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[code99]

Hey,

I can be considered as a new player to this game even tho I have played it a lot a few years back but lot has changed since then and now im pretty much a newbie at this.

I am having some issues early game ...
Mainly its supplies and by extension, money. I just cant seem to figure out a good way of getting some income or a way to get more supplies/fuel than I use.

I looked into bounty hunting and, maybe im just plain unlucky  but most of the bounty hunting missions are on the other side of the sector, i cant reach that far yet. Same with exploration like planet surveys and such, all seem to be quite far out.
I tried salvaging and I failed at that too. I cant seem to find anything worthwhile to salvage and when I do find something it usually takes more fuel/supplies to get there and then salvage it than what i get out of it.

I know planet colonies are expensive and hard to do early game so i wont be considering doing that.

I havent tried trading yet, next on my list .. Im still trying to understand how the ui works for that and where to find the info i need.

Im sure a lot of you have no issues paying this so to that end:

What do you do in your games to get going?
Any suggestion to what I should try?
Got any tips and suggestions for someone new at it?

[Modest]

Hello

As far as I am concerned, best start is by scanning objects in space for factions (derelics, probes - not surveying planets). One of my very first moves that I do is buying a small tanker. Once that done I can reach with my small fleet (Wolf, Kite and said tanker) huge portion of sector (I make sure to have max fuel). Then I just pick mission to scan derelic/probe and go to do that. And next! And next! In small amount of time I usually have eoungh money to get into destroyer based fleet.

Just make sure to not run through hyperspace storms, take some more supplies and keep an eye on your amount of fuel and everything should be allright. And one more thing - for objects that are too close to star/black hole to reach them safely - use Emergency Burn to get to them and after that, quickly run away.

Salvaging things once you are in system of interest is a nice bonus that helps you to sustain your expedition and chance for more interesting items.

[TaLaR]

Just run sim from missions (to have all weapons/hullmods/ships available) until you figure out combat (being able to reliably win against combat ship 1 size larger 1v1 except bad matchups and capitals), THEN start campaign.
Or at least till you can reliably defeat any same size ship, except direct counters (like Medusa being weak to carriers with fighters).

[Baqar79]

If you haven't done so, it's worth trying out the (faster start) options, in particular the explorer one because of the Apogee (Excellent cargo (400) & fuel (200) capacity, very robust shields, with cost saving survey equipment built in), and you also get given 20,000 credits, 160 supplies and 180 or so fuel and 50 Heavy Machinery for salvaging.

When surveying planets you have to spend supplies depending on the difficulty of the survey.  The Apogee, and the Shepard both come with the "Surveying Equipment" hullmod (built in ship system), that reduces the cost of planetary surveys by a flat amount; the Apogee saves you 20 supplies off each planetary survey (the minimum however is capped at 5 supplies), so if you are surveying a difficult planet that normally costs 40 supplies, the Apogee & Shepherd included with the (faster start) fleet will reduce this down to 15 (20 from the Apogee, 5 from the Shepherd).  This should save quite a bit of money if you are surveying lots of planets as supplies are around 100 credits each.  I think though that planetary surveys in this version, are better used for scouting out a good place to set up a new colony of your own and are not really that great for making money (by selling the survey data).

I would probably leave the distant survey missions and focus on exploring nearby undiscovered systems for both loot and potential planets to set up a new colony.  You should receive a monthly stipend after completing the tutorial missions (in my case it is 15,000 credits for 3 years), which should help keep you afloat.

If you still are having money issues, it's worth looking at how much supplies and fuel you are using each day.  In the bottom left panel supplies/day is that icon with 3 boxes; fuel you need to hover over that orange pill shaped icon to get how much fuel you use each day while in hyperspace (as you don't use fuel while in a system).  In any case it's a good idea to just mouse over numbers and icons you aren't sure of since there is often a tool tip that will pop up and explain things.

Try to avoid expanding your fleet to quickly, and don't be afraid to scrap ships that you find.  If you do take on new ships, keep in mind that you have to pay a hefty sum of supplies in order to get them up to your maximum Combat Readiness (70% by default), so you want to make sure they will be useful to you first.  

Here is a breakdown of the basic ship stats with those that affect Supply and Fuel cost highlighted (I may get things wrong and you may even know all this stuff already):

Spoiler

[close]

1. Combat Readiness
The maximum is 70% at the start of a new game, if your ship falls below this value for any reason, your supplies will very quickly go down in order to bring this back up to your maximum.  There are a couple of ways this can happen, probably the most common being that you deploy your ship in combat.  When selecting ships to take into combat, you probably want aim to take the smallest fleet you need to comfortably win (unless your completely loaded with cash and supplies). Each ship deployed will have it's Combat Readiness reduced, which requires lots of supplies to bring back up.  On the other hand, if you don't take enough ships and the battle takes to long, or you end up taking lots of damage, that will also cost additional supplies.

2. Hull Integrity
If your ships are damaged, they will need to spend supplies in order to get them back to 100%

3. CR per deployment, Recovery rate (per day), Recovery cost (supplies)
CR per deployment - This is how much your Combat Readiness bar will go down by if you choose to take that ship into combat, eg in the picture 70% will drop to 60% at the end of combat (note that if the battle takes too long - longer than the "Peak performance (sec)" stat below, then your Combat Readiness will degrade very fast, so it is possible that a battle could cost large amounts of supply on account that you weren't able to defeat the enemy quick enough).

Recovery rate (per day) - How much your Combat Readiness will increase each day, in this case 5% eg if Combat Readiness was 60% then after a single day it will increase to 65% (note that each day consists of 5 ticks of the counter in the top left).

Recovery cost (supplies) - This is how many supplies it will cost you to deploy this ship in battle; ie both "CR per Deployment" & "Recovery cost (supplies)" are linked.  In the above image it will cost me 8 supplies to return the ship to full combat readiness after battle; since the "CR per deployment" is 10% for this ship, then that 10% corresponds to 8 supplies.  For example if the CR was 50% and your maximum was 70%, you need to recover 20% of your combat readiness.  Since each 10% of combat readiness will require 8 supplies, then 16 supplies are needed to get it back up to 70%.  Bigger ships tend to have larger recovery costs.

4. Maintenance (supplies/mo)
This is how much your ship costs just being in your fleet, 10.0 supplies month is 0.33 supplies/day so not a big cost, but it can quickly get rather large if you recover every ship you come across, or have a few too many big ships in your fleet.

5. Fuel/light year, jump cost
This is the most important stat for fuel usage on a ship, this is how much fuel that ship requires to travel 1 light year and how much it requires to jump through a portal to hyperspace; ie in the picture above 2 fuel is consumed by the ship jumping into hyperspace, and then 2 fuel is needed for each light year traveled.

One light year is the distance covered by a ship over a day when moving at a "Burn Level" of 10 in hyperspace. You can find the current burn level in the bottom left panel below the fuel gauge (that orange pill shaped icon I mentioned before).  If you travel faster than this your fuel consumption increases; slower and your fuel consumption decreases eg if you have a "Burn Level" of 20, then you will use twice as much fuel per day since you are covering twice as much distance.

There are also several skills that can help keep costs down:

Leadership tree:
-Fleet Logistics, level 2 reduces the monthly supply maintenance cost of all your ships by 25%.

Technology tree:
-Navigation, level 2 reduces the fuel consumption of your fleet by 25%.

Industry:
-Field Repairs, level 1 will increase the health and combat readiness of ships you salvage (or your own ships you may of lost during a battle, but are able to recover after battle), so that you will require less supplies to get them back to full combat readiness and health.

Cheap ships for carrying cargo & fuel:
-Buffalo (or Tarsus) freighter, only costs 3 supplies each month and 2 fuel per light year and carries 300 cargo space.

-Colossus freighter, 3x the capacity of the Buffalo/Tarsus, 3x the Maintenance, but only 1.5x the fuel cost.  The downside is that it will slow down your fleet, so it's worth putting Militarized subsystems on it to increase it's maximum speed.

-Dram fuel tanker, a barely noticeable 2 supplies each month and just 1 fuel per light year while carrying 300 units of fuel.

-Phaeton fuel tanker; double the capacity of the Dram, double the fuel costs, but only 3 supplies/month, so if you can afford it this is even more cost effective than the Dram.

Cheap combat ships:

-Apogee @ 18 supplies a month and 2 fuel a light year, but it has more storage than a buffalo, 2/3rds the fuel capacity of a Dram, as well as the planetary survey cost reducing equipment.  It makes for a decent cruiser that can tank a great deal of damage if configured well and commanded by an appropriate officer.

-Hammerhead @ 8 supplies a month this one of the cheapest Destroyers you can get.

Most frigates are around 3-8 supplies a month and 1 fuel per light year, but I make heavy use of Wolf frigates and Omen's to start with (both 5 supplies a month, and 5 supplies to deploy each).  The new Brawler(TT) I found can be pretty effective and only cost 4 supplies a month (and 4 supplies to deploy in combat), but they may be difficult to acquire early game.

I haven't really used many carriers, but the Condor is the cheapest 2 fighter bay carrier I think at 10 supplies / month (and 10 to deploy in combat).

Note: In most cases the monthly supply cost is the same as the cost of deploying the ship in battle; ie deploying a Hammerhead in a single battle costs the same as having the Hammerhead in your fleet for a month.

I think this post is getting far too long, I was initially going to stop before I posted the picture...but well...umm...sorry

[Darloth]

Just a quick coda to the very useful post above me:

Planetary surveys of rocks aren't worth it... but terran or basically any habitable planet almost always ARE.  They'll be class 3, 4 or 5 survey data, which results in something like 5k, 10k or 30k of money.  Given that they usually won't cost more than 20-40 supplies (2000-4000 credit cost, respectively) these are still very much worth it.

Surveying Gas Giants or other huge, high-hazard places, that's almost never profitable.

Also, the Tarsus costs the same in maintenance and fuel as a Buffalo, but is MANY MANY TIMES better at running away.  Early game, that matters a lot, as you may have to run away from things, and you'd like your freighters to survive as they're carrying all your stuff

[Baqar79]

Also, the Tarsus costs the same in maintenance and fuel as a Buffalo, but is MANY MANY TIMES better at running away.  Early game, that matters a lot, as you may have to run away from things, and you'd like your freighters to survive as they're carrying all your stuff

The Buffalo is slightly faster on paper, but I can see that the Tarsus is much hardier so would likely survive running away where the Buffalo would not.  In version 0.8a the reason I chose the buffalo was it's burn speed of 9 vs the Tarsus's 8 (which was nice with early smaller fleets made up of destroyers and frigates); I especially liked the Hegemony (A) versions which were slightly faster and didn't have the penalties inherent of a civilian hull. 

With both versions of the Buffalo bought down to the same burn speed as the Tarsus (8 now), it looks like you are quite right and the Tarsus is the better choice (at least for the civilian freighter version).  In addition the militarized subsystems hullmod also makes the civilian version of the buffalo look better than the buffalo (A) since it gets a +1 burn bonus with Militarized Subsystems.

There is still one advantage to the (A) version over both the Civilian buffalo and Tarsus and that is "Expanded Cargo Holds" hullmod doesn't get the 50% monthly maintenance penalty that civilian hulls do, so you can squeeze an additional 90 cargo space out of it without any increase to your maintenance costs.

[Thaago]

Also the Tarsus has the "Burn Drive" system in combat - its actually pretty speedy at gtfo'ing.

Militarized subsystems is a must on civilian ships just for the sensor changes - the speed is a bonus!

For distant exploration missions: buying a Dram is definitely a good idea, but so is only going out on missions when you have 2 or 3 in the same region of space. In the early game I'll often look at the intel map with "exploration" checked looking for clusters of missions. Also, the missions typically have a generous time limit and very low failure penalties (minor reputation loss), so its ok to accept a mission and not do it right away, hoping for another to pop up in the area. And if something better comes along like a nice cluster of 3 missions in the same nebula, just don't do the first one.

Another good way to make money is to go to the bar and look for broody people. They typically have cargo that needs shipping. Its not always a huge money maker, but if it happens to be in the direction you want to go it will cover travel costs + a nice little profit.

Finally, keep an eye on the missions that pop up on the left as you fly around habitable space. The procurement missions can be very profitable if you happen upon one you think you can fulfill. Remember that they disappear so you need to accept quickly and that the failure penalty is pretty low.

[TaLaR]

Just tried spacer start and came to conclusion that it exists to teach player smuggling (what else are you going to do without weapons or decent fuel reach for survey/scan missions?).

Since normal start can bounty hunt right away, I never really needed to. So I didn't know it how profitable smuggling is. Just find some pirate planet terrorized by local patrols into having huge deficit of everything, then proceed to ship everything from nearest planet. Of course using black markets on both ends.

[code99]

Thanks a lot to you all for your suggestions!

It has helped me a lot in my new game.