Hello and welcome!
This guide is primarily a guide for newbies to weigh the pros and cons of the various ways of generating that all important thing: money...
Money is the be all and end all in the X-Universe, as it is in 'Reality', and many newcomers have a hard time figuring out how to generate a decent income. There are too many 'how do i make money?' threads cluttering up the X-Universe Forum, so i am hoping this guide will help lower the amount of these threads....
so, you're new to the X-Universe, you've just jumped into you're disco (discoverer), and you're floating around in space, wondering where on earth to start....
well, as the slogan of the game says: TRADE FIGHT BUILD THINK
TRADE
Trade, pretty much the only way to begin generating income at the start of the game. The best advice involves playing out a few story missions, in the hopes of gaining a few rewards:
Trading however, eventually becomes obsolete as a method of generating money, and the process can be quite boring if you do it manually...
you can however use Trade Extension MK III, which will allow a frieghter to trade commodities for you, but the extension costs over 500,000Cr., and by the time you have that much to spend freely you probably won't need the extension anyways....
Pros
Can generate a healthy degree of money at the start of the game.
Helps the player get an idea of good/bad selling/buying prices around the universe.
Using Trade Extension MK.III, can bring in several million Cr. per hour, but only if you're lucky.
Cons
Can be tedious.
Does not generate substantial amounts of money compared to factory building etc., and is therefore obsolete later in the game.
Potential Income per hour: anything up to roughly 1,000,000Cr. with TE MK.III, and up to roughly 500,000Cr. without....
FIGHT
Ah, Fighting, its come under a lot of criticism since the games launch, but it actually an extremely good method for gaining money.... one of the best in fact....
So, how do you make money by fighting? well, there are three main ways:
firstly, you could attack a freight ship, get it to drop its cargo, steal said cargo and sell it off....
or, you could get yourself a police license, and get payed for pirate, xenon or khaak kills...
however, neither of these generates anywhere near as much as the third method: ship capturing....
ship capturing is just what it sounds like, you make a pilot decide that he/she values his life more than his ship, the pilot ejects, and the ship is yours...
one of the best guides on how to capture ships can be found at the official UNCC thread here:
http://www.egosoft.com/x2/forum/viewtop ... sc&start=0
capturing is how i personally make the most money, if i capture one Argon Nova every 2 minutes (not particularly hard), thats 30 captured by the end of the hour (i usually capture nearly 40 per hour on average)...
each nova sells for an average of 500,000 Cr.
30x500,000=15,000,000Cr. for an hours work
so as you can see, fighting is an extremely effective way of making money, only problem is you're going to need at least a good M4 class ship before you even think about capturing other ships.....
Pros
Generates a huge amount of money per hour.
Improves combat skills for dealing with Khaak/Xenon/Pirates.
Cons
Need at least an M4 to start capturing.
No way to automate capturing, and spending an hour manually capturing ships can get tedious.
Potential Income per hour: up to around 15,000,000 Cr. per hour.