Newcomer / Intro Argh, why cannot I get some credits

[unicron]

So frustrating...

Flying around, dogfighting, upgrading the ships, moving cargo, doing bounties. All enjoyable stuff!
But why does it have to be SO HARD to earn some credits as a newbie!?

Why you ask do I say this?

- Starting out with 1000 cr - trading seemed really hard had to restart a few times losing battles, being pirated, doing stupid stuff, being unable to complete missions, getting fines etc. Sure, learning curve.
- Managed to take down an Anaconda (little did I know) with mostly harmless status, got 78k cr. Win.
- Got an Adder, seemed like a nice allround ship, let's do some exploring and selling that data, some mining maybe.
- 4 hours later, mining some, getting blown up once, selling some starcharts: 60k cr.
- Got an Eagle better try my hand at bounties. Some assassination quests, but after 3 hours, no sign of the target. :-/
- Nav Point battles, got me 200k cr in about 2 hours, fine I guess.
- Tried another few quests, the conflict zone ones fail miserably, kind of hard to keep a budget Eagle alive for 7 kills, especially with CMDRs around...
- Back to nav points in anarchy systems, works a bit better it seems, higher bounties!
- Got a Viper, some gear into it, around 300k worth. But my income / hour doesn't really seem to increase, many bounties not awarded (NPC got the kill, no CMDRs around). After another long hard fightning session (over 45 minutes continuous battle) and 32k credits to show for it and another 2 hours USS hopping not finding the target, I decide to do what everybody that is in need of credits is doing: Trading.

So back to my Adder, dump the guns, get the FSD up and 12 rackspace in it. 230K credits for commodities. (minus rebuy)

- Read up on trading principles, looked up some reasonable routes and got to it.
- First load of 80k credits of Palladium: CMDR pirate. Demanded half of it. Sigh. There goes the profit.
- Second station: NPC Interdiction - Phyton right in front of me, shields down in a second (2e so yeah...), cargo demanded, but at the same time smashing into me. Nice...
- Third run: large population federation to independent democracy - not top listed, should be safe, right? Destination station does not let me dock -- Ohh, is in lockdown... So ehh? Next one?
- But yeh, before arriving at my next station: interdicted by CMDR: got wrecked in seconds after dropping out. Another 110k credits gone.
- Some intersystem trading then, with just 4k in commodities and a 2.5k profit. I'm pretty much broke, so lets have at it. 5th arrival: NPC Anaconda blasting away at me - escape with 23% hull...
- Repairs: 2630cr, profit: 2590cr.

== Balance after 15 hours bounty hunting: 230K and a Viper & Adder with average D loadout.
== Balance after 4 hours of trading: 32K

Well i guess I'll scrap that Adder and blow some more stuff up in my Viper then... At any rate, the Adder utterly sucks at avoiding interdictions, with the Eagle / Viper I managed to get away almost every time.

Love a lot of things about this game, but man... It is sooo hard to start out when you have sub-par gear...

 

[the100thmonkey]

• Don't do assassination missions in the Eagle. It's too small and the targets are usually elite Anacondas. The small hardpoints on the Eagle mean that you'll take a damage penalty of 66% against large ships. You'll destroy it quicker by farting at it. If you do manage to take one down, I want to see the video, because it will be an epic battle.
• Trade in the Sidewinder is pants. In the Adder, it's pretty good. Find a nice little square of Agricultural, Extraction, Refinery and Industrial/High tech and run a route like:

1. Ores from the extraction to the refinery
2. Metals from the refinery to the high tech
3. Performance enhancers/progenitor cells to the agricultural (if it's wealthy); agri-medicines or land enrichment systems if it's not.
4. Food to the extraction.
5. Repeat

• The above works best if the economies are "pure", i.e. the extraction economy doesn't have a refinery concern. You should still be able to find a profit though, sometimes without even jumping to another system (Eravate: Cleve hub [industrial] and Ackerman Market [agricultural] for example. I don't recommend Eravate and the surrounding systems though - I understand there to be a lot of... asymmetrical PvP).
• NAV beacons are good for bounty-hunting - 200,000cr/hour isn't too shabby. It will definitely make you enough to upgrade the Adder or Eagle. Resource Extraction sites (RES) are better.

My advice would be move away from areas with lots of CMDRs and join a group - the groups forum is full of threads with player alliances looking for members. If you move even only 20ly away from starter systems/Lave/etc., you'll see far fewer aggressive human players intent of helping you to unload your cargo early, and you will be significantly less likely to be pirated. PvP Piracy requires that the pirate hang out at high-CMDR population systems: They can't pirate players if there are no players around to pirate. Joining a player group really increases the social aspects of the game - shared goals, support and advice, a helping hand if you paint the station walls with your ship.

*EDIT*

And I like that it's hard! It wouldn't be so rewarding when you get your first big credit haul for an assassination or when your Asp rolls out of the shipyard if it were easy!

 

[OirishM]

Sounds like you've made more money than I have

So back to my Adder, dump the guns, get the FSD up and 12 rackspace in it. 230K credits for commodities. (minus rebuy)

- Read up on trading principles, looked up some reasonable routes and got to it.
- First load of 80k credits of Palladium: CMDR pirate. Demanded half of it. Sigh. There goes the profit.
- Second station: NPC Interdiction - Phyton right in front of me, shields down in a second (2e so yeah...), cargo demanded, but at the same time smashing into me. Nice...
- Third run: large population federation to independent democracy - not top listed, should be safe, right? Destination station does not let me dock -- Ohh, is in lockdown... So ehh? Next one?
- But yeh, before arriving at my next station: interdicted by CMDR: got wrecked in seconds after dropping out. Another 110k credits gone.
- Some intersystem trading then, with just 4k in commodities and a 2.5k profit. I'm pretty much broke, so lets have at it. 5th arrival: NPC Anaconda blasting away at me - escape with 23% hull...
- Repairs: 2630cr, profit: 2590cr.

== Balance after 15 hours bounty hunting: 230K and a Viper & Adder with average D loadout.
== Balance after 4 hours of trading: 32K

Well i guess I'll scrap that Adder and blow some more stuff up in my Viper then... At any rate, the Adder utterly sucks at avoiding interdictions, with the Eagle / Viper I managed to get away almost every time.

Love a lot of things about this game, but man... It is sooo hard to start out when you have sub-par gear...

Some of this sounds like bad luck, I've personally never found a station in lockdown (unless you meant it just wouldn't let you dock, but that's a matter of waiting for a free pad if the station is busy - stay in the no-fire zone if you're feeling unsafe).

I trade about half the time at the moment, and I'm running a pretty well-equipped Cobra. Are you fighting the interdictions? This may change with future updates, but submitting to the interdiction gives you less of a jolt out of supercruise, and you're good to frameshift again in 10 secs - as well as starting in sublightspeed a good distance from your interdictor and facing away from them. Make sure you've got power in shields and engines (I usually got two in shield unless I'm under sustained fire and four in the engine so I can floor it out of range).

The advice about changing systems is good - you may not have come across rare goods trading yet, some stations sell a commodity unique to them whose resale value increases the further away from that station you travel (it caps about about 160-170 Lyr). There are some fairly well-publicised routes, but that publicity also makes them a magnet for pirates. Go off the beaten track and find your own commodities and routes to forge through space and you'll have more success, I've done three successful runs of this type.

In terms of future upgrades I realise you're a little short on cash, but if you're going to trade, then reinforce your ship with better alloys, or pick up a shield cell bank. It will mean shorter jumps, but as long as you jump in and jump out of systems straightaway that won't make much of a difference.

I can't speak for bounty hunting as I've not really tried that so much.

 

[Zylark]

1: Find a nice cozy place with few actual players. I'd recommend the area around Tavgi. Plenty of interesting systems around there, good profits to be made doing regular trading and the people you meet are generally friendly.

2: At the start, basic focus is getting credits. You can do this the the dangerous way - trading rares where you just know at the major rare hubs plenty of pirates exist - or be a bit more patient and just do regular goods. Buy low sell high. By no means a gold mine, the Tavgi (Land Enrichment) - Hydelkagati (Tea) - Arngi (Silver) route is modest in earnings, but is steady, give Federation rep, and will get you fit to fight through the more lucrative rare-routes in a beast of a Cobra in no time. Bonus is doing delivery or fetch missions to boost rep with the feds, making a good amount of cash on the side.

3: Forget about bounty-hunting and such until you got some decent firepower and shields. Not saying it can not be done in a dinky little ship, just saying it is a lot more easier and profitable in a capable ship. And that means at least a good Viper or preferably a good Cobra. The latter due to better power capability, allowing more sustained use of good energy weapons. Put this way, my 10 million Cobra with its two fixed medium beamers will strip the shield off anything up to Clipper size without a sweat.

4: Have fun and don't grind. Yes, we all want that next big shiny thing, however if all that matters is moving up, it very soon gets very tedious very fast.

(5: join a group like say Contrail that will help you get along in the galaxy... )

 

[the100thmonkey]

Forget about bounty-hunting and such until you got some decent firepower and shields. Not saying it can not be done in a dinky little ship, just saying it is a lot more easier and profitable in a capable ship. And that means at least a good Viper or preferably a good Cobra. The latter due to better power capability, allowing more sustained use of good energy weapons. Put this way, my 10 million Cobra with its two fixed medium beamers will strip the shield off anything up to Clipper size without a sweat.

While player preference does come in to it, the Viper is, in my opinion, a more capable combat ship - it has better hardpoint placement meaning you don't need the weaker gimballed lasers on the wingtip hardpoints like you do with the Cobra, and an A3 shield on it is second to none.

You can also run something like 9% over the 12MW power budget if you set the cargo door, cargo scoop and FSD to priority 2 in the modules tab so they switch off when you deploy hardpoints. You can't use the FSD or cargo doors in combat anyway. Burst lasers are a good intermediiate between pulse and beam lasers, and do nearly as much damage to shields as the beams while reducing your power demands, although you can run two fixed beams on it if ytou choose. Additionally, small kinetics on the Cobra is a sub-optimal choice - you take a 33% damage penalty against medium ships (the Cobra is actually a medium ship that uses small pads) and a whopping 66% damage penalty on large ships. You should consider switching the weapon loadout round: Medium kinetics on the central hardpoints and small lasers on the wingtips - there's no damage penalty for lasers against any ship, and you'll take down bigger targets much faster.

In a small ship, bounty-hunting is actually a faster way to accumulate credits. 200,000cr/hr is pretty good. If he goes to a good RES, Unicron can probably make 50% more per hour than that, although why he doesn't just eat a world escapes me.

 

[Zylark]

While player preference does come in to it, the Viper is, in my opinion, a more capable combat ship

Yes it is, no argument there. If combat is what you are looking for, the Viper is very good.

The Cobra allows a bit more variety though. And better jump range. And a bit more power to have fun with them weapons

 

[unicron]

Thanks guys.

I don't mind the game being "hard" as in hard to master, taking a long time to get those millions and a high end ship (or all of them) when the high end ships are a factor 1000 out of reach when starting out.

The thing I do dislike though, is putting long gameplay sessions into a RPG style game GOING BACKWARDS. If playing cautiously and listening to tons of advice still means you lose (much) more than you gain, the better play is not to play.

Navigating, landing and fighting comes naturally to me in this title, eventhough I haven't been playing space sims like this for a while. I do reasonably well chipping away at huge targets in a Viper (and yes, I've taken down a novice Phython in an Eagle hehe). But doing battle for 10-20 minutes like that and NOT gaining anything form it just sucks.

I'll go some 250 LY away from where I am now (Brani / Chami / Cupis area - been robbed blind in all these three sectors now for 250k cr - getting killed after jettisoning too...) and stick to Solo mode I guess... Easier to get away from 2 Elite Anacondas than 1 player Cobra, that's for sure...

Anything I can do to get less easily interdicted? No issues with that minigame, but a loaded Adder just stands no chance. And CMDR's seem to interdict me in 2-5 seconds flat, I practically bump into them even when submitting...

 

[the100thmonkey]

The higher grade interdictors are very difficult to escape from. I'd imagine that a player pirates would equip an A-rated one to maximize the chances of a successful interdiction. When you submit, you should still try to follow the escape vector, as you can still spin out of it and take damage if you don't. The Cobra is the fastest ship in the game under boost, and one of the fastest at full throttle. Escaping one means you'll probably need to take a lot of hits to your shields. Make sure you buy and equip chaff - it will scramble gimballed weapons for up to 30 seconds. The optimal loadout for PvP in a Cobra is 2 small lasers and 2 medium kinetic weapons, all fixed. However, the wingtip hardpoints on the Cobra are very far apart and the fire they put out doesn't actually converge within a practical range, so unless the pirate is skilled, they will probably be using gimballed lasers. Chaff is therefore a prerequisite. It's also really useful for big ships, which often run turreted weapons.

I've never heard of the systems you're flying in, but if the PvP piracy is that bad, I'd just decamp to somewhere else. If you travel 250ly, you'll likely not actually need to play solo - as long as you're avoiding the rares routes and staying away from starter systems you'll probably see one or two CMDRs a session at most.

For trade, you can minimize the chances of NPCs interdicting you by paying close attention to the security level of the system you're considering flying to. Open the system view and scroll the reticule OFF any planets or stations. The security level will show in the information pane on the left. It will say low, medium or high. Political anarchies and there's-no-government anarchies are always low security. Stick to medium and high security systems.

If you're happy with combat, I strongly recommend bounty-hunting at RES and running combat missions from the bulletin boards to get the toehold cash you need. That will also buff your combat ranking, which also has an effect on interdiction rates, I think.

 

[Hudsonn]

Hahaha, sounds like you're doing more than fine to me!

 

[Herethos]

I got an Adder ASAP outfitted it for mining, upgraded to an Cobra also outfitted for mining did mining runs until I got it A classed, was returning around 300k+ full cargo per mining run, checked bulletin boards for those where they wanted say 5 gold which would give you around 90-100k credits, before I sold off any cargo. Switched to hauling rares. The mining was all insystem, no jumps just go to resource area, mine, return to station, repeat.

 

[unicron]

Continuation of my "saga" ("of failure"):

- Played solo, doing some trading.
- After 3 hours or so, made 100K. Decided to ditch trading for the time being, untill I can afford a vessel that can carry a bit more.
- Returned to Evarate and sold the Adder and got into the Viper.
- Relogged to Open play.
- Back again all the way to Cupis / Brani etc. Found the CMDR that ripped and killed me in Cupis. Returned the favor. 20 minutes at the Beacon, left and found him again. Hope the rebuy for his Cobra is high.
(couldn't find the other two just yet, but I will eventually)
- Returned to the starter systems again, sold the Viper for a Cobra.
- Back to bounty hunting. Lets upgrade this 500k cr Cobra for now.

Trading: Less enjoyable that dogfighting (if all goes well, you only see empty space and stations...), the UI is a bit of a mess, rewards not guaranteed and financial risks, that have little to do with player skill (IMO). I must 1) really suck at it so I cannot even see what I'm doing wrong or 2) not be well enough equipped for it.

But for now, I enjoy bounty hunting even more.

Got a PM about a nice enough system, I'll get in touch with those guys next and check out what I can do there, once I get the internals of this Cobra to decent specs to travel. (The Adder was a joy in that regard)

I've tried mining for a bit as well, that wasn't a bad profession either. I might invest another 300k into that when I get there. Might be a nice enough thing to drop some of it (since it is all profit anyway) to a sidewinder starter when that time comes too.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Trading is less skill-based than the other professions, but is probably more complex and rewards players who will take time to take screenshots for reference, make spreadsheets and have an eye for small details in them.

I must admit, I found trading confusing for quite a while. The key for me was to find systems with complementary demand and supply, and with large enough populations to slow down prices crashing under sustained trading. Trading doesn't really turn much profit until you get into T6 territory, outside of running rares (which bring with them a much higher possibility of piracy/mindless violence, cool, if you like that kind of thing). The first ship you can really multi-role in effectiely and make a decent profit (outside of rare goods) is the Asp.

Good job on getting your revenge. I bet you enjoyed that immensely.