I've started in 7.00 Beta 2 as the jailed Tides of Avarice start with a few rules to make restarting a little more interesting:
- Don't do missions.
- Don't sell personal inventory items.
- Don't use autotraders or autominers. (Manual remote orders are fine.)
- Don't pirate L-sized ships or larger.
I now have about 30 hours in
this game, and I don't think I'll be doing all three rules again, as it made early game progress kind of excruciating. I guess those handouts I was eschewing with these rules are there for good reason. Until I could secure some good traders or miners to manually control, I only really earned money from vaults with credit crates, bounties from stations whose enemies I killed nearby, and piracy.
Combat was no longer all that rewarding since I was not selling the personal inventory items or doing missions. The occasional pirated M-sized ship was quite lucrative, but fighting off waves of Xenon was not quite as euphoric when I didn't have those programmable interface sales to look forward to. There was also significantly less incentive to mine because crystals and spacefly eggs were not going anywhere. (Although I did forget my mission restriction once and accidentally made 2,000,000 credits with a caviar procurement station scan mission.)
But I had one get-rich tactic involving teleportation and manual mining between several miners that I thought I would try. I would teleport between ships, order them to sell and return to the field, and buy another M-sized miner when I could afford it. I didn't bother switching to ore because anything mined is effectively unlimited anyway, and ore would never be valuable. With satellite coverage all around the main superhighway and a few neighboring sectors, it was soon impossible to find a station that offered more than 130 credits/unit (mid-price) for silicon. However, I mined it anyway, because mining is free and easy.
I quickly bored of mining and set them up on repeat orders instead - not automining, but close to it. I had a plan from the start of this run to make most of my money from recycling scrap, and decided I now had enough money to try doing that. I stole the blueprints for solar power, scrap processing, scrap recycling, and large solid and container storage. Then I started work on a station in The Reach that would try to use that almost 367% solar output for recycling.
I supplemented my income and handled ware movement with a couple of Prometheus I stole from BUC. As with 7.0 Beta 1, it's rare to find a profit margin of more than about 133% for any ware there is to trade, but I can occasionally find an obscure deal between two stations very far apart. It's a good thing my Prometheus are heavily armed and fast, because it would be impossible to trade anything if pirates were successfully intercepting them, they seem to attract notice instantly every time.
As for my station in The Reach, in a way, 367% solar power was not nearly enough solar output, I would need 3 solar panels per processor (about 33,000/hr apiece) to keep them fueled (they eat around 90,000/hr). But it hardly matters, I suppose, as The Reach is a very safe sector with access to plenty of scrap from the constant fighting in Haktivah's Choice. After losing a Manticore to it stupidly loitering in the path of a Xenon K, I opted to manually supervise ordering Manticores to snagg Xenon PE while fighting Xenon.
I feel somewhat stalemated at the moment. While my new station may be self-building for free as long as it's being fed scrap, it's doing do at a very slow pace. After all, the scrap recyclers only put out 200 hull and 60 claytronics every 20 minutes, and my scrap processors take over 20 minutes to work their way through a single Xenon PE.
I'm stuck manually supervising the Manticores since I can't let them wander unsupervised and may get separated from any guards I assign them. I my mind, I imagined I would be running a lucrative scrap empire by cleverly scavenging battlefields. In practice I find that scrap processors and recyclers work far too slowly.
It's not particularly lucrative to rely on battlefield scrap, either. In my current 7.0 game, there's a near-universal energy cell purchase cost of about 15 credits/unit that makes paying this many cells for 200 hull parts a relatively poor deal. I suppose I'll have to stick to Avarice or Mercury. (Most likely Mercury, I'm not bothering with that whole Protectyon routine.) But if I really want hull parts or claytronics, it's probably just easier to rely on the infinite resources available in relative abundance everywhere already.