A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

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EgoGimb
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A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by EgoGimb » Sun, 16. Jan 22, 19:59

Hello I need help getting some income using stations but as a noob to building stations I don't know where to begin I am playing cradle of life + no mods doing the very ferst plotline
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Alan Phipps
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by Alan Phipps » Sun, 16. Jan 22, 20:29

If you are doing the plot then you will be guided through building a Personal Headquarters and eventually at least one other station of yours, and that will probably be more than enough affordable building effort at an early stage of the game. Others may disagree, of course. :wink:
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SirConnery
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by SirConnery » Sun, 16. Jan 22, 23:28

Steps to building your station

1. Buy space land (skip this since you already have HQ)
2. Go to plan build. Place a dock so ships can land to sell and buy. Place whatever other buildings you want
3. Assign a builder from the Plan Build menu (cost 80k)
4. Ship the required materials to build your structures. Or alternatively put some money in the stations "Funds for Construction" . Then AI ships will sell your station the required materials. This is going to cost you about 2x the credits in comparison to shipping the materials yourself though.

If you want to create income you need to buy blueprints from a faction representative. Production blueprints that is. Those are quite expensive. Food products are always needed and the blueprints aren't that expensive so you could go with those.

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grapedog
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by grapedog » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 00:04

If you want to learn how to steal blueprints for building stations, I wrote a guide, it is linked in my signature.

Insects
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by Insects » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 02:36

All my station trading does is lose me money and take too long doing horrible spreadsheet arrangements.

Processing your mined materials in factory is profitable, though to get best pricing you have to queue lots of manual sells, which is where large freighters come in making you over 1M per sell click.

Since I fail to get trade stations to be the free money some people have claimed I can only recommend you focus on a production empire working upwards from the raw miner materials.
Large freighters manually selling Claytronics at max price makes milions per click, once your production has the excess stock.

If you want to rankup the manager and have busy traffic just set auto buy/sell on the local food and medicine with 2000 storage limits and there will be a hub of small freighter activity.

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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by Panos » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 10:34

EgoGimb wrote:
Sun, 16. Jan 22, 19:59
Hello I need help getting some income using stations but as a noob to building stations I don't know where to begin I am playing cradle of life + no mods doing the very ferst plotline
Since you picked the Teladi start you have a station, a freighter and a combat ship. Very easy to make money from the start.

First pick the PHQ mission from the data leak to the first NPC station you encounter but not the Teladi trade station next where you start. Continue the mission until you get to part to buy the Antimmater Cells. Then
Spoiler
Show
head to GE NW corner and pick the abandoned Elite vanguard.
Hire a Teladi captain from a station (those 3000cr ones). Send it to be stripped and then send it to buy the cells.
Give money to the station manager to buy water, open the sale of goods to everyone ad medium to low price.

Head with your fighter to Pious Mist and scoop all the containers from the destroyed ships. When you do that, head to Second Contact Flash Point. Scoop there all the containers.
Within those items you picked there would be Interfaces & Majalit (keep 40 sell the rest) and parts to make SETA. Personally never used SETA because there is always something to do in X4. Sell the parts for the SETA. That would make you the first few millions.
You going to use this money to for the freighter to trade Hull Parts & Teladianium (starts with 3 skill most of the time). Explore the Teladi sectors around your station and put some large satellites around the station clusters.

Add an Energy Cell production module (or 2) at your station including an M container and preferably a water production module. Stop buying water and start buying ice to sell the water, EC and sunflower. If you have the cash (and you should) just buy the Spice & Nostrop Oil alongside the M container, M solid and 3M6S dock.
Add the Spice and Nostrop Oil to your starter station.
As money flows buy S couriers with MK2 combat engines and assign them to trade for the Nostrop Oil station. 5-7 are OK. Buy another 4 for the PHQ.


Some might call me a hypocrite :lol: as I support single product multi station clusters, but for the Teladi start this is OK cutting costs. Can demolish the production modules and rebuild the station later. :mrgreen:

builder680
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by builder680 » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 13:09

A simple start would be to start off mining silicon (imagine a Teladi saying that lol). Sell it to NPC stations at first. Eventually, buy a plot and make a dock, pier, container storage, and energy cell production. That's a basic solar power plant. Keep selling your silicon to NPC stations.

Buy silicon wafer blueprint. Add solid storage and silicon wafer production to your solar power plant. Keep the silicon you were selling and make wafers from it and sell those. Buy microchip and smart chip blueprints. Add those to your factory. Increase energy cell production, docking space, and storage as needed. Start selling microchips and smart chips, and any excess wafers. This is a simple complex whose only input is silicon and energy cells. The energy cells are free once you have built the solar modules, so all you need to do is keep feeding it silicon. If you look around, there are economy flow charts that will give you ideas for simple complexes like this. I would not recommend building a mega station that produces everything, but a focused complex like this isn't bad imo.

Another thing I will do is mine one resource and make its output at the same place. There are six mineable resources and they all refine into one thing. For example, ore becomes refined metals. So I will mine ore and deliver it to my station that will then refine that ore into refined metals. I have another station that refines methane to make graphene. If you look on the flowchart, you will find that hull parts and advanced composites both use just refined metals and graphene (plus energy cells). And missile components use just hull parts and advanced composites (plus energy cells), so they're a perfect addition. So that's an idea for another complex that can use the outputs from your methane and ore refineries.

There are several candidates for complexes like this once you have a good flowchart. Pretty soon you'll have your own production chain going.

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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by Ezarkal » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 23:10

Insects wrote:
Mon, 17. Jan 22, 02:36
All my station trading does is lose me money and take too long doing horrible spreadsheet arrangements.
Stations losing money usually have too much storage space:
1- Managers will try to keep a certain level of wares required for production is storage and will buy these wares pretty aggressively until the required levels are met, meaning they spend a lot of money. If you have smaller storage space (or if you manually reduce the allocated storage for these wares), your manager will spend less money on them.
2- Managers will set the prices of your produced wares according to how much of them you have in storage, in ratio with the allocated storage, unless you set the prices yourself. So if you have only 10% produce in storage, the price will be high, and if you're at 90% the price will be low. Now you may think a high sell price is a good thing, but it's not if the competition sells cheaper than you. A trade that does not happen generates no profits.

So, a station with too much storage will initially buy a lot of wares, and sell at a too high price to be competitive. So they will lose money until it's full with whatever it needs to produce, and until its product prices drop enough to be competitive.
You can either A) build less storage, B) manually reduce assigned storage levels (both for input and output), or C) manually adjust your prices.

When I build a station just to generate money quickly and/or help the local market, I go with solution A), and use small or medium storages. This works wonderfully for energy cell, food, or basic material (refined metal, silicon wafers, etc.)

When I build a station that I know I will expand for other purposes such as making buffers for my shipyards or station production, I go with B) and build large storages for my future plans. I just have to remove the storage limits to start stockpiling, usually when the station already runs pretty well.

I don't bother with adjusting prices except in certain circumstances. It's not reactive to the local markets.



...or, your station may be losing money because of horrible placement, or lack of scouting of nearby stations. But I found that's rarely the case.
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by jlehtone » Mon, 17. Jan 22, 23:59

Well said.
Ezarkal wrote:
Mon, 17. Jan 22, 23:10
So, a station with too much storage will initially buy a lot of wares, and sell at a too high price to be competitive. So they will lose money until it's full with whatever it needs to produce, and until its product prices drop enough to be competitive.
The money used to obtain wares is not truly lost -- just invested. The trouble is that that asset (unnecessary surplus of wares) cannot be converted back into credits without use of those options "A" and/or "B".

I presume.
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SirConnery
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by SirConnery » Tue, 18. Jan 22, 02:35

jlehtone wrote:
Mon, 17. Jan 22, 23:59
The money used to obtain wares is not truly lost -- just invested. The trouble is that that asset (unnecessary surplus of wares) cannot be converted back into credits without use of those options "A" and/or "B".

I presume.
You can use ships and assign them to trade for the station. They will eventually sell everything in the storage to nearby stations. That's the most hassle free way of making the profits.

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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by ubuntufreakdragon » Tue, 18. Jan 22, 10:20

I would start with some terran productions, you can get their whole tech-tree with 3 wares, this makes later stations cheaper, as you can use terran modules for storage and docking costing you much less as you consume you own products.
If you storage is too large just reduce it per expensive resource in the logistical overview.
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Re: A broke Teladi Needs help with stations

Post by Imperial Good » Tue, 18. Jan 22, 10:46

There are three major options to start with in my opinion.
  • Turn HQ into a mineable trade station, buying from self only and selling to NPCs. Pirates do not pirate miners and Grand Exchanges central location can cover a lot of processing stations to sell the mineables at. Risk is that a KHK cluster spawns in the sectors as those can easily kill M miners while at work. Protecting such miners from KHK can be difficult but until then you can easily make 10Ms per hour with enough volume and places to sell. This only needs 2 ships (1 to mine, 1 to sell) to start returning a profit.
  • Create a fully self-sufficient economy from the ground up. Start with Energy Cells and move into mineables then intermediates. As you are not spending money buying resources pirates do not matter much as you will still make a profit even with piracy. This is harder to setup as you are looking at a million or so investment into stations and subordinates to get going.
  • Repeat either of the above in Terran space. Much safer than anywhere else but also more limited to average price for anything but mineables. Most of the demand are the Terran trade stations which can buy huge volumes every hour (>>100M/h total market volume). Requires you make friends with the Terrans and all the productions are not compatible with the other races.

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