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[puke]

wow, those guys stack?  I never knew!

Some things:

lamps, sensors, ground penetrating radars, binoculars, etc:  you only need one.  I dont know why it lets you buy multiple, maybe if the first is lost to acid rain?  You might think:  everyone needs a headlamp.  They don't.

Jetpacks and grav platforms:  useless unless you have enough for everyone.  Dont buy them until you can buy enough for everyone, or reduce the number of people in the away party.

Things like drills, I'm less certain on.  My ability to tunnel through mountains seems to be improved by having multiple drills, or maybe it is just a factor of having more firepower?  It's hard to be sure.

The advice about not fighting is good, but you can still fight dirty.  use the radio to keep your ship close.  use the ships guns for everything.  Dont call fire too close to your own position, and bigger guns have bigger area of effect.  take some test shots before using them for reals.

[Girlinhat]

I guess I'm just not sure what you're 'supposed' to do.  And it seems half the times, there's three major stations and all of them have the same megacorp.  Like, I can't even buy stock for a different corp.  So I end up running around to easy planets, selling scan results, barely paying off my fuel costs, and then scan something and get hit by space squids or something.  Sometimes I can get a lucky break and get an easy mission for a few thousand, but it's rare and then I get eaten by something.  Most of my income ends up around the 200 mark, which gets consumed by repairs, fuel, and wages instantly.  I feel like I'm missing something and there's some larger profit feature that I've somehow overlooked.

[puke]

well, you're "supposed" to retire rich.  But it is usually my personal goal to explore as many unique planets as possible and to obtain an alien ship.  I consider adding aliens and other unique characters to my crew to be a minor victory as well. 

There is some sort of subplot with the robots and somehow being able to thwart them, but I've never been able to do this.  Eventually you can get corporate missions to scout robotic factory worlds, this is hard stuff.  I think the major victory in the game is if you can achieve this, but I've never gotten that far.

You used to be able to duel a famous pirate captain, but I've not been able to do this in a few versions and I suspect it is broken.

If you dont get multiple corps on the major stations, this is not a huge deal.  One is pretty much as good as another, the differences are minor.  Sometimes you can get offices for a different corp on the smaller "truck stop" stations, but I dont believe that they show up on the stock market unless they are on one of the 3 major stations.

I usually get a couple thousand per trip in the early game.  This is between bio-data from 'i'inspecting things, geo data from scanning and mapping planets, and whatever resources I turn in.  For me I feel like the big money is in the biodata and inspections.  You can inspect each individual dead alien, not just one of each type.  And inspecting terrain can be valuable as well.  Some planets are more interesting than others, usually lush biodiverse worlds give better terrain value than dead vacuum worlds, though sometimes you can find interesting rocks when inspecting barren tiles.

[Girlinhat]

How do you get anything in the thousands?  I tried investigating worlds and scanning and walking about, but everything is costly and nothing pays.  I found a planet with life, it was hostile and attacked me.  I called my ship to fire on it, and my weapon exploded.  My first science officer died in combat, then got to ship and went to nearby station, and my secondary science officer immediately retired.  So I had to pay for repairs, fuel, got essentially no data to sell, and then the next 20 worlds are hellish corrosive and I can't even cover my fuel costs, much less my much higher wage costs because I had to hire new science officers.

Again, it feels like I'm missing something.  Like, I'm playing an MMO and killing mobs for hours, and someone says "oh yeah, quests give like 1,000x the rewards of killing mobs" and I realize I've been doing it wrong.  Scanning planets and finding resources feels like fighting mobs, it takes a long time, I take a lot of damage, and it doesn't even pay out.  Surely there's some trick or some style that I'm just not getting.

[mainiac]

As a general rule, avoid special planets completely until you know what you are doing and are rich.  If it has a unique description there is about a 50-50 chance you are going to die unless you know exactly what the trick is.  Some of them are benign and even profitable but you dont need them.

Exploring is a good source of wealth it's just pretty erratic in results.  You want to explore to get yourself off your feet.  Once you save up enough money to properly equip your core crew you will be a lot safer.  Once you save up a ton of money and start buying/finding top level equipment you can shrug off robot attacks.

[Neonivek]

It is actually far better to just be a trader at the start until you got enough cash flow to get a great ship with a full compliment of crew.

Since as I said the game actively punishes you for exploring too early...

But another thing that helps are mining bots.

[puke]

hmm, not sure.  There are a few things similar to questing, but they're erratic.  I usually make money the same way you describe.

The first thing I do, is fire any command staff with skills less than 3, and then hire new ones at the first station.  You can keep turning down applicants until you find ones with skills at 3, and then take them on staff.

I also keep pilots and gunners on the ship, take them off of away teams by hitting "A" to manage the away team while you are at your ship.  That way they dont die horribly.

I've never had a ships gun explode.  Ouch!

You can spam communication attempts with any creature that you can communicate with.  If it keeps asking for food, you're wasting your time.  But if it is chatty, you can keep talking until you get it to trade local currency or art items or whatever.  I think this trains your scientist, but maybe only the first time he breaks through with each creature.  It definitely give some funds, some of those art items are worh over 1K each (many only in the 100's though).

Where do I make money?  hmm.. I ration my fuel by only landing on places that look promissing (two or more items detected, or breathable with biospheres) and explore fairly thoroughly.  I can usually get 2-4 landings per trip out, depending.

I dont refuel in gas giants unless my pilot is at 4, or I really need the gas.  It's a hard trick balancing hull repair costs against fuel prices, but if you have a good pilot (or some drones) you can always try selling fuel back to a station?  I have not tried this, but it is conceivable that gas giant mining might pay off.  Seems more grindey than exploring, though.

If you want to jump straight to mid-late game activities, fire up Cheat Engine and give yourself more money.  You will still have some challenges and risks.  you will still need to train up your crew and find better items than you can buy at stations, but you can at least afford a nice ship and some good equipment out of the gate.

[puke]

Okay, here are some hard numbers.  Fresh game, hired a level 3 scientist. 

Made one landing on a green looking world with a few resources in sight, spammed some conversations with aliens and got some of their junk.  tried trading with one, but ended up losing a combat knife and getting nothing in return.  Should have offered him the play script I got from the guy in the bar.

Some hostile spiders came along, I was able to kite and kill a couple from range and examine their bodies after, but ended up losing two security guys when I tired messing with a third.

scanned maybe 20 other planets from orbit, without landing.  Including some uniques.  flew through some red/green gas clouds, but no dangerous nebula.  went past a wormhole.

Smith Heavy Industries:

Map data on 4982.5 km2: 773
data on alien life forms: 210
resources: 1877
info on wormholes and anomalies: 660

So thats a little over 3k on a first flight with a light scout.

For the first time this game, I tried changing the map parameters.  Default size is already as small as it goes, but you can increase the number of stars and wormholes.  I kept the map small with a high number of stars, and there is a bit more density of stuff to work with.  seems beneficial.

[forsaken1111]

I need to try this game out again. A lot has changed since I last picked it up.

[Fniff]

The crew of the ship LS Jackson seem to have delved into the more horrid parts of colonialism and just generally being dicks.
Everything started off cool, working up enough money to buy spacesuits and get better guns by scanning dangerous planets (Read: anything with life on it) and stripping any rock of whatever it had provided my crew of lazy assholes didn't have to climb up a mountain like real men.
Then I realized, once I had enough guns, that I was able to make a much neater profit off planets if I gathered biodata by murdering the wildlife instead of just plant samples. I did this for a while and made a pretty penny (Got myself a country manor and life insurance) but then realized exactly what I was doing. I was wiping out (Depending on the scale of enemy encounters: I generally imagine them to be herds and packs rather then loners unless they are bosses) whole species across the sector just so I could dissect them and sell them to scientists. Oh well, such is life in the Zone the outer rim.
Then I had to get rid of a walking mushroom infestation on a small space station. Alright, cool! 50 creds per head sounded amazing, especially since my crew were so well-armed they could take on most things. Problem is, the infestation was concentrated in a single room which for some goddamn reason was also filled to the brim with civilians. Civvies, civvies everywhere. We waited for them to dissipate, but every time one of them left another one jammed himself in there. Why? The room had walking mushrooms in it. What were they getting out of this?
I got tired of waiting. So I aimed at the mushrooms and figured that my crewmembers were accurate enough to not cause what was meant to be pest eradication to turn into a horrible cross between friendly fire and a war crime.
Guess what happened next? Yep, every single civvie got killed, so we kept firing while they wailed at us. They weren't able to get past our combat armor at all, and no-one suffered as much as a bruise. I expected that no-one in the station would ever sell to me again. That is until I approached the vendor who told me to kill the mushrooms, who thanked me and handed me 150 credits, which would barely pay for our fuel. Despite my crew being covered in the blood and guts of his former customers like something out of Dead Alive, we received absolutely no punishment whatsoever for what was essentially a shooting spree. Well, apart from the occasional civilian attacking us whenever we visited that station again.
Then we arrived on a special planet. Usually I avoid these, but this one was... well, special. The lizards living there had divided themselves into two groups: redcaps and bluecaps. These two tribes warred with obviously human-made gauss guns. We tried convincing them not to war with each other for a bit, but then we decided to go with the more profitable route and follow them around while they killed each other then dissect the corpses of the fallen for precious biodata. Eventually we started claiming to both sides that we were against the other side, then randomly killed lizards from both sides then dissected them. Now acting like some horrible colonial power made up entirely of serial killers, we walked around the planet a bit until we found a cave. Inside was filled with human pirates, and it wasn't hard to draw a conclusion: they were running arms to the lizards, most likely both sides.
We killed them all, for great justice, then decided that the whole 'let's sell arms to warring lizard tribes' was a pretty excellent idea and sold our surplus of guns to the lizards who greatly appreciated it. We then left, since we had probably fucked this world up and doing much more was likely to cause God to throw a meteorite at us just to get some positive karma going. Which has happened to my crew, and we only had a few scratches!
We had murdered innocent wildlife (And probably a few sapients we didn't bother to talk to), killed human civilians for getting in our line of fire, and essentially pulled a Belgium on an entire planet. By now, you would expect the crew's mental states to be so bad it would make Spec Ops: The Line look like a tea party, but they were still constantly going 'You're the best captain ever!' and telling funny jokes while we did all of this.

Is the morale system a placeholder? Or are people willing to do anything if it means a few extra bucks in Prospector RL?

[puke]

They'll do anything.  I prefer to communicate with anything that I can, and trade in little trinkets. but you can certainly make some easy money playing ugly.

If I remember from older versions, these are some of the big money makers on the special planets. 

You can sell arms like you just did -- basically trafficking the cheapest weapons you can buy, and hauling them there and selling them at a tidy mark up.  There also used to be a few colony worlds that would either pay a premium for some specific kind of good, or convert one cargo type to another.. For example, theres an industrial world that converts tech items to luxury items for you, and depending on the market you can clean up this way.

Some things I recently learned:

- robots seem even harder than they used to be
- multiple drills ARE in fact an advantage over single drills.  If you want to knock down mountains, you need several laser drills.
- OMG ship guns do explode pretty often now when you call fire on a planet!  ouch!  I guess this curbs some abuse, but I really liked using them that way.  Wish it was easily editable.

those mushroom infestations used to be really common, but I have not seen one lately.  I used to find derelict ships over run with them, and the cool thing was that I couldnt always fight them off -- but I could blow a hole in the hull and the vacuum would do them in.  That didn't work on the crystal things though... Those used to be monstrous.  Again, have not seen so many in this version.

[Gabeux]

EVERY TIME I get back on these forums you guys make me play this game again.
EVERY TIME.

And it's always better than the last time. 

But seriously, it's pretty awesome Magellan is still improving it.

[NullForceOmega]

I just downloaded this yesterday, and I'm actually doing fairly well with it (strange because I tend to feel that I'm not good at RLs).  The only real problem I'm having is that it throws a terminal error and crashes after an hour or so of play.

[puke]

I have had a couple crashes, usually when I try to hit a button somewhere that is inappropriate for that... dont remember well enough to reproduce, but it's a little glitchy sometimes.  Conveniently, it keeps you quicksaved every time you launch your ship.  So crashes are never /too/ frustrating.

Unless you just successfully cleared a robot world or something.  I'd be pretty upset if I lost my progress doing that.  and OMG, I cant use ships guns for that any more since they explode now!

[puke]

aaah! robots!  Robots!

I successfully charted a robot world for SHI, and now they can build robot crew for me!  Its awesome!  They come with jetpacks, and start at level 6!  I wonder if they want wages?  Probably not, but how can I tell without fireing everyone else?

Slightly less awesome though, they may be a little bit useless.  They still take up bunk space on the ship, and I cant issue them weapons or armor.  I *think* this may mean that they have no ranged attack ability, hard to be sure. 

I guess I could take all my living crew off the away team and disarm my captain, and then try shooting something.