behaviour "Hold Position" the Kurkri should now surf the highway indefinitely. It's very safe on the highway, so don't worry about enemies. This reveals other factions and keeps the trade offers of nearby stations and up-to-date. The AI wharfs are usually near that highway. Once you can teleport, you can ride along the ship to quickly find missions.
Check the Gladius' equipment: It should have pulse lasers mk2, all shield slots equipped and combat engines. Proton barrages are nice but expensive. Terran pulse lasers are the best among all pulse weapons, because of higher accuracy through superior projectile velocity and higher single-shot damage at a slight cost of lower fire rate. Above of all, four of them should be enough for what is to come.
Or you could resume the story and unlock the Player-HQ. In the Terran cadet campaign you are suddenly dumped into the sector "Grand Exchange I" and to to be able to use it, you have to build a dock module. Lastly you have to rescue a Boron who is all the way in the sector Hewa's Twin V, the "east side" of the map. It unlocks the research menu when you open the map or on the escape key. One of the projects is teleportation, which is very useful down the line. To research it and other things, you need resources. As you propably guessed: If you do not produce your own products and gather your own resources, which you can't of course with a single figher XD, you need money. So to the money making part:
Finally to the the fun and rewarding part: Find your way to Segaris Pioneers space (Brennan's Triumph, Gaian Prophecy and Segaris)
Use this map, for general directions: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/map/
Once there, find a "Freelancer Katana". The Katana is a Terran and Pioneer M-sized corvette. Don't shoot the Protectorate Katanas in Sol. Only those with "Freelancer" in their name and only in Segaris Pioneer space. This is the ship you want to pirate. Don't worry about attacking them, because Pioneer space is not policed. Therefore you don't incur any reputation loss. You can literally shoot the freelancers next to other ships or stations and no one other than your victim will fight back. Believe me, there is also another reason why you specifically go after the "Freelancer Katanas".
Finding and pursuing one can be difficult at first, because even when they are bigger, they still are faster than your fighter. Only shows how shit the terran S-class fighters are. Their destroyers on the other hand are without doubt the best. Only downside are the selection of their L-size turrets. Before engaging, quick-save and then start shooting.
Bring down the shields and then the hull to 74%. But not further! All while you evade their shots. Always try to get behind them and stay at distance, where you can evade the turret shots. Don't fly towards their main guns. Rarely they use guided missiles. If you're not confident, you may want find another one that doesn't. You don't need to go lower than 74% Hull, because in X4, the random bail trigger starts at 75% hull. Every shot after that has a chance to make the pilot bail and abandon ship, but only every 30 seconds. You can see if you are on the right track, if you see escape pods of the crew other than the pilot come out. So constantly shooting and therefore damaging the hull more and more, doesn't make them bail faster. Wait for their shields to regenerate to 1 or 2% then shoot, but still not damaging the hull. If they try to go into travel drive, one hit is enough to stop them accelerating. How much "harassment" they endure, depends on the enemy pilot morale. With 1 or 2 star morale, they usually bail fast. The "Freelancer"-Katanas especially bail very often and very early. Most of the time I only had to damage them to about 74% and the demanded them via comms to surrender (point at target, press F, then select comms or press c on the keyboard). 9 out 10 times they bailed and left the ship abandoned for you to claim.
Once you claimed your price, don't immediately sell it to the wharf. I mentioned a reason for specifically choosing this target before. Now read the next two steps and decide what you want to do.
First, check its equipment. For some reason many Freelancer Katanas carry a full load of 100 adv. satellites!!! Not always, but pretty often. You can also scan them for their inventory beforehand, if you don't want to waste your time. Stripping their gear and the consumables at the equipment dock or wharf nets you about 5mio to 7mio credits (depends on the current prices and Katana's equipment tier levels). Then you repair the ship and sell the bare hull for an additional 2mio credits. If possible don't sell damaged hulls, you will get much less credits like that. Whereas immediately selling the ship, you will make a gigantic loss, because the advanced sattelites don't get accounted for.
Despite their tempting value in credits for a new player, I recommend holding onto the first katana, because it is the one of the two best player ships besides the kuroakami from the Yaki Pirates. Nice color scheme on top
If you are lucky, there a still some Yaki around in Segaris and Terran space. They are present a gamestart but after that diminish quickly. Try to find and get the moreya and kuroakamis to bail, because they are very good ships in the hands of the player. You cannot get them otherwise unless you finish certain branch of the plot. Depending how you decide during a crucial moment, you can entirely lose the chance to attaining their blueprints. They are only sold at the Yaki base, which usually has trouble getting supplies. This is why these ships are so rare even after the start of the game and even after the plot. Sell the Katana's advanced satellites, but keep enough for you to cover all of Segaris Space to locate more Freelancer Katanas. And then rinse and repeat. Slowly proceed cover the terran sector with advanced sattelites and then finally moving uo to "monitor" the galaxy. This will be important for keeping track of a certain ship later in the game.However you decided, once you have enough money, buy some miners for passive income and reputation gain via auto-mining. For now you as nobody are stuck to small and medium miners. Maybe build an solar power plant for the start. It requires no input and E-Cells -though not hte most profitable ware- are always on demand. Mind the reduced sunlight intensity starting at Mars. For exact modifier see the specific Sector encyclopedia entry. Try to undercut the terran and segaris prices by only a little bit. You start with the necessary blueprints unlocked. I usually don't bother buying station blueprints, because they can get obscenely expensive. What I and most other players do, is stealing them with EMP bombs. u/JKNinja_tubes has a good video for it among other very good videos for X4 foundations in general. I highly recommend checking them out. Very good production, on-point and funny and up-to-date as of writing this.
As an additional step between with a bit of money for a dock at the HQ and with a Katana in your hands, you could also continue the plot. During a quest you have to fight a pirate in a kuraokami and its Xenon escort. Hence why you should at least keep a Katana. Eventually you get a ship, that has a unique gimmick, that is available, until you finish the storyline. With said ship you can safely explore and put down adv. sattelites in Xenon sectors. As long you fly that ship it automatically switches IFF so Xenons don't recognize you as an enemy. Useful if your scouts always get obliterated in Xenon Sectors.
Buy some scouts and use them explore the other sectors and factions. Give them terran combat engines, so that they can quickly escape enemies, if they are encountered. Thruster quality is only noticable in player hands and "in-sector", short IS. Terran engines look bad on paper, but don't let it fool you. There is a hidden trait that is not listed on the spec-sheets for the engines. That is the time needed for transitioning into travel-drive and reaching the max speed in said drive mode. Terran combat engines excel at start and stop trips as they go into travel-drive magnitudes faster and reach max speed much earlier than other factions' engines. They are also much faster and more shield efficient when boosting (tab-key). Now I can't play without them. At least for civilian ships they are very good. There is a video detailing and testing the terran engines against other races engine and how to use them as a player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LfH3aZukwo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exSIxIqJvos
The next level is boarding and capturing
Now you have to actively grind reputation for Argon Federation (Getsu Fune>The Void>Second Contact II - Flashpoint>Argon Prime) and for Terran Protectorate to gain access to the Moon and Earth. As Terran you start off as enemies to almost all other factions. That means you cannot use automine, as your miners cannot dock on their stations. But at -15 its pretty easy to get to positive relations.
The best way is to find missions where you need to shoot down mass traffic criminals and even better is escorting miners and defend them fron kha´ak. If you kept a Katana, these missions should be very easy. If you are lucky and find a "patrol for 20 minutes" mission in the same sector you can almost shortcut your reputation from -15 to +10 and above. The minimum for your ships to dock and trading is -9. However our target is +20 and it's doable with the aforementioned missions. Or if there is a Xenon K, participate in its destruction. Killing them near stations or the faction's ships also gives massive Reputation boosts.
There is also another way to cheese the reputation grind is:
Once you get to -9, when your ships have docking permission, buy some really fast scouts. Search for the faction's shipyard/wharf/trade-station and then set the behavior of your scout to "Repeat Orders". This behavieour requires 1 star in piloting. Many station trader sell these cheap basic seminars to go from 0 to 1 star. Once set, tell your scout(s) to buy from the nearest producing station the ware that the shipyard requires. Set the buy order to only 1 piece of whatver ware you choose at max price and the sell to the wharf etc. that just bought singular ware at minimum price. The reason is as follows:
To increase your reputation, not the volume, but the amount of trades is the deciding factor. That is why a scout with minimum storage capicity is sufficient for this task, because you only move one piece at a time. In this case, speed is more important. The more scouts you use, the faster the gain. I managed to reach from -9 to +20 in a few hours with 10 minimum loadout scouts. However: Buying from and selling to the same station doesn't work. Selling to trade stations also seemingly doesn't help. All other stations including wharfs and shipyards work. Sadly you cannot organise these ships with the "Repeat Orders" behaviour into fleets for tidying up your ship list. Just rename these ships to sort them if it bothers you.
Auto-mining is good for passive income, but not for grinding reputatio. They generate pennies, if you don't have lots and lots of them. Too much micromanagement and anything smaller than L-Miners dies easily to Kha'ak. Silicon used to be a good money maker, but the devs nerfed the mining rate significantly. Now to still mine them at an acceptable rate, you need 5 star pilots and max level service crew + resource probes! The bad side-effect or good, depending how you see it, is that auto-mining drives down demand of the faction refineries. This leads to reduced prices for raw resources. Consequently the prices of the endproducts also go down, as supply increases. It can be a bad thing for you, if you later want to sell your own products, or good if you want to support a particular faction. As a general rule of thumb, only use one or two miners per refinery in the sector to not oversaturate the market. Also keep in mind, that mining minerals can spawn Kha'ak raids. Switch to large miners as soon as possible, as the Kha'ak weapons don't faze larger ships.
However if you want to use auto-trade, once you have the required pilots, you of course have to supply the resources to the AI. So the wares get produced and are actually available to be moved around. Try to find a good balance. Youtuber u/JKNinja_tubes recommends the Cormomant Vanguard from the Teladi-Faction "Ministry of Finance" in one of his videos and I agree with his choice. Boa's according to some redditors here, are also a valid option. Auto-trading does not always fill the whole storage capicity of the freighter. Therefore the Boa's speed actually helps more in trade amount and with right equipment/ship-modifications it is actually capable of running away from pirates, Xenon and Kha'ak.
Once you reach +20 reputation with the Argon Federations, buy a shuyaku vanguard freighter. It can hold up to 225 marines, the most of any other L-size ship as of now. Minimum loadout is sufficient for the so-called drive-by-boarding:
With your Shuyaku and 225 marines, fly back to terran space and find a Tokyo Carrier, preferably one that doesn't patrol a gate, so it won't shoot any other of your ships passing by. Optimally with only 50-70 crew-members and has dozens of ships docked. Once found do a quick save.
If you want, you can also go to the Split sectors and find a raptor, but I haven't tried yet.
Position yourself at about 7 kilometers behind the Tokyo carrier, disarm your turrets if any and start travel-drive.
Aim to cruise by under the carrier as close as possible. Once you are directly under it, quickly hit pause, while still in travel-drive. Now open the boarding menu to crap out all your marines. Choose as behaviour "Maintain distance", then both boarding options to very strong/effective, so your marines don't wait for you to bring down hull and weapons. Because you won't be there anymore XD
The Tokyo and its escort, but fortunately not the entire faction themself, will become hostile temporarily. Once you unpause, you are still in travel-mode and can get away to safety. Don't worry if you somehow dip or collide and lose travel-drive. In that case immediately turn off flight-assist to preserve the momentum. After reaching a good distance, reengage travel-drive, with flight assist immediatly turned off again to not suddenly decelellarate. Once you see "travel drive activated" message, turn on flight assist to actually accelerate again. You will get the hang of it.
BUT ATTENTION: The problem with the Tokyo Carriers is, that they often sport numerous missile launchers which are always exclusively armed with smart missiles. They easily shoot down a lot of your pods if you are unlucky. Therefore you need to quicksave before the boarding. Sometimes you get lucky -depending on how your pods spawn into existence- only an acceptable number get shot down during approach. Your boarding strength might still sufficient for a takeover. I had the same ship shoot down 150 marines and after some quickloads, only 50-60 got killed. It will take about 30 minutes for them to start fighting inside the ship, because they have to get through the undamaged hull. The reason, why we don't damage the hull at all is, because if you attack, you lose rep. But if you do not fire a single shot, while the carrier is hostile and even after you captured it, you won't lose any standing at all.
Mass murdering the ship crew and stealing entire heavily armed super-carriers is somehow totally ok with them. Quite illogical and possibly an exploit...not that I'm complaining though XD
If you do not want to reload the saves, just give it multiple goes. 225 marines cost you about 2 million credits. A tokyo completely stripped and roundabout 30 s-class fighters sells for about 80-90million credits. So unless you somehow waste 9000 marines on single carrier, you still make a big profit. Some of its fighters can even have mods installed. You can see, the marines are expendable. Wait some time for it to "forget" your attack and de-aggro. Sadly you cannot stall boarding ops to send reinforcements, because you cannot have 2 boarding "missions" at the same time on the same ship. However you can board multiple ships at once, if you have enough marines. Your remaining marines will go through with it no matter what. Just wait for the current Boarding op to inevitably fail and then start again. The crew, that the tokyo loses in each encounter, won't get replenished. So it's just a matter of wearing it down.
Make sure to stay away from your target all the time, even if you have to manually intervene. This is especially important with the carriers. Sometimes I forgot to set the order que right. So instead of maintaining distance it got close to the carrier, because the order "follow ship" was still top in the que. To absolutely make sure, I order the ship to fly to the edge of the sector and then fly around a bit. Or you can move the "board" order in the que down to "disabled" status (orange text). I can confirm that boarding still goes on. Only the ship will not follow the target. After a time the carrier is not hostile anymore (blue Icon instead of red on map, radar and targeting-UI). But if the fighters see you or any other of any other of your ships while they still are hostile, they will deploy and hunt you down. Many of them are equipped with meson-streams. When they are not docked by the the time the tokyo is captured, they will not become yours.
Of all the terran XL-ships, the Tokyo is the most difficult and maybe the most costly to capture, because it can easily shoot down your pods. The Honshu (Resupply-ship) is the easiest, even doable in the Falx Frigate with only 24 Marines. Most of the time they come with beam turrets, which suck at about everthing. 5 beam turrets shot at one pod and it still survived to the hull. On top of that they almost always operate on a skeleton crew (30-40 mixed crew) against 123 marines. I often don't even bother to do drive-by boarding, but instead fly to it normally and tank its shots, while leisurely cruising to the next target. Yes, you can board multiple ships at once, however only one boarding op possible for each enemy ship. If you run out of marines: transfer them from another ship. In X4 they are immediately available on the next ship. I don't know, if you need teleportation researched.
Tip: Often 3 or even 4 resupply ships park at the same time at the shipyard in Brennan's Triumph. They are also very profitable, because they carry a lot of consumables and are additionally a good ship to train your marines up.
Saturn 2 is a good place to cap Hokkaido large miners. The AI tends to all gather at resource probes. Check the screenshot.
I present you the farm that is Saturn 2, an All-you-can-eat-buffet! And this I consider meager. At one time there were 30 of them crammed together, my framerate (low graphic settings on AMD 5950x and Nvidia rtx 3090 + 32gb 3600mhz ram and samsung 980pro) fell to 20fps
The Terran and Pioneer trading-stations have that awesome hexa-pier. Often six Okinawa large traders park there with more waiting in line to dock. Sit at the center and then do a run. If you run out of marines you can transfer them instantanously from a ship you prepared for replenshing troops at a shipyard/EQ-dock.
In the meantime, with enough money you can buy the materials for researching teleportations. You might have to manually buy and transfer wares to your HQ, if no AI trader is coming. With Teleportation and multiple Shuyakus following different targets, you can teleport around to board the next ship, while the one before gets "processed". Even the first teleport level is enough: Just place cheap scouts at adjacent sectors and use them to jump from one to another until you reach the next target.
On the way to the Terran Asgards you can capture yourself a Hokkaido mining fleet for selling or auto-mining and Syn Destroyers, which make valuable targets, since you can't buy them, but only build them at your own wharf. You cannt emp-steal wharf- or shiopyard blueprints as well as ship blueprints. They cost around 200million each+other station modules, for the ship-building materials you need! Bruh! Eventually you will set up your shipyards, but for now: Yeah...no thanks, I'm just go with a shuyaku starting at 8million plus only 2million worth of sometimes reusable marines.
The Asgard is your endgoal and another ship you can't buy, but only build. As of now, there is no ship like it. In terms of firepower it is second to none and the only ship smart enough to stay at range against stations, well most of the times. OP, but still not quite the fire and forget weapon. Currently this ship is the only viable option to destroy stations without dying in Out-of-Sector combat. I have even seen on singular Asgard go against an Xenon I, 3 Xenon K and a buttload of other Xenon Fighters and still come out at 100% shields. However only if it actually fights back! If your stupid captain is still focusing on the station you ordered him to destroy and then he gets jumped by the K or I, it still dies. They just ignore the bigger threat entirely! By the time your captain, who deserves to die for this stupidity, calls you for "advice", it usually is already too late. So you must still keep an eye on your most valuable ships! Not in sector though. If you are present, a single Xenon K, can kill the Asgard, once it gets close enough XD. Its OOS Power might be patched in the future.
Unlike their destroyers, Terran L-size weapons are useless against Xenon K and I's. These enemies are even bigger than normal L ships, with the "I" being even above XL. Xenon Graviton Turrets are very devastating and have a relatively high rate-of-fire, but in turn have shorter range of about 5km. To counter them in a capital ships you typically rely on the high damage and reach of your plasma turrets at about 8km + your destroyer main weapons. The Terrans sadly have no Plasma equivalent. No Terran L-Turrets have any of its qualities. The closest, but still not usable is Terran L-Bolt: Instead they are weaker and their most glaring issue is their short range. The same like the Xenon Graviton turrets. Only L-Beam has its uses against fighters and maybe m-ships, but even then only in numbers. Terran destroyers + Plasma turrets and m-flaks though...very good. So if you only have terran materials available, you exclusively rely on your destroyer main-weapons. They, in contrast to the other Factions' main weapons, are the best. Your AI-captains unfortunately do not understand that and always try to hug the Xenon and inevitably perish. This is an issue in-sector as well as out-of-sector. The derpy AI is a fault that plagues this otherwise beautiful game since launch and has still not been fixed as of writing this. I only hope the ugly terran fighters also get a makeover in the future. I like the terran ship exclusive proton barrage very much.
One Asgard always sits at the Gate in the Moon sector. You need +20 with the Terran protectorate to gain access. You could go there without permission, but you will get obliterated before you even see it, much less travel-mode by. If you are lucky the Asgard there carries only 70-ish crew, but be careful: As with other Terran ships, their marines are usually 2 or 3 star veterans. If you board at 100% hull, which our method is all about, you need very high numerical advantage to succeed. I don't know the exact math, but you seem to be at great disadvantage, when boarding the ship at full strength. Makes sense to me though. By the time your marines enter breaking in an undamaged ship (no holes and cracks to slip inside), they could already be exhausted against the enemy crew and automated defences. But that is only my imagination though, do not quote me on that. You could invade it with a max 360 marines, but your Shuyaku vanguard only carries 225 max. So to reach the cap, you need another Asgard.
Otherwise, just with the Tokyo, you need to wear it down then. Recruit level marines are replendished at shipyards and EQ-Docks. For ships like the tokyo, which are very dangerous at approach, I would burn the rookies instead of your veteran or elite marines, because unlike rookies, your experienced marines cannot be replaced easily. I would save veteran marines for the Asgards. Usually they are 2/3 full of crew and have a boarding defence of about 4000. Even with 225 recruit marines, your boarding strength is still lower. Combined with the disadvantage discussed before, you will lose all of them, while the asgard loses only 10-20 people. The odds are really stacked against you in this case. If you boarded other "easier" ships you should have plenty 1star veterans to gather all in the moon. The approach for the boarding pods on the other hand is very easy. Fly close enough and your pods will almost always make to the hull without losses. This is due to the low number of m-turrets on an Asgard. Seriously Egosoft: What the hell? Nobody builds a dreadnought like that. It's too few turrets for a battleship like that. Carriers maybe, because their power comes from their fighters, but not a pure destroyer.
A second Asgard "TER Intervention Corps Asgard" also gets built in the moon sector. Fortunately it moves out into Xenon sectors and is therefore the only one you can board outside of the Moon. This one usually has less crew than the "Patrol Asgard". If possible, don't let it go too far. Intercept it in Getsu Fune before it wanders off into Xenon space. It also might die against multiple K's and I's with your marines still on it in hostile space. You lose both the ship and your marines in that case. But usually the opposite is comes to be. It often bodies the Xenon ships and sectors solo and when that happens the economy gets hit. You see, there is really only one endproduct for all the wares outside food and meds: It's ships. If there are no ships destroyed or you make peace between the factions during certain story missions, the economy stagnates. It's a shame really, because I would have liked the peaceful choices for roleplay purposses. Ironically war is what keeps this world alive.
There is usually also a "TER Intervention Corps Tokyo" that, too, flies towards Xenon. This one you really want to prevent from reaching Xenons not only because the carrier and fighters die much easier than an Asgard. It might be a bug, but for some reason, whenever it passes through a gate, its ships undock and then proceed to dock again. The Tokyo however refuses to wait and then fires the travel drive. This might be annoying, if your already onboard marines capture it and the fighters are still outside. What I do is to shoot at the Tokyo once it is not hostile anymore to prevent it going faster or through a gate before the marines have infiltrated inside. Only one shot is enough. Wait as long as possible between shots and you will only be warned without making them aggro. You can buy a little more time for its fighters to dock like that. This whole procedure requires all of your attention, so you yourself decide if it's worth it to you. I would say yes, because it's a freaking XL-Carrier+entourage, usually less crew and it doesn't pop up that often!
You can use global orders to set up an alert. Sadly you can not narrow the criteria down to specifically ping for Asgards or Tokyos. You can only ping at XL-ship size, so if you want that, you still need to be for the lookout. As mentioned before, work towards good sattelite coverage in the galaxy. In my game I place Shuyakus and Frigates with marines throught the terran sectors, Getsu Fune and the Void as the only way in and out of Sol. This is for the case you can't capture them in safe sectors and in one go. Poor Terran-Intervention-Corps. Setting out to the unknown to gain glory and honor of protecting Sol from the accursed Xenon. Then only to embarassingly die against pirates and have their ship stolen.
From here on you and can rinse and repeat and use the money to snowball your empire. There are certain terran war guild missions that require exactly the ships you have been capturing. Keep an eye out for those, because these types of missions often have paint-mods or high-level seminars you can't get otherwise.
Rant time: You can build highly weaponized moving fortresses, which shouldn't be possible if you do not belong to the factions military, but can't paint your ships normally. F*ck that. The default paintjobs suck. Egosoft propably planned for them to be monetized, but backed down at the last moment, because most of them look like sh*t too. Stupid Ventures, that are currently deactivated without ETA anyway. The only way to get them is through cheat mods, which will label your save "modified". Another reason why I prefer to cap Pioneer ships: Their color scheme. How Earth, the OG blue planet went for white and red instead, still doesn't make sense to me.
Lastly try to not neglect the Split. In my games they always get wiped out by the Xenon. Go there early for their blueprints and maybe capture a few raptors before they die at the hands of the Xenon. Use your Asgards to wall the Xenon off.
There it is. If you made it here.....thank you for your time. Also thank you for all you trailblazers of this subreddit and official forum for your tips.
Interestingly, one of the blue drones dropped a 3* Pilot Seminar. Something to watch for.
. The crate drops from them were phenomenal. I picked up 357 unstable crystals, dozens of lodestones and 262 spacefly eggs from collecting only half the crates. Which took about 5 minutes.