How to aquire gold faster?

Upgrade your planets- unless you've upgraded the civil infrastructure, they're a net drain on the economy. Mouse over the credits count in the top right to get a summary of income and expenditures.

Erm, assuming you are on the right forum, there's a number of ways to increase CREDITS.

1. Make sure you have your planet/asteroid development maxed out, having a planet/asteroid without developing it results in a NEGATIVE credit flow.
2. More pop means more taxes. Make sure you research the pop increases.
3. Research and build trade centers on major planets. These have a BIG impact on credit income. Also, depending on race, research the trade improvements.
4. Explore your planets/asteroids. Some have bonuses to increase trade/pop.

pek

Trade centers?

He meanes the Trade space stations available to the TEC

Dr. Gonzo ftw.

theoretically, there are even more ways.

* collect bounties
* fulfill ai missions (some give resources)
* sell resources to the black market either directly or indirectly
* some race abilities like the sova embargo or the vasari salvage reclamation tech. at tier 3 it gives your resources if you destroy any enemy capship or structure.

but you should be fine with the options already mentioned, these are mostly secondary sources (though if you are one of few players to have crystals of metal, you can make a LOT of credits with the black market)

Trade Ports are availible to all races, though the TEC gets them 'earlier' (i.e less civil Research Bases), and that is understandable, seeing as they're a TRADE Coalition. I think you're main problem is that you havn't upgraded your planets civil infastructure, if you mouse over your credits you'll see the income from each colony, those in red are losing you money at that rate.

Hope we helped.

Don't under estimate the black market. With a good system of refineries, you should have a large excess of metal and crystals. Watch the black market and sell a bunch when prices jump from some one buying, you should make a neat profit.

How do you indirectly sell on the black market in a game? I was playing with my friend vs 2 computers and I would put up 500 metal and 500 crystal for sale at 98% of market value and I never saw a way to tell that I was actually getting any money from that.

Also, in that game I went trade center nuts. I always fully upgrade my planets and then use my front line planets purely for producing my fleets. I had about full size planets and each of them had 4-5 trade centers. My trade income was at 145 credits/s, planet income was something like 70 credits/s, with a big upkeep of around 100 credit/s. I had maxed out capitol ship crews and fleet capacity.

Which brings me to another question, if you are playing a big 4v4 won't the games cap not be enough. 2000 really isn't that much. Is there a file we can edit to get 5000 and say, 25 capitol ships, etc?

It will show the amount you put up, and then that amount will decrease as it's bought. Of course, AI/players need to click the "buy" buttons to actually buy from it



It should be in your gameconstants file, I'm at work so I don't remember which folder it's in. Someone else can probably find it for you

Personnaly I don't have any problems with gold, but I'm playing on a small map 1vs1 with a random AI (and thus outbidding them on Pirates' raids is easy :p).

On the other hand, I'm always a bit short on cristal (playing as advent). I didn't knew that you could have several trade ports in orbit around the same planet though, so maybe (certainly) the solution is to have multiple trade ports where possible focusing on ressource production (for those who haven't tried the Advents yet, they don't have refineries, instead they use their trade ports to the same effect) ?

It's a little different, yeah. The Advent's trade port can "switch modes" to function as a resource booster. Ideally, if you're low on crystal you want to build a few on an ice planet and turn on their refinery mode so they give you a boost to crystal production on that planet.

Sweet, all of your answers are helpful! I'm starting to really like this game, mainly because it's slow enough to keep up with. I'm not to "twitchy" of a guy and I think this game fills a hole where gamers that enjoy a strategy game once-and-a-while like me can really enjoy the experience without getting completely stomped on in the first five minutes by a rusher.

Thanks for the tips!

So, what if the market price is very high. Does that mean I need to set my price to 150%? I've noticed I can put it up to 150% and it still says I'm the lowest available resource.

As for tradeports, I wish you could select ALL the trade ports you own, all 50 or so I had, and then switch them to resource boost. That would have given me an absolutely insane jump in crystal/metal, but reduced my income to almost nothing or negative. As it stands I think you can only select the ports within 1 planet.


I didn't know you could do multiple trade ports until last night. Once I found that out I realized just how much you could do with economy in this game. I seriously put 4-6 trade ports in all non-front combat cities and my income went through the roof. It was so addicting seeing my trade output 2x or more that of my planet output.

Plus, as advent, desert planets are now more useful then terran planets. They can hold 36 logistic slots where terran planets only hold 24. Thats 9 trade ports on one planet. Take into account that each trade port brings in I believe 1.6 credits/sec, that's 14.4 credit/sec. The desert planet also gets 7.5 when fully populated with all tech upgrades. So, desert = 21.9 credit/s, terran = (10 + 9.6) = 19.6. I guess its not huge, but its nice that a desert planet is so useful for advent.

Not to mention advent desert planets as front line planets rock. You can put up 5 frigate yards and a capitol yard and still have room to spare with culture and be able to produce huge fleets in now time. I was using the advent's best tactical weapon, the "culture bomb, laser of love, w/e" and shooting it at a distant homeworld. After I hit it about 8 times, the planet's allegiance dropped to 0% and blew up as well as the rest of his planets. I didn't know it would have that effect, nothing like blazing some hippy culture bombs and blowing their minds.

The trade income per port varies by the size of your route I had some nice routes that got my ports up to 2.1!

Actually, try playing it before you say its "Not enough" -- that is a lot of ships, and you'll find it difficult to afford building that many, much less more.

It is not enough when you get into the later parts of huge games with multiple star systems. But in 4v4...I'd say the unit cap would be fine.

Huh... I never noticed that on my huge games

Well in my 2v2 I played last night I reached the 2000 fleet cap and wouldn't have minded having more. Also, I was 60 cred/s after the fleet 75% reduction to my cred/s. I'd say I would personally want more ships in a game twice the size of the 2v2 I played.

Does anyone know how the trade length is calculated? For instance, if I put 5 trade ports in one planet, do they all have the same trade length? How does it determine the trade length for each individual trade port and where it will trade to? I'd like to know how it determines this so I can exploit the trade ports to their maximum potential.

If you mouse over your credits, not only will it show you your economy, but if you zoom out to see the entire map, it should also highlight what I believe to be your longest continuous trade route.

That's correct Ships trading on this route earn a bonus!

I am confused about this too. Once I build the trade port, do I need to do anything with it. Is it all automatic at this point or do I tell it a route to follow? Should I be building lots of trade ports at the same planet, or just a couple at each planet? What about at asteroids?

I can tell you that it scales perfectly. If you had 6 trade ports at a planet, it will have 6x the income of 1 trade port at that planet. At least thats the way I've had it work for me. I assume if you build a trade port that is along your longest route, you get the bonus.

Paint ships red. More dakka.

Do be aware that trade ports will not trade with other trade ports in their own grav well -- you need to have 2 at 2 different systems before the bonuses start piling up.