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[SapphireSage]

If you're playing with Nex, you're not playing the regular game. So any market opinions don't really apply.

While I was fairly certain this strategy would still work in vanilla due to a couple factors that were still true, namely low accessibility due to hostilities and no other real production facilities due to Epiphany being the only Pather colony, I opted to test it out regardless. In summary, yes raiding Epiphany's starport and feeding them marines, drugs, weapons still gives about 600K - 1M per month.

Using only LazyLib and Console Command for an earlier start, I started with Nav 3 as my only skill, 500K credits, 2 colossus, 2 Phaeton, 1 Nebula, and 800 Marines along with the (unused) ships in the mercenary fast start.

First, I made sure to build them a comm relay so that they can capture it and gain +2 stability if they didn't already have one and placed a comm sniffer to grab the highly lucrative procurement contracts for the things I was picking up as they showed up. I avoided grabbing the ones for food and organics though due to contracts not helping with shortages.

Raiding their spaceport shut it down for about 300 days, or 10 months with 800 marines losing very few. Now, with the comm relay, the combination of food/organic shortage and recent unrest dropped them to exactly 0 stability. Using the following path, I grabbed the materials for cheap.

Epiphany -> Jangala, Corvus (2000 Organics) -> Eventide, Samarra (1500 Food) -> Nachiketa (Fuel to full, 800 Marines) -> Chicomoztoc, Aztlan (200 Hvy Weapons (Optional), 200 Organs (optional), 100 Hvy Machinery, Supplies to full on complete run before sell) -> Eochu Bres, Hybrasil (800 Drugs, 200 Organs (if not already)) -> Culann, Hybrasil (200 Weapons (if not already)) -> Epiphany

I made sure to sell food and organics on the open market to resolve their shortage for the month so they wouldn't decivilize. Also, when smuggling the illegal stuff from Hegemony, I let the patrols scan me before entering the port at Chicomoztoc, I didn't have anything illegal by that point and they never scanned me when I left with the weapons/organs. Doing this I made about 1M on the first run, and about 600K on the next two. Including three colossus purchases which I picked up en route as I needed them. I made the full circle in just shy of a month's time so had to wait in front of Epiphany for a few days after turning in the procurements for the shortages/surpluses to come back. After three months their stability climbed up to 1 so I had the choice to drop providing food and organics, keep providing them for money, or swap over to domestic/luxury goods.

After 3 months I could stop doing this at any time and Epiphany would have stuck around since AFAIK pirates never raid their system so their colony would never go down to 0 stability until I showed up again. And then I can choose to do this again whenever I wanted so long as I had enough starting credits to purchase all that they needed again and continue making 600K - 1M per month for something routine or not requiring too much effort in execution.

Now while its not as lucrative and easy as the food shortage days of 0.7, I figure this is something that should be changed as Alex has stated multiple times that they want to avoid having things like a player feeling like they have to do a trade route to make faster money and buy things to get to the "real content". And this is literally a circle that you do month after month to make a bunch of easy money far faster, though less exciting IMO, than something like bounty hunting.

[intrinsic_parity]

The best solution to me is to have some more serious reputation based consequences and/or military consequences (increasing each time you raid), but that gets into all the issues with the reputation system (reputation penalties mean the entire faction is angry at you, rep penalties encourages grinding a bunch of easy missions to get rep back up which is boring etc.). Tbh, I think this is an excellent example of a situation where a better reputation system could be used to create much more interesting consequences for player actions.

The first time you raid someone, you would expect some anonymity if your sensors are off (maybe suspicion but not outright hostility), but if you keep doing it, people are going to recognize you and refuse to trade with you/attack you. It would be cool if that happened locally so that you weren't torpedoing your relationship with a whole faction, but you also weren't getting away with making millions for free.

It would also be cool if there was some military build-up at colonies that have been recently raided (which would also help with pirate raid issues).

[Megas]

If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately.  The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.

Of course, if player waits until he is powerful enough to kill them all, just eat the hostility and raid them to the ground.

[dead_hand]

...

Now while its not as lucrative and easy as the food shortage days of 0.7, I figure this is something that should be changed as Alex has stated multiple times that they want to avoid having things like a player feeling like they have to do a trade route to make faster money and buy things to get to the "real content". And this is literally a circle that you do month after month to make a bunch of easy money far faster, though less exciting IMO, than something like bounty hunting.

I'm potentially going off rails a bit, but I guess bounty hunting could become a bit better if there were some more variety to it. I mean that if something like Vayra's bounty system made its way to Vanilla with special bounties popping up from time to time. I guess the difficult part would be to come up with ships, but I guess that some kind of pseudo-randomizer could work to occasionally create a ship with bonus built in hullmods/rare paintjobs and what not.

[intrinsic_parity]

If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately.  The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.

Of course, if player waits until he is powerful enough to kill them all, just eat the hostility and raid them to the ground.

This is the problem with the rep system. There is no way to make the planet super mad at you without making the faction super mad at you. There needs to be more reputation consequences for raiding IMO but there just isn't the granularity with the current rep system for it.

[SapphireSage]

If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately.  The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.

Its pathers so they start hostile with you right away. Though since you never need to enter with transponder on, because they're pathers and don't have any patrols you need to shoot down, its a moot point. Honestly, having decently sized patrols that were strong enough to attack a stronger mid-game player, or at least something more frightening might help make it more difficult since attacking fleets in the same system of a planet prevents you from being able to trade with that planet for an amount of time requiring you to put in effort to sneak into the colony which can help discourage this.