My recent story. Give me suggestions at the end?

[realdor]

I'm fairly early into my game. I caught a total number of 3 titurels, amassed a small fighter squad and made a construction ship and had about 25 Million credits left over. (I realize I could be rolling in a lot more money doing missions and such but I didn't know a good formula to making money at the time.)

Anyways I did some market research and decided I'd make a space fuel distillery in Omicron Lyrae>Devoid Clime>Keen Chant.
Figured it was in much needed demand and with the resources so ready and available why not?

At 90% construction I was feeling pretty great about my small empire. Proud of what I built with my own effort and that's when things took a turn for the worse.

I s#+t you not, four Xenon K's flew in and decimated everything. I kinda save scummed a bit because I was going to lose way more than I really wanted to and cut my losses a bit. My small combat fighter squad was gone in seconds and my titurel that was destined to be a trader specific to that station died as well.

Now my property consists of two titurels on my autotrader mod barely making any money. And an almost phase 1 complete space fuel complex.
I'm torn. The Teladi in my wants to continue to gain revenue but the Terran part of me knows that danger is most likely coming sooner than later. That Xenon K squad was going to wipe everything I worked for.

Do I try to capture more titurels and amass a trade fleet or do I amass an attack fleet? I need suggestions. My last capture I tried not killing as many turrets and it ended up killing my marines so my capture skill is probably back to 30ish. I have around 11 million credits on me. Skunk is pimped out thankfully. Not Mk. V stuff yet but I'm working on it.

Edit: autocorrect is killing me today.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Damn, that's a harsh attack!

If you would like some boarding tips and don't mind spoilers, there's a nice guide bt XenonSurf linked on the wiki here alongside a few other guides.

As or trade vs combat fleets, i guess you could invest mission rewards in a trade fleet/trading/station construction, and capture some of the combat capitals during missions for a combat fleet. That's sort of what I do

[XenonSurf]

Yes, this is a little my story too with the difference of not so big a devastation endured. It's a fact that your trade ships are very vulnerable in general if you don't take appropriate measures and : you can in XR.

Your trade ships:
Have you maxed out the crew's skills? If not, they will not warn you when attacked and you lose them quickly, also don't expect much navigation 'evasion skill' from a 1 or 2 star captain. For more, see spoilers below.

Stations:
I think that stations are taboo: AFAIK they cannot be destroyed, neither by pirates nor by yourself, at least when playing without mods, so I don't quite understand your 'decimation'. If things go really bad pirates may cause a production halt, but nothing more... Also 25 Millions in credit left after building a station is nothing and you are in difficult situation, you need MUCH more to keep running your business unless you are really lucky and make big profits asap.
The place where you build your first station is a very delicate one: as you have discovered, a station is not cheap and you need reserves in credits for a worse-case like yours. I would not build my first stations in a higher traffic zone, but instead somehwere in empty space between zones of economic interest for your production wares. Heavy Xenon destroyers are less likely to visit such 'unknown' territory, but it's not excluded, so it's good to assign a Taranis battleship with drones to patrol together with fighter escorts.

As for measures against pirates, here some spoilers:

Spoiler

Show

1---
Create empty zones with Nav Beacons to make save heavens for your ships to fly in

2---
Some ships are devastating against combat fighters and small trade ships. If you use this sort of ships you need good escorts. The weakness of small ships is largely due to bad AI and maneurvers. Titurels are often enough to protect small traders, but 1-2 Taranis in your fleet patrolling in critical zones are necessary

3---
Some Black Marketeers have very powerful weapons for sale, but first you must explore the galaxy to know about. Missiles and guns are not the only existing weapons, your cargo bay can drop some dangerous items too...I'm not spoiling everything, but what I mean begins with T and is both useful for your Skunk defense and to protect zones.

I hope this will give you some good continuation.
Good luck

XenonS

[Snafu_X3]

If the Skunk is pimped you could try taking on the Ks yourself. As they're beetle-backed they have no protection (other than each other) if you simply stay up on their back & take them down from there. Good rep gain too for destroying capships (although the time taken can be tedious), however you may want to target their engines & cap weps first to avoid wholesale destrucion. If a capship can't move & can't fire significantly it's pretty much dead to anything that regards it as hostile (in the case of Xenon, that means every other faction )

Do you have the Teladi DLC? Buying a Mk3 mining laser from them /really/ helps with shield/hull busting on capships; if you use it to destroy engines/cap shield gens first you won't have as much of a problem as you initially presented (but be aware there's no autoaim with this wep)

When you specified your distillery, did you include turrets? Station turrets do a significant amount of dmg to enemies.. also I hope you have a booze license, otherwise you're going to have losses from police scanning your traders (once the station is producing)..

IZ dmg tends to be a lot less than OOZ dmg from that sort of attack; grab a cop license & a few Astrobees/Novadrones & make some cash (& rep) from destroying the K's escorts too..

[realdor]

Snafu_X3: Yeah my immediate thought to save all my stuff was to destroy their hard hitting weapons starting with which K was focusing on the Construction Vehicle at the time, the CV was all pimped out with the exception of a full contingent of drones which I'm thinking I'm starting to regret.

I'm rolling with the welding laser mod would that happen to conflict with the Mk. 3 Heavy Laser?

Oh yeah I have the booze license, it made me come back and look a ton though because the wares still show up as orange on my trade list though.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

IIRC, welding laser mod is indeed an alternative for the mining laser slot on the Skunk.

(I can't remember which slot the Heavy Laser uses)

[ezra-r]

there are areas patrolled by Argon Fulmekron/Olmekron cap ships, those are where you should build.. or go to empty space, nobody will show up to attack there (I wonder if this should be changed).

[Thufar]

Realdor,

Your experience is exactly why I always build my station's defenses up as much as I can, as fast as I can.

Train up those marines and "acquire" your fleets. Regarding trade vs. combat fleet, don't choose between, choose both. Take assassination missions and capture targets and/or their escorts. Personally, I don't think Titurels aren't that good a trade ship. They're better as storage ships. I'd take one to store all their drones on (that you'll need later), and sell the hulls. I'd then buy needed Rahanas(s) to assign to stations.

Regards.
Thu

[DJ0JJ]

I equip a lot of my stuff with Overrun drones because they die slower than any type of drones.