Yeah it is not actually that difficult, just filter system state and population, supply what they need at a premium. War is good for business. The thargoid conflict out in Maia is very good for business, if you don't mind working for Aegis & Pirates.
War/Civil War: They pay more for weapons
Boom: They have higher supply of everything they normally produce and lower demand of what they normally buy. (good for missions, and picking up what you need for other system states)
Famine: They pay more for food
Outbreak: They pay more for Basic Medicines and Advanced Medicines
Lockdown removes the commodites market altogether, so no trade.
Expansion reduces wealth level, so trade should be slightly worse in all aspects. Same goes for Bust and maybe Elections.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6305
Hopefully in the future they will add weather and natural disasters into the mix. Paying a premium hauling shelters to a port that has been hit hard hard by massive storm, or an earthquake scenario requires passenger evacuation and medical goods.
From the DDF
Weather (Severe) – Severe weather (includes earthquakes, stellar flare events and other natural disasters)
Has a negative influence on Standard of Living and Wealth.
Just wanting to throw in there, Goemon did a pretty good guide about this, though I don't know where it is at the moment... (paging Dr. Goemon?)
There are however even more commodities affected than what 777Driver lists. For example,
Boom state: Ups the price of military-grade fabrics significantly. Normally 300-odd credits, they become =~ 1,500 on a buy-low and 3,200 on a sell high. So if you source them from a non-Boom system and sell them at Military, you'll add even more profit.
This state also affects the price of Painite and LTDs by around 10-20k credits per unit.
Similar also happens for Medical Diagnostic Scanners, when shipped to Service economies. There's probably tonnes more I don't know about (eddb-warrioring, Insulating Membranes has a maximum spread of ~ 5,000cr profit, compared to Palladium whose maximal spread is only ~ 2,000, for example. Don't know if that's states or something else).
It's already been mentioned, but if you just ship 100t of different types of weapons to a civil war system, there's tonnes of missions available from the boards for these weapons for a better profit. This should be the same for War state usually, but the
boards are bugged for that, sposed to be fixed in the next major update.
You don't need EDDB to take advantage of this though.... it's usually not updated fast enough for the state changes and you're better looking in-game for these situations.
One of my favourites is finding a system:
- In a famine state
- with multiple stations
- and agricultural economy
- and one of the agricultural stations is owned by a faction *not* in famine.
You go to the mission boards and the faction in famine has *tonnes* of in-system missions shipping food (as the station is owned by someone not in famine) to themselves in that system. And once you take all those missions, you can load up with other food to just turn a profit at the other end.
