Litcube's Universe

kizito · Post by **kizito** » Tue, 23. May 17, 03:07

Hey everyone, so I started a new game yesterday, I'm 12 hours in and have 11.5m with 1 UT. UT's are pretty slow from what I'm witnessing. So I'm wondering, with what I have, would it be better to start building stations, or invest in a boarding ship and marines?

I've never tried boarding before, I've read a guide but just can't seem to find good targets.

Sirrobert · Post by **Sirrobert** » Tue, 23. May 17, 10:59

I would build stations. Perhaps buy a few 1MJ shield fabs in argon prime or something.

Or just straight up save for a TL

sendrock · Post by **sendrock** » Tue, 23. May 17, 16:53

Hi,

The reward of building stations is based on your trade rank, before 17-18 you'r not going to get large profits.

You sould get at least 10 UT to raise your Trader Rank until this point and then spam building missions with your own TL.

To get the money for the TL, you can buy any ship that is under 80% (the less hp%, the more profitsss when you repair and sell)

Boarding pirates M6 is really simple if you have a team of 9-10 marines with 3-4* overhall. You'll win 10M up to 18M depending on the ship you board when you repair and sell. If you'r playing only with Boron's ship, you'll have to wait an M7 (Kraken) to use boarding pod, other races have M6 compatible with boarding pod.
Boarding is very profitable when you have a team of 25 marines at 4* overhall, you can board Pirate's M2 (200M+ for an exterminator when you repair and sell) or M1 for 140M+.

You should avoid Xenon's ship because they'r harderto board, and by harder I mean SO MUUCHHHH HAAAAARRRDDERRRR to board than pirates, i don't know why, even if they don't have sentry, hull pola or things like that.

Good luck

PS : To board a Pirate M6, if you have your combat rank around 17, pick some "Medium difficulty DEFEND THIS STATION " missions, they'll spawn 1-2 M6 with some fighter.

Zaitsev · Post by **Zaitsev** » Tue, 23. May 17, 18:54

sendrock wrote:You should avoid Xenon's ship because they'r harderto board, and by harder I mean SO MUUCHHHH HAAAAARRRDDERRRR to board than pirates, i don't know why, even if they don't have sentry, hull pola or things like that.

The lore reason is that they are essentially living machines, and have built in defenses that can make life very difficult for any boarding parties. The game engine basically treat them as if they have sentry lasers on steroids.

dizzy · Post by **dizzy** » Tue, 23. May 17, 20:08

kizito wrote:I've never tried boarding before, I've read a guide but just can't seem to find good targets.

I don't think boarding in LU is worth pursuing as a way to "accelerate" empire growth. It takes forever (in terms of game time) to train a reasonable set of marines to 5 stars combat plus one other skill (and that's after you already bought the highest skill marines you found) and 20% or so still die in the boarding attempt, after you reload/retried 5+ times because most times they will simply all die (in flight or in combat).

Personally the most efficient way to make money in the beginning has been simply buying damaged ships, repairing them using astronaut suit repair laser and selling them back. If you get lucky and land a great deal (~50% hull integrity) on an expensive ship you can make >10mil for 5m of game time. Do not bother buying damaged ships at >90% hull integrity, it won't be profitable. This works quite well/naturally when you are also exploring the universe and dropping satellites in every sector (I do not trust Explorer Command Software to do that automatically, they get themselves killed way too often).

After a while I start building a UT trader fleet while I continue to hunt for repair ship deals. When you get to 40+ UTs you should probably stop adding more to the fleet. Somewhere around here you will have the reputation and can afford to buy a TL, do so and then start doing the very profitable "build station" missions. Just do any "Build station" mission you can find, especially those of "hard" difficulty, they pay tremendously well.

Whenever I have the money I drop a SCH with small weapon factories (APC, IRE, etc), at least 50 size. That should cost a few hundred million credits and make good money per hour. Whenever I can afford it I'll buy a second one. Then a third one and so on. Then I upgrade existing smaller SCH to larger ones. When you have about 1200 total SCH size of small weapon making factories you can probably stop doing that because you'll be making more money than you can spend. Make sure you are varying your production or the universe will get saturated with the same weapon you've been mass producing and your profits will drop. While you are planning for the next SCH and you need to save up money for it, you can invest the current balance into the stock market (buy at the cheapest price, sell whenever it goes 20% above that or more) so the money doesn't sit idle.

Sirrobert · Post by **Sirrobert** » Tue, 23. May 17, 20:58

memeics wrote:(I do not trust Explorer Command Software to do that automatically, they get themselves killed way too often).

Check out Joubarbe's Quick explore. It lets you tell your ships to avoid hostile sectors.

What I do is I have 1 or 2 Kestrels safe explore the universe, which only maps sectors, not what's in them (that information is useless anyway, without property in the sector).

And since only friendly (safe) sectors are known at this point, the Kestrels that go for satellites aren't at risk of running through hostile sectors as much.

dizzy · Post by **dizzy** » Tue, 23. May 17, 22:31

I need to scout the universe looking for good deals and missions anyway, I can take that opportunity to safely drop satellites while at it. If I had no reason to go to every universe sector I'd consider it.

kizito · Post by **kizito** » Tue, 23. May 17, 23:57

Thanks for the replies, I'm gonna start scouting asteroid sectors and build SCH's there. And then eventually make an HQ somewhere, probably close to the OCV chain but haven't decided yet.

dizzy · Post by **dizzy** » Wed, 24. May 17, 00:22

Note that in the grand scheme of things an HQ is quite cheap and immensely useful (even early game). It costs about 400mil credits which is around the price of one decent money making SCH. As such in my second playthrough of LU (which you can watch on youtube, see my signature) I made sure to buy it before any other station.

As for dropping it close to the OCV... up to you I guess but that sounds scary. My instinct has always been to find an empty remote sector, away from my enemies (Phanon and the OCV). You'll have jump drives on all your MLCC ships anyways so flying distance doesn't really matter in terms of deployment.

kizito · Post by **kizito** » Wed, 24. May 17, 01:37

Thanks again for the reply, I think I'll take your advice and get a money SCH first and then get a HQ. Also, I've been watching your vids here and there when I'm not playing, they've been helpful, so keep up the good work!

kolimbo · Post by **kolimbo** » Fri, 26. May 17, 20:03

Hey! I've been out of the loop for a while, will there be another update in the foreseeable future?

I distinctively remember that the last time I 'finished' a game with LU that there wasn't much to do after defeating OCV since most of the races are not fighting eachother (and the phanon are really slow at building up).

Thanks!

Sirrobert · Post by **Sirrobert** » Fri, 26. May 17, 20:09

The OCV is the final boss. You indeed finish the game after beating them.

bombaldil · Post by **bombaldil** » Tue, 30. May 17, 20:08

Guys, help...trying to move an asteroid with Plutarch Tractor System and then got this error 'too close 12 km to a stationary object'. Tried move it to empty sector...same thing. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Litcube · Post by **Litcube** » Tue, 30. May 17, 22:00

I'm not a betting man, but my best guess is that you're trying to move an asteroid too close to a stationary object. My other best guess is that the object is within 12 km of where the asteroid was to be placed.

Purely speculation, though.

bombaldil · Post by **bombaldil** » Tue, 30. May 17, 23:44

It's all good, the asteroid was placed far away and I coudn't see it.
Thx for help and this great mod, man!!

Valangar · Post by **Valangar** » Wed, 31. May 17, 00:12

I'm having a problem with installing EMS ontop of LU.
When selecting the folder I chose for my X3AP LU the installer complains that there is no "X3AP no-steam.exe" present.

Here's how I did my installation:

- fresh steam installation of 3.2 without BP
- copied to a different folder on my SSD
- exchanged the original .exe for the no-steam .exe from the egosoft download section
- gave the game a test run, no issues

- installed LU 1.7.1 to this folder
- installed LU Patch 1.7.2
- installed EIP, Soundtrack & GUI in that order
- gave the game a test run, no issues (as far as I can tell)

Am I missing something obvious?

dizzy · Post by **dizzy** » Wed, 31. May 17, 00:30

The installer wasn't updated about the fact that newer no-Steam x3ap executable is named just x3ap.exe and the installer instead looks for a x3ap_n.exe file and it doesn't find it so the error.

Copy x3ap.exe to x3ap_n.exe and re-run the installer.

Valangar · Post by **Valangar** » Wed, 31. May 17, 00:37

That did the trick, thanks.

bombaldil · Post by **bombaldil** » Wed, 31. May 17, 03:02

Got my first Saturn Complex Hub working...yay. And another problem...why my Station Agents are only negotiationg when the Hub is pretty much full?

Zaitsev · Post by **Zaitsev** » Wed, 31. May 17, 04:12

bombaldil wrote:And another problem...why my Station Agents are only negotiationg when the Hub is pretty much full?

Check the export threshold in the station menu. The default is something like 90%, which means an assigned station agents will only look for deals when the SCH has filled to more than 90% of its maximum capacity. If it's a product with fairly short cycle times, like IREs and the likes, I set it so the station agent will sell the entire stock roughly once per hour, which means setting the export threshold to around 12-13%.

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Litcube's Universe