Optimal Growth Strategies

[Panpiper]

My growth strategy thus far has always been to simply build bigger and better mining ships. I'll take my starting resources, buy extra salvage modules, power blocks, and very soon a cloaker. (Buying a faction block, and creating my own personal faction, is of course fairly high on the starting imperative.) I'll use my starting cannon blocks as a slave to my salvage array to speed things up. Soon however as I accumulate resources and get my ship's power to the point where it can support permacloak, I will switch my salvage array slave to pulse and build a dual array to avoid down time. Using a permacloak miner, I will accumulate sufficient resources to build a non-cloaked miner with a dual 15x15 salvage/pulse array that also can kill any wandering pirate fleet and then salvage the wreckage.

(The optimum strategy I have found is to, as soon as you can permacloak your starting ship, go find a nice, unclaimed, asteroid rich star system, plop down a station, make it your faction homebase and claim the system for your faction, as this greatly increases the results of your mining. Simply by mining asteroids, trade stations pop up randomly into existence. Try to spread your mining throughout your system so as to generate the greatest number of trade stations.)

I've been playing for a while now, enough to have a fairly good handle on ship building and am now wanting to try my hand at something somewhat titanic. That will however require a great many blocks. Thus far, most of my building materials have come from selling whatever raw ore I've mined and buying the blocks I need. I have only very recently set up a factory system and am still quite uncertain as to what I am doing.

Am I better off crafting everything, or is it still worth while selling off raw materials and buying certain sorts of blocks? (I realize the answer may be somewhat server dependent, as some servers may have tweaked things.) Is it a better strategy to not sell off raw materials for credits but to instead craft stuff with it and sell the crafted blocks? Are there some blocks better suited for this than others?

 

[xlBlackhawklx]

Do not sell the ores and shards, you get 1/4th the return on products. You're better off learning the factory system, creating the product of your choice, and trading or selling said resources for better ones. You get alot more amassed per time than just selling resources. Plus the factories can be made autonomous where all you have to do is put all the ores and shards into one storage container and the factories make it for you auto once you dump it.

 

[Lancake]

I normally trade first with a tiny scout ship till I have a large amount of money, with that I can setup large factories + big salvagers. Then I can just make whatever I want ^^

 

[Groovrider]

I did the whole mining thing until I made my first serious battleship. Once that was done I went on a crusade. That's was when I discovered pirate wrecks drop loot. Lots of it. 3oo+ each of computers and modules of various types gave me a final profit of 13,000,000 credits and an absolute ton of armor blocks. Happy days.

 

[JulesRoland]

I´ve been playing for a week now, and I found a not so honest way to make profit quickly...

There´s a derelict station, "Cathedral / Dracula Castle" Themed with a HUGE turret attached
Get close to the turret, break blocks on the station, under the turret, until you reach the docking cube and break it!
Now that the HUGE turret is detached, it´s able to fly, has amazing firepower and good shields
With this STOLEN flying turret you can raid small pirate stations, hell, you can even cause core overheating on turrets with a single shot !!!
Everytime you cause core overheat on a turret it will drop loot, a small pirate station has a minimum of, let´s say, 6 turrets...

I came home with my inventory full and had to jump on 4 shops to "smuggle the goods" hehehe, came home with 38.000.000+

Here´s a pic of said station with the turret detached !!!

Note: It´s good to ease the grinding sometimes, but I feel uncomfortable about it, I consider it cheating !!!

See ya!

 

[Drakkart]

nice tips well i am more like looking for a sector with lots of asteroid belts and claim that one over one with lots of planets and then when harvesting i empty the entire sector just to make sure they can respawn.