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I'm wondering, which investments you undertake pay back fastest? I am looking for investments where the money I put in pays back in 5-10 game hours. For example:

Ore Mines of Yield 40+ with CAG
costs approx 1.5m, my Mistral CAG earns profit of approx 200K each hour, so this pays back in 7.5 game hrs.

Wheat-Space Fuel complex
costs with a Hauler CAG approximately 6m, my CAG makes 500K an hour from this so payback in 12 hrs (a little too long for now but will do that later

Some threads suggested MK3 trade ships are the most profitable investments and you should not invest in stations; maybe I'm doing something wrong but for me MK3 traders are very slow in payback because you have to level them up. Still, on the long run you need UTs of course . I'm just looking for something quick now.

What do you guys think?

cheers!

Caping M1, M2 anything big = 50 millions each in like 30 minutes or less.

With under 100 millions inversion + missiles. A Cobra with a good marines team and a big pile of flails and hammers.

ok... that sound pretty profitable . But it means I will damage my reputation with another race, which might affect my traders, right? I read you cannot cap Terran ships when you play Argon, is that correct?

nospammdi wrote:ok... that sound pretty profitable . But it means I will damage my reputation with another race, which might affect my traders, right? I read you cannot cap Terran ships when you play Argon, is that correct?

Playing as the Argon commander I had a Terran Katana bail on me which I sold because I knew I'd never be able to get hold of enough electro-cannons to fit it out.

Scan RRF ships... find one with jump beacon then cap it and reload till you get it with jump beacon still there.
Sell it for 288mil.
Or mine a TL full of nividum... roll it and dock it in a sector with stock exchange buy shares... move it outa sector sell shares... repeat until you have no idea what else to do with credits.
Or simply buy a bunch of spacious TS blow up nvidium roid and set traders to mine when they are full... sell them at nearest shipyard... buy even more TS ships repeat first step and so on and so forth.
Go to xenon sector and start the smashing. Collect weapons then sell them. Depending on luck I had times where after an hour I was leaving with 5-6 PPCs and a bunch of HEPTs and so forth.

IIRC the nividium mining trick doesn't work in AP, because the rocks disappear. One of the mods mentioned that the TC version was a glitch because the mining script never removed the rocks when you were OOS, thus allowing you to mine a given area forever.

On topic: In my experience most factories take around an ingame day to earn back their cost, making them a bit slow. If you can stand a bit of micromanaging, a few MORTs can make a pretty penny for next to no investment. Freighters are pretty cheap, and the software required doesn't cost much, so with a good spot and a little luck it'll earn back the investment in about an hour or so.

AIUI the "infinite rocks" 'exploit' TC isn't a "glitch" because it was intentionally added in one of the patches (2.0a I think).

Also, Station-class asteroids should still have the usual respawn cycle, so you do technically have an infinite amout of Nividium (or whatever) to mobile mine, it just doesn't allow quite the same level of automation.

For making money certain products seem to sell well at above average prices (Microchips are famous for being popular even at maximum), but the old wisdom was that to maximise sales you needed to sell most wares for 1 credit below their "Average" price.

If you don't mind exploiting what may or may not be an exploit, there is a way to automate sales of missiles & lasers to EQDs (& similiar stations) that don't normally stock them, thus creating a literally infinite demand scenario at "Average" price (since any wares not normally stocked that are sold to these stations are erased from the game).

If your Mk3s are taking a long time to pay for themselves, I'm inclined to think you've put them in a bad area to start with.

Put your STs in Empire's Edge, Ore Belt, Ministry of Finance, Company Pride, Profit Share and Nyana's Hideout. Shouldn't take long at all for them to reach Level 7ish. Set them up as Local Traders with 1-2 sector radius in such a way to keep them out of Pirate/Xenon/War sectors. Any area that includes Ore, food and factories is good.

nospammdi wrote:ok... that sound pretty profitable . But it means I will damage my reputation with another race, which might affect my traders, right? I read you cannot cap Terran ships when you play Argon, is that correct?

There are always Pirate and Yaki waiting for be boarded... if you don't mind to be called a vermin
Also Xenon can be boarded, but are really difficult.
You can jump to a Yaki sector and board two capitals in one trip.

Erqco wrote:

nospammdi wrote:ok... that sound pretty profitable . But it means I will damage my reputation with another race, which might affect my traders, right? I read you cannot cap Terran ships when you play Argon, is that correct?

There are always Pirate and Yaki waiting for be boarded... if you don't mind to be called a vermin
Also Xenon can be boarded, but are really difficult.
You can jump to a Yaki sector and board two capitals in one trip.

Yaki unlike pirates can be made into full permanent friends like any other race and they make for best sectors to stick illegal ware complexes and not worry about random xenon/pirate making a mess. Yaki tend to pulverize anyone that starts trouble in their sectors.

I have not tried pirating or boarding ships yet, because it seems counter productive to piss off the boron,teladi,para at my stage of the game (1 week). I only just restarted yesterday too with the rebalanced mod so life is alot tougher now....

Any suggestions on boarding ships as a Argon early game?