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[Dexy]

There are several ways to make a lot of money that are available from the beginning, require little to no investment in ships or skills or reputation and have little risk. Compared to other options, the risk/reward profile seems off and too generous.

The problematic money makers are:

- Missions to scan some ship in a distant system. Why it's problematic: pays well, can be done with almost no risk with 1-2 fast and very cheap ships, and one can take several of these missions with destinations in the same genera area of space.
- Selling drugs or armaments: pays very well, relatively low risk, drugs have high price per volume so one can use fast ships to escape from unwanted fights. The reputation impact is negligible.
- Galatian academy missions: available from day 1, pays well, requires little investment.
- The Galatian stipend.

Fast ships means ships that optimize their speed and ability to escape from unwanted fights.

Combat missions can pay well but are riskier and require investing in a combat fleet first.

Trading other commodities is less profitable but still good. Other commodities have lower price per volume which means that you need proper freighters (instead of hounds or cerberuses). Proper freighters are slow and need protection. So again the riskier and more costly option is less profitable.

The solutions that I think are needed:
- There needs to be a counter to fast ships fitted for speed that sometimes comes into play.
- The "scan ship in distant system" missions should increasingly involve a mandatory combat capability check the further out these missions are. Nothing major, just something to prevent a player from making 200k in a light tanker and shuttle that never even see any threats.
- Smuggling drugs needs to be more difficult to pull off. Stealth, sensors and phase ships should come more into play here but at the moment they are unnecessary.
- Galatian stipend should exist only on easy difficulty.

PS: this is written from the point of view of someone trying to find ways to make playthroughs more challenging.

[Yunru]

Those are all probably some of the worst ways to make money.

The easiest is to start with the tutorial so that you have the Rep required with the Hegemony for a commission, and then just sit on it for a while.

For reference, the stipend is only 60% of a commission.

[Lucky33]

Unless you are playing iron man risk is of no concern. Only time.

[ElPresidente]

I find that ships are too cheap and there rewards for most missions are not worth the effort.
If you ask me, I'd double the ship cost and increase rewards for most mission by a LOT. Especially some that are utter waste of time.

[SCC]

I don't mind smuggling making good money, but there's no risk or investment. Scan missions are nearly free money, but increasing their difficulty is harder. Galatian Academy missions, as far as I am concerned, are low-tier and the only reason to take them is to grind rep with academy so you can get to the meat eventually.

[DownTheDrain]

None of these seem particularly great money for the time invested, especially not the academy stuff.

[prestidigitation]

None of these seem particularly great money for the time invested, especially not the academy stuff.

Academy is actually great because they pay you up front and have no timer on the missions. So you can stop by and get a free nearly 200k for taking their jobs and then leave. I did that and then ran off to fight in a bounty system with my brand new decked out falcon on day 2 ish.

Many of their missions also give 100k+ reward (because you get the payout plus the bribe for whatever they wanted) for a simple scan or using a few marines to conduct a basic raid.

[DownTheDrain]

None of these seem particularly great money for the time invested, especially not the academy stuff.

Academy is actually great because they pay you up front and have no timer on the missions. So you can stop by and get a free nearly 200k for taking their jobs and then leave. I did that and then ran off to fight in a bounty system with my brand new decked out falcon on day 2 ish.

Many of their missions also give 100k+ reward (because you get the payout plus the bribe for whatever they wanted) for a simple scan or using a few marines to conduct a basic raid.

One type of academy mission is time sensitive but for the most part you can do them while you're already on the way to do something else. That doesn't make their payout great though, certainly not great enough that it would need to be addressed with a balance patch.

My first serious paycheck usually comes from ruins in some random planet scan or from running across a mining or science station or some such. On both of my last 2 playthroughs I found over a million's worth of rare-ish materials really early on and was basically set from the get-go without grinding missions. Sure, you can't haul that in 2 fast frigates or whatever but it's not like you can't easily escape when you bring a few small freighters, unless the enemy fleet is scripted.

[Arlian]

The problematic money makers are:

- Missions to scan some ship in a distant system. Why it's problematic: pays well, can be done with almost no risk with 1-2 fast and very cheap ships, and one can take several of these missions with destinations in the same genera area of space.
- Selling drugs or armaments: pays very well, relatively low risk, drugs have high price per volume so one can use fast ships to escape from unwanted fights. The reputation impact is negligible.
- Galatian academy missions: available from day 1, pays well, requires little investment.
- The Galatian stipend.

In the early game I like to get a small tanker and cargo ship, fly around the core systems in hyperspace picking up scan missions that are in the same place on the map and then collect them all at once. With around 10 missions you could bag half a million credits or more which is a good start to the game and will buy you a few good destroyers and frigates and kit them out. That being said, I don't think it's overpowered or risk free. The benefits of scan missions drops off the later you get into the game where your fleet is larger, it costs more in fuel and supplies to go do the missions and there's better ways of making larger amounts of money when you have a larger fleet. When it comes to risk I've also been wiped out by pirates or worse who have caught me by surprise and it really sucks to wipe and lose a large chunk of cash (because I refuse to use a story point to avoid the fight and I'm not big on savescumming). When you're trying to get your colony empire started and you have hundreds of thousands of credits in upkeep going out every month + you're spending millions on colony infrastructure projects scan missions simply won't cut it.

The real moneymaker is mid-game exploration of ruins, derelicts, research stations, mining stations and domain probes. I usually start mid-game with a million or two credits and end mid-game with 50 million credits or so, with careful selection of selling salvaged goods at the highest buyer and having 5 salvage rigs in my fleet a long with lots of cargo ships. Late-game I'll usually live off the passive income of my colony and selling the goods gained from grinding on REDACTED fleets.

I quite like the fact that there's an avenue to make money when you're fresh starting out with no ships or credits to your name. You can certainly skip those methods if you want to make the game a little harder, I've roleplayed a pirate captain who refuses to do anything other than fight and steal and many cruel, punishing deaths were waiting for me. But I definitely wouldn't say that they're too powerful compared to later methods of making money.

[Kohlenstoff]

Actually the Money of these is quite well balanced. You have risks and costs to cover. Experienced Players can make fast a fortune because they know how to get and how to spend. Unexperienced Players have to struggle to have allways enough fuel and supplies for their fleets. They have also to learn, how to do exploration properly. I remember my first playthroughs, where i actually had to fly back home very often to refuel and earn money for next explorations. Nowadays i have to fly back often and only just to dump off all the scavenged stuff because all my ships get full too fast.

[ElPresidente]

None of these seem particularly great money for the time invested, especially not the academy stuff.

Academy is actually great because they pay you up front and have no timer on the missions. So you can stop by and get a free nearly 200k for taking their jobs and then leave. I did that and then ran off to fight in a bounty system with my brand new decked out falcon on day 2 ish.

Many of their missions also give 100k+ reward (because you get the payout plus the bribe for whatever they wanted) for a simple scan or using a few marines to conduct a basic raid.

Don't you actually have to find the mission in a random bar first?

You found it at day 2, in my latest playtrough, I only activated the academy when I was well into midgame

[AcaMetis]

Academy missions are available basically right after you finish the tutorial (or skip it), I believe. The bar event on...that one Aztlan planet is just a reminder, and opportunity to pick up the first story contact.

[Kahnmir]

You can finish the tutorial with 300k+ simply by taking advantage of price differences between Ancyra and Derinkyuu mining station.

Maybe there should be more risk involved with such obscene profiteering, I dunno.

Does feel kind of weird how easy it is to access the black market though. I mean, black markets are supposed to be hidden right?
Maybe this is something story points could be used for: finding/accessing black markets.

Missions are a totally different ball of wax, and one element that should be noted aside from material costs is the time cost associated.
If it takes you a month or two to finish a mission in-game, that's actually quite a lot of time you could spend doing other things; like being a badass space captain, or founding a colony. It may not be a big time cost for you IRL, but I personally find it weird to make it to the end my Galatia stipend and realize I've been nothing but an errand boy for 2 years in game time.

[AcaMetis]

Black markets are openly available because they're your intended method of buying/selling goods without running yourself into the ground. If anything open markets should be removed, because they serve no purpose other than an opportunity to pay way too much to not have to interact with anything. Well, and buying a halfway reasonable amount of fuel for some reason, but that's another mechanic that should be chucked out the nearest airlock.

[Faeren]

Lol I think it extends well past early game. Get a Phantom/Valkyrie and say 200 Marines and you can just do a circuit of raids on Pirate stations/colonies every few months, accruing lots of drugs/volatiles/supplies and sell them wherever is paying the most, total investment of say 70k and marine losses are negligible. I can crush any mid-sized pirate fleet with my LP Brawler and two officered LP Lashers. There's no risk since Pirate fleets are weak and they always hate you anyway. Currently my view is Starsector is great as a game for exploring star systems and engaging in spaceship battles (ignoring the problem of horrible AI loadouts) but is lacking in the resource management department currently. There's basically no hobo phase, or sense of having to scrape the pan to gain power and wealth. A game that does resource management really well is Battle Brothers, which is structurally similar to Starsector. In BB you HAVE to take on risk to make money or get good gear, there are very few free lunches, and the way progression works with gear means once something becomes easy to fight it probably also isn't very rewarding to fight anymore.

Pirates are simultaneously weak AND rewarding to fight, there's no stage at which it isn't rewarding to crush hilariously weak pirate fleets. In Battle Brothers the early enemies drops, and the rewards associated with fighting them under contract are comparatively low and stop being worthwhile later on, you have to graduate to riskier enemies with greater rewards. The equivalent in Starsector could be having to start fighting pathers instead of pirates, given they're somewhat more threatening and their stations are larger. But there's no need to, I can just raid pirate worlds and squash easy pirate bounties for cash. Not that it isn't more lucrative to fight pathers, or fight remnants for AI cores. But you don't really need to to make a lot of money, there's so many easy ways to make money or free lunches like raiding pirate colonies that the player doesn't need to take on risk to progress, you can safely ignore high-risk bounties and situations to accrue power safely.

A balance pass that made the economic aspect of the game less forgiving would:
- Improve AI loadouts so that even early pirates don't just give you their ass on a silver platter to spank. I want to cry when I see pirate ships sporting light mortars, swarmers, and mining lasers.
- Make the player actually have to take on risk to make money/progress by doing away with free lunch payouts, work such as bounties and probe/survey/bounty missions could also stop being handed to the player on a platter, all work could require actually having to forge contacts and build a reputation. The alternative being to scavenge which is less reliable (and could involve more risk) or fight/raid which should also be riskier.

That said this could all get in the way of the game letting you smash cool spaceships together so there should be a mode that is basically like the game is now where money is easy to come by. But I'd definitely like to try the game with more punishing resource management where losing a ship is more of an issue and something like finding an Alpha Core is more of a big deal.