Stations losing money

[StevieLeeCole]

I've been playing X-series for over a decade, and I've never lost money with stations... I always have made really good profitsss. Can't figure it out either. I have a complex with 2x Silkworm, 1x Wasp and it was making good profits. Then I added a Solar Energy Medium and it started losing lots of money. The only thing that would seem to explain it is crystals are so expensive that I'm taking a huge loss on producing E-cells, but that doesn't appear to be the case based on the numbers. I'm dumbfounded, most of the other games were set up so that even if you were buying wares at high prices you would not make much money, but you would never lose money, and certainly not at this rate. I've lost 5M credits over several hours, and I mean actual net worth including value of the wares. Should I just destroy the Solar Energy factory at this point?

[Hwitvlf]

I don't think you should be losing money because of making your own e-cells. Are you using the Station Manager? It charges a salary and can spend money on ship upgrades.

If you plan out an identical complex using the Complex Planner tool, it should show you the expected profit. Regardless, I would add a crystal factory before removing the solar plant. It's easier to find cheap silicon and food than crystals.

[StevieLeeCole]

Thank you! I am using the station manager, and thought I saw one of my vanilla transports using a jump drive... hmmm. I've used the complex planner for X3AP and X4, didn't know it was available for X3FL. Based on what you've shown, the station should be quite profitable, as I suspected. I did just buy a bunch of cheap transports (no shields, guns, etc) and assigned to the station after losing a very expensive Mistral SF XL fully kitted out. I've guessing it is all the upgrades on three ships at once that is sinking all the profits.

[Novvak]

Yeah losing money with stations is definitely possible, I had a standalone BoFu factory XXL in a Boron sector that theoretically had a large demand on BoFu, but still the factory was idling after running out of resources it was supposed to buy, it never made a profit.
I think your problem may be caused by:

1. Station manager fees (once in a while the pilot will get their wage).

2. Station manager updates - unless turned off, the managed ships will try to install updates, such as jumpdrive (300k) or turbo booster mk 1 (1.7m), which they don't even use.

3. From what I've noticed, AI is not buying weapons, shields and missiles too eagerly. I have a large complex producing various weapons, but all AI ever wanted to buy is Mosquito Missile. They are not interested in firestorm torpedoes, shields of all sizes, etc., mosquito is all they care about...

[Da-V-Man]

If you want to see what your complex was spending its money on, you can look at the station transaction report under the advanced menu section. It might give you more of a clue as to what happened.

[StevieLeeCole]

Thanks will check out station reports and try to nail down!