In other words, regular trade isn't profitable.
No, it's NOT friggin profitable when even during a shortage what I earn cannot even cover the fuel/supply cost
No, I am not. Only bar mission give a decent profit.
Buying low and selling high is very unprofitable as it is, due to *** tariffs and a operational costs. And bulk selling doesn't work since you cannot even FILL your freighter fleet on the markets.
The entire trade/economy aspect of the game right now is HORRIBLE.
If you legitimately burn enough fuel and supplies to nullify your trading income you either have a large combat focused fleet and none of the reduction skills, or just an absurdly large fleet.
If you do not use the black market, that is your own mistake.
During my latest midgame when I was more or less farming intel resource requests and freight missions to fund my colony, I frequently did "regular" trading on the return trips and made at the very least enough money to pay for my upkeep, the key is to actually using the black market and preferring high value goods. If you're trying to cover expenses with low margin goods like food or organics then of course you aren't going to make profits easily unless you already have an atlas or something.
Example: with just 2000 cargo space you can easily make profits upwards of 300cr per unit of rec drugs, organs or heavy weapons if you exploit shortages, and about 100-150 without an explicit shortage. So using about 1700 of my cargo space of my mostly combat ready fleet (only freighters were three mules and a hound I forgot I still had at that point, rest was combat ships) I still made anywhere from 170k and 600k profit, the latter admitedly only during lare shortages of these goods (upward of 1000 units at higher prices).
If you go black market and don't overdo it, you dont even lose any real amount of standing for it. After doing this whole thing for multiple cycles on and off as my main source of income I have no less than -10 on any major power, since the resouce requests give you standing back, countering out the occasional losses from black market trades.
Again, this was all without an optimised trading fleet and just a few combat freighters amongst my almost 20 combat ships, including eagles, herons and later even a dominator.
The magic is in the upkeep reducing skills (industry and fleet trees) and keeping your speed to 9 for as long as possible (Navigation 3).
And as correctly stated by other users, once you get past cycle 210 or so more and more shortages appear, making profits even easier.
Sure, bar missions and open requests from the intel tab are definitely more profitable, but that is not to say its not profitable to still do regular trading, depending on shortages it can even come pretty close.
