I'd appreciate some advice on making a trade profit. There's a couple of issues giving me trouble:
1) If a colony has any of what you want to sell, they always seem to pay less than it costs to buy it anywhere.
2) Goods just plain don't exit the market.
To elaborate on 1... So I produce some eludium, snag oh three hundred units and take them to a convenient habitable world in another system that doesn't produce it themselves. I sell it for say 800c/unit, twice what I bought it for! Cool! I produce it by the bucketload so I go back with another run and...suddenly the market has crashed. Now they pay more like 300c, which is less than what I buy it for. Gotta find a new planet to unload it. It doesn't take long before you run out of markets.
And that's because...any system with a self-sufficient economy, doesn't want to import ANYTHING. It seems like the only way to make any cash is to intentionally starve your systems. Warehouses will fill up and never empty. Even if you make two systems that are each half of a full economy, they will eventually fill each other up. NOTHING exits the economy, except in two ways:
- Life support: Food, air, fuel. And these are all pretty cheap. Honestly they don't get used up very fast either.
- Ship components, if people build and subsequently blow up their ships.
And there's a big problem here. Let's say you want to keep supplying a central planet from some outlying ones. Every trip you make, you're going to lose money! If you want to be nice and support your capital, you are going to go broke. You need supplimental income...and I can't figure out a way to do that.
Any advice on building up a personal fortune? At this rate, it'll take me ages to even get a million credits (unless I sit around and manually build power armor all day).