Chateau de la Mort is a lot better payout than X-grog, even if you need apples to make it.
Yeah Chateau makes apples a valuable treasure - a mechanical reason to help the Lokk'Nars, as they tend to give a lot of apples. Refining hellerium is almost as lucrative as X-grog if a base lacks a still.
So uh, what’s a good basic strategy for XPiratez? After both of my attempts ending in two years to a very strange base attack to an enemy I’ve never seen before and can only assume is a hardcoded event at this point, I definitely need to re-evaluate my strategy of “basically slowly turtle in the starting base.” I usually turtle way too much in games, but x-com and especially xpiratez are extremely punishing for it.
There isn't an awful lot of time pressure (except on the higher difficulties. I think the HFS start retaliating 2 years in on hardest). The enemies mostly scale up based on certain key researches, like "The Academy is alarmed" or "The Academy is angry", and pogroms are optional until you formally ally with the Mutant Alliance. Score is easily positive just by research after the first few months, so taking your time just means less bonus dosh.
In general though I like to ramp up a manufacturing base as soon as reasonable, probably as soon as I get a workshop. Making a base full of plantations also provides an income bonus and is easy to redevelop later on as more useful 4-tile buildings become available. Always be researching, of course. I like to focus on researching low-value captives first, to collect lore, so that high-value captives are more likely to give something good instead.
Slavery is lucrative and required for a nice lategame building, but it takes longer to pay off than I used to think. A no-slavery run is very possible. Robbing captives gives only half as much dosh as releasing but the bonus materials can be good. More importantly it gives blue chips, which are a lot more than $1000 due to gambling.
I got pretty far in J13a but didn't do much intercepting. Bounty hunts and other static missions were usually enough. That's pretty true even in the first few months- I never bothered with airballs, just grabbed a few civilians foolish enough to park nearby.
Base defences are an ever-looming threat, though it helps to avoid intercepting. I try to keep an animal pen in every base. I used to fill it with dogs and the occasional reaper, but I think bloodhounds can be bought en-masse with the proper research and are considerably tankier. Dogs are very fast and deadly glass cannons, though.
(Also how the hell do you fight those very small APC shipping things in person)
Armored cars? At first you don't, they're tanky as hell and deadly. IIRC they're resistant to explosions, but they still take extra because they're multitile. They're fortunately pretty rare, mainly showing up on pogroms. I usually spam all the grenades I have available, then try to wear it down with machineguns/miniguns. Their armor-pre-damage and sheer rate of fire makes them my go-to weapons once all the important enemies are heavily armored. Their accuracy sucks, but that's not much a problem against a car.