I have pretty high rep with most of the major races (need to work on Paranid some more), so I get some pretty fruitful missions and have gotten way pickier on the profit margin per mission. Return Abandoned Ship missions are lovely. So far I've stolen 2 Minotaurs, a Cerberus, and a Centaur thanks to my Yaki friends. I've sold all but 1 Minotaur since I'm training up a bunch of Marines. I get M8s frequently for these missions now, and I go ahead and return those. Because of these missions and personnel transport missions, my favorite ship for a while was a Zephyrus, but I switched to flying a Chokaro with a Kestrel and an M3 docked (usually a Mamba Raider to aid with personnel transport, but could also be swapped with a Nova Raider or Blastclaw Prototype).
I've been using X3 Map by Scorpby and started working with the log file it uses. I write a lot of notes and keep track of changes to them in a git repository, so recently I wrote a console application to read in the log00001.txt file and sort the stations under each station category and sort the wares in each station's sellable and buyable wares groups and rewrite the file. This makes the diffs with each commit of the log file in that repo much less noisy since the search script doesn't ouput stations or wares in the same order each time.
Outputting a second version of the sorted log without the wares allows me to track GoD's activity, and it's been busy, apparently. It took away an SPP-XL in Bala Gi's Joy and one in Akeela's Beacon, which makes me a little sad. I probably shouldn't have disabled the 5 UTs I had going (and 3 STs training) before starting to set up CLS2 networks a la Trapper Tim's approach. I should probably drop a bunch of CLS2 discos around with multiple fly-to-station waypoints to try to protect more stuff from GoD. I lost track of how many discos I have around the galaxy.
So far I'm working on dominating energy cells in the Argon Prime region before tackling other wares. Ran into a snag where my first substation in The Hole went dry. I redid the collection/distribution in The Hole, thinking that was probably the bottleneck, that the buying traps on the two XL SPPs just weren't being collected from quickly enough for the distribution I was doing previously. At the moment, that substation is fed from the 2 SPP-XLs in The Hole and the SPP-M in Antigone Memorial while distributing to the EC consumers in those sectors and a substation in Herron's Nebula (which just started distributing to selling traps in that sector). Time will tell, I guess. I definitely arranged ships and waypoints a bit differently than others seem to do these when I first set up that sector. I probably need to do some math on travel time and SPP production rate to figure out if I'm collecting fast enough.
There's so much stuff I've added to a To Do list for this game...
Apparently the only way I'm going to get any PBGs is by capping pirates, but I'm trying to keep fight rank down still for the police spawns on Return Abandoned Ship missions. The only PBG forges at the moment are in Maelstrom and LooManckStrat's Legacy and are red, naturally. Might try cruising around for a station hacking mission. If I can't get them, I'm simply going to have to use an alternative weapon/ship — I saw someone take out an entire sector of Xenon in an M3 and figured that might be something to add to my X3 bucket list, but PBGs are essential to that plan.
I want to expand upon my log parsing application to output per-sector-per-ware maps of supply and demand to help inform me how to shape my CLS2 networks. Where the sources of particular wares are clustered, where the consumers are and whether they're being served, etc. Now I'm wondering if how feasible it is to take those results and write an application that constructs, per sector, a list of ships, with their cargo sizes, waypoints, costs, etc. needed for a basic setup. Could be handy as a checklist.
I thought about speeding up CLS network setup by writing scripts that create whatever ships I want with whatever software/equipment/upgrades and then deducts the proper amount of credits from my ship account. Part of the grind and enjoyment of the game seems to be moving spaceships around, though, so for now I'm using pairs of Boas with 4 discos each, with JDs in the Boas and JDs in the 4 discos of one of the each pair of Boas. The one with the JDs sits at the shipyard I'm sourcing freighters from, dishing out a JD and ECs to the new freighters. They get jumped to the sector where I need them and the other Boa is sitting there at the gate to collect the JDs. Then after each 4, the Boas swap places. Still need to set up some CLS2 ships to refuel the Boas. These are also pretty handy for collecting the used freighters I like to buy while cruising for missions.
Still need to pick a bunch of weapon/shield fabs to protect from GoD. Still need to set up some EC/ore/wheat delivery to the Space Fuel and IBL stations in Weaver's Tempest. Still need to start the Terran Plot and quickly setup trade in Terran space. Still need to practice dogfighting and capping more.
Oh look, a Return Abandoned Ship mission. Oh look, an asteroid scanning mission that pays 290,000Cr per asteroid. Oh look, this person needs to get to a station in 5 minutes in a sector I haven't explored that's 4 jumps away — let's see if I can pull that off.
Crap, I still haven't done any of the other stuff. Why is there so much to do in this game?
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Unsolicited advice welcome (re: PBGs and CLS2 networks), but mostly I wanted to say hello to everybody. Hello.
Also, I once killed my character repairing that first Minotaur with a coffee cup on my Ctrl key while watching a couple episodes of Stranger Things with my fiance. I forgot my space suit had only a 2-hour supply of oxygen.
