The ultimate guide to Vega Strike economy
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 2:31 pm
The money in Vega Strike is in trade. Nowhere else. The most cash I have ever seen offered for a mission was 120.000 (120k) credits. That involves going off-system, fighting and nasty risks. Currently, I make 80.000.000 (80M) credits in 4 minutes, absolutely risk-free by trading (I could make even more, but what's the point? There's really not much you can by beyond 300 M which is the Clydesdale...).
The reason for this can be seen from the equations which govern trade profits. If you're able to re-invest all your money after a trade run into new cargo, you can do n trade runs per hour, you start with the investment of i credits and your profit margin (the ratio of selling price over buying price) is p, then the amount of money m after one hour is
m = i * p^n
Let's try numbers - assume a trade run takes 10 minutes, so we can do six per hour (n=6), we start with 10k credits and we get a decent profit margin of 40% (p=1.4). After one hour, we have about 75k credits, after two hours 560k credits, after three hours 4.2M credits and after four hours incredible 32M credits (in fact, the equation leads to exponential growth of our assets). Running cargo or bounty missions simply cannot keep up with this amount of growth.
However, in reality, we may not be able to re-invest all money after a trade run for various reasons, as the cargo hold may be too small, or the planet/station may simply not have enough goods available. If we're only able to re-invest a constant sum i of money on each trade run, the money after one hour in this case will be
m = i * p * n
Using the same numbers as above, starting with 10k credits, we'll have 30k credits after the first hour, 60k after two hours, 90k after three hours and 120k after four hours (the equation leads to linear growth). Thus, trading is vastly more efficient when done in the exponential regime, and the strategy to get rich must involve staying on the exponential for as long as possible.
Let's optimize the numbers and see what strategy follows. Of course, every number should be as large as possible, but that's not quite so easy.
i is trivial - this says that it takes money to make money - of course getting 40% profit on 1M credits (400.000 credits) beats getting 300% profit on 10k credits (30.000 credits).
p should be large, and we have to optimize the trade route for it. Some goods (like metals from a mining base to an oceanic planet) offer p=3 - but the catch here is that usually the amount of money you can invest in these goods is very limited, whereas we're looking for really expensive cargo to invest all our money. Such items usually get p between 1.1 and 1.4, so we aim for a trade route which offers 1.4.
n seems often overlooked - but this is where the real money is made! Being fast pays off! Being able to make more trade runs per hour generates money much faster. So, let's take a look at travel times:
In a fast ship with high acceleration (like the Dostoevsky), travel time is almost exclusively dominated by time spent in SPEC. The velocity reached in SPEC is limited to about 97 c, so here is a dependence on distance. A run like Atlantis-Serenity which is unusually far (87 light minutes) actually takes a noticeable time in SPEC, thus a shorter run of a few lightseconds should be preferred. But SPEC is not the real issue.
The real issue is the time to accelerate out of the gravity well and towards SPEC velocity, and the time to decelerate at the end to the docking clamps. An empty Dostoevsky accelerates to 380 m/s in a second. A Plowshare with heavy cargo pulling 40 times its empty weight needs more than 9 minutes to reach the same velocity! As soon as the cargo hold is full, acceleration becomes the dominant factor determining travel times.
For this reason alone, a trade route should not involve a jump point, as many ships have to decelerate to reach it properly. A Dostoevsky always comes out of SPEC 10.000 m before the jump point with velocities perfectly matched, but even my Lancelot comes out 35.000 m before the jump and I have to chase the jump point because orthogonal velocity is not aligned properly. But then, the Dostoevsky has almost 13 g orthogonal acceleration, enough to match everything while autopilot is on, but the Lancelot has a mere 3.5 g orthogonal acceleration. The (empty) Plowshare has 0.6 g - the Lancelot may still be able to chase the jump point, but the Plowshare has to decelerate before changing direction.
Even trading with a station is not really good, as we have to decelerate for docking (well, you don't have to, but the chance of hitting the docking clamps with a heavy cargo instead of smashing the ship against the station is not large...). The best trade route thus involves only planets, as one can actually accelerate towards planets into a huge docking window (technically, I'd consider that an exploit - you would not stand a chance of landing on the planet unless your velocity is reduced whereas the game allows you to accelerate towards the planet and then dock to get your velocity magically reduced to zero) - thus such a trade route involves only one acceleration phase to get up to SPEC and is thus with heavy cargo about 4 times faster than one connecting two stations via a jump point.
Thus, the travel time in the limit where acceleration rather than SPEC time matters can be estimated from the acceleration of the empty ship and the cargo mass. For example, the empty Llama has 255 tons and a forward acceleration of 6.8 g. When the whole cargo hold is packed with metals (that's actually not a good idea...), then the cargo mass is 18.000 tons. This is about 70 times the base mass, so consequently the acceleration drops to 1/70 of its basic value or 0.1 g and it takes forever to get the ship anywhere.
The relevant figure when filling the cargo hold is thus the density, i.e. mass per volume, of the cargo. That's actually pretty different, a few examples:
Base metals: 9.0 t/m^3
Alkali metals: 6.5 t/m^3
Factory Constructors: 5.0 t/m^3
Construction vehicles: 4.0 t/m^3
Dilithium Crystals: 2.0 t/m^3
AI core: 2.0 t/m^3
Recycling Tanks: 1.875 t/m^3
PAI Wetware: 1.0 t/m^3
Atmospheric Scrubbers: 0.5 t/m^3
Material Processors: 0.4 t/m^3
Everything else being equal, selecting the right cargo can make you thus more than 10 times faster.
However, everything else is usually not equal. First of all, we'd like to invest all our money into cargo, and we can't do that if the hold is full. In order what cargo is best for putting the largest amount of money into the hold, one can compute the value density of cargo, i.e. the cost per volume. A few examples:
Base metals: 2 Cr/m^3
Alkali metals: 3 Cr/m^3
Dilithium Crystals: 100 Cr/m^3
Factory Constructors: 100 Cr/m^3
Material Processors: 400 Cr/m^3
Construction vehicles: 933 Cr/m^3
Recycling Tanks: 2500 Cr/m^3
Atmospheric Scrubbers: 2500 Cr/m^3
PAI Wetware: 20000 Cr/m^3
AI core: 2000000 Cr/m^3
Thus, as long as the hold is not full, one would prefer Material Processors over PAI Wetware because of their low density, but with the hold becoming full, PAI Wetware becomes a better option because of vastly higher value density. Ideally, one would like to trade cargo with low density but high value density - this is why AI cores and PAI Wetware make excellent cargo.
Unfortunately, the usual limitation is that excellent cargo is not available in large numbers, thus eventually one has to consider hauling heavy (high density) cargo. Here, larger ships actually are an advantage. A Llama hauling 10.000 tons has 0.17 g forward acceleration, however a Plowshare already offers 0.18 g for this mass whereas a Mule still operates close to the nominal acceleration with 0.69 g. It's hard to compute exactly as upgrades have mass too, but the cargo mass at which the Plowshare is better than the Llama is about 3600 tons, but the Mule becomes better than either for them for 1800 tons of cargo - unfortunately, the Mule is quite expensive, so one cannot usually change to a Mule early on.
All this means that it is pointless taking cargo on a leg of the trade route when the cargo does is not worth a significant fraction of money and is heavy. A good example is bringing Factory Constructors and Construction Vehicles to a mining colony which can make a 2M Cr cargo on a Plowshare. Should one take metals back? The answer is no - a full hold of metals is barely more than 50k Cr but slows down enormously. It is far better to make the return trip empty to repeat the more profitable run quickly. It is even better to take an empty Dostoevsky to make the return journey.
Time has to be balanced with profit though - if you have a trade route with 40% profit, a route with 30% profit only needs to take 25% less time to be more profitable, a route with 20% profit should be twice as fast to compete and a route with only 10% profit must be more than 3.5 times faster to compete.
How, then, to get to 100 M credits quickly?
Start on the initial Atlantis - Serenity run taking expensive liquor to Serenity and metals back till reaching 50 k or so, then buy a jump drive and go exploring. What you're looking for is a system with a Factory or Trantor class planet and an arid planet or a Mining Colony. It helps to have several factories, then you never run out of cargo to buy. If not, you may need two or three such routes and change system - if so, fly empty, fly fast, use a fighter to travel. Take high-value manufactured goods such as recycling tanks, atmospheric scrubbers or PAI wetware (dependent on just what run you can find) and work your way up. Don't bother taking a return cargo, just fly back fast. Eventually you need to buy heavier and heavier cargo to reinvest all your money, construction vehicles or factory constructors will eventually become cargo of choice, and they should always be dumped on an arid planet to minimize flight time (with heavy cargo, docking on a mining colony is too difficult) and to maximize profit (arid is better than rocky for this type of equipment). If the cargo hold of the Llama is full, buy a Plowshare and a Dostoevsky. The Plowshare hold can take as much as 2 M credits in manufactured goods (both production and mining) - at which point you enter a linear growth phase. The runs are very slow, therefore always go to a planet. Take the Dostoevsky to fly back quickly (unless you consider that cheating). With 2 M credits in the hold, you can make 800 k Credits of profit per run - which means you need only 8 runs to get back to exponential, since then the AI core which costs about 10 M in a Commerce Center and can be sold with 40% profit at a mining colony becomes accessible. Fly AI core runs with fighters and other fast vessels. A good commerce center holds 20+ AI cores - the profit per run is then 80 M, so the 300 M credits for the Clydesdale are in reach with only a few runs (which moreover are very fast runs!). All of this is doable within less than 12 hours playing time.
If you want to play completely honest and account for pirates, modify as follows: Pirate attacks are usually rare, but especially with a heavy cargo, you just can't run, and shooting the pirates only attracts uln and forsaken - so don't. Instead, you have to dump cargo and run. Thus, only invest 50% of your cash into your cargo as long as cash is growing exponentially - this way, dumping cargo will only be a setback of two runs and will not ruin you. In the linear phase, there's enough cash left anyway.
Afterwards, go buy all the goodies and go bounty-hunting for a hobby...
The reason for this can be seen from the equations which govern trade profits. If you're able to re-invest all your money after a trade run into new cargo, you can do n trade runs per hour, you start with the investment of i credits and your profit margin (the ratio of selling price over buying price) is p, then the amount of money m after one hour is
m = i * p^n
Let's try numbers - assume a trade run takes 10 minutes, so we can do six per hour (n=6), we start with 10k credits and we get a decent profit margin of 40% (p=1.4). After one hour, we have about 75k credits, after two hours 560k credits, after three hours 4.2M credits and after four hours incredible 32M credits (in fact, the equation leads to exponential growth of our assets). Running cargo or bounty missions simply cannot keep up with this amount of growth.
However, in reality, we may not be able to re-invest all money after a trade run for various reasons, as the cargo hold may be too small, or the planet/station may simply not have enough goods available. If we're only able to re-invest a constant sum i of money on each trade run, the money after one hour in this case will be
m = i * p * n
Using the same numbers as above, starting with 10k credits, we'll have 30k credits after the first hour, 60k after two hours, 90k after three hours and 120k after four hours (the equation leads to linear growth). Thus, trading is vastly more efficient when done in the exponential regime, and the strategy to get rich must involve staying on the exponential for as long as possible.
Let's optimize the numbers and see what strategy follows. Of course, every number should be as large as possible, but that's not quite so easy.
i is trivial - this says that it takes money to make money - of course getting 40% profit on 1M credits (400.000 credits) beats getting 300% profit on 10k credits (30.000 credits).
p should be large, and we have to optimize the trade route for it. Some goods (like metals from a mining base to an oceanic planet) offer p=3 - but the catch here is that usually the amount of money you can invest in these goods is very limited, whereas we're looking for really expensive cargo to invest all our money. Such items usually get p between 1.1 and 1.4, so we aim for a trade route which offers 1.4.
n seems often overlooked - but this is where the real money is made! Being fast pays off! Being able to make more trade runs per hour generates money much faster. So, let's take a look at travel times:
In a fast ship with high acceleration (like the Dostoevsky), travel time is almost exclusively dominated by time spent in SPEC. The velocity reached in SPEC is limited to about 97 c, so here is a dependence on distance. A run like Atlantis-Serenity which is unusually far (87 light minutes) actually takes a noticeable time in SPEC, thus a shorter run of a few lightseconds should be preferred. But SPEC is not the real issue.
The real issue is the time to accelerate out of the gravity well and towards SPEC velocity, and the time to decelerate at the end to the docking clamps. An empty Dostoevsky accelerates to 380 m/s in a second. A Plowshare with heavy cargo pulling 40 times its empty weight needs more than 9 minutes to reach the same velocity! As soon as the cargo hold is full, acceleration becomes the dominant factor determining travel times.
For this reason alone, a trade route should not involve a jump point, as many ships have to decelerate to reach it properly. A Dostoevsky always comes out of SPEC 10.000 m before the jump point with velocities perfectly matched, but even my Lancelot comes out 35.000 m before the jump and I have to chase the jump point because orthogonal velocity is not aligned properly. But then, the Dostoevsky has almost 13 g orthogonal acceleration, enough to match everything while autopilot is on, but the Lancelot has a mere 3.5 g orthogonal acceleration. The (empty) Plowshare has 0.6 g - the Lancelot may still be able to chase the jump point, but the Plowshare has to decelerate before changing direction.
Even trading with a station is not really good, as we have to decelerate for docking (well, you don't have to, but the chance of hitting the docking clamps with a heavy cargo instead of smashing the ship against the station is not large...). The best trade route thus involves only planets, as one can actually accelerate towards planets into a huge docking window (technically, I'd consider that an exploit - you would not stand a chance of landing on the planet unless your velocity is reduced whereas the game allows you to accelerate towards the planet and then dock to get your velocity magically reduced to zero) - thus such a trade route involves only one acceleration phase to get up to SPEC and is thus with heavy cargo about 4 times faster than one connecting two stations via a jump point.
Thus, the travel time in the limit where acceleration rather than SPEC time matters can be estimated from the acceleration of the empty ship and the cargo mass. For example, the empty Llama has 255 tons and a forward acceleration of 6.8 g. When the whole cargo hold is packed with metals (that's actually not a good idea...), then the cargo mass is 18.000 tons. This is about 70 times the base mass, so consequently the acceleration drops to 1/70 of its basic value or 0.1 g and it takes forever to get the ship anywhere.
The relevant figure when filling the cargo hold is thus the density, i.e. mass per volume, of the cargo. That's actually pretty different, a few examples:
Base metals: 9.0 t/m^3
Alkali metals: 6.5 t/m^3
Factory Constructors: 5.0 t/m^3
Construction vehicles: 4.0 t/m^3
Dilithium Crystals: 2.0 t/m^3
AI core: 2.0 t/m^3
Recycling Tanks: 1.875 t/m^3
PAI Wetware: 1.0 t/m^3
Atmospheric Scrubbers: 0.5 t/m^3
Material Processors: 0.4 t/m^3
Everything else being equal, selecting the right cargo can make you thus more than 10 times faster.
However, everything else is usually not equal. First of all, we'd like to invest all our money into cargo, and we can't do that if the hold is full. In order what cargo is best for putting the largest amount of money into the hold, one can compute the value density of cargo, i.e. the cost per volume. A few examples:
Base metals: 2 Cr/m^3
Alkali metals: 3 Cr/m^3
Dilithium Crystals: 100 Cr/m^3
Factory Constructors: 100 Cr/m^3
Material Processors: 400 Cr/m^3
Construction vehicles: 933 Cr/m^3
Recycling Tanks: 2500 Cr/m^3
Atmospheric Scrubbers: 2500 Cr/m^3
PAI Wetware: 20000 Cr/m^3
AI core: 2000000 Cr/m^3
Thus, as long as the hold is not full, one would prefer Material Processors over PAI Wetware because of their low density, but with the hold becoming full, PAI Wetware becomes a better option because of vastly higher value density. Ideally, one would like to trade cargo with low density but high value density - this is why AI cores and PAI Wetware make excellent cargo.
Unfortunately, the usual limitation is that excellent cargo is not available in large numbers, thus eventually one has to consider hauling heavy (high density) cargo. Here, larger ships actually are an advantage. A Llama hauling 10.000 tons has 0.17 g forward acceleration, however a Plowshare already offers 0.18 g for this mass whereas a Mule still operates close to the nominal acceleration with 0.69 g. It's hard to compute exactly as upgrades have mass too, but the cargo mass at which the Plowshare is better than the Llama is about 3600 tons, but the Mule becomes better than either for them for 1800 tons of cargo - unfortunately, the Mule is quite expensive, so one cannot usually change to a Mule early on.
All this means that it is pointless taking cargo on a leg of the trade route when the cargo does is not worth a significant fraction of money and is heavy. A good example is bringing Factory Constructors and Construction Vehicles to a mining colony which can make a 2M Cr cargo on a Plowshare. Should one take metals back? The answer is no - a full hold of metals is barely more than 50k Cr but slows down enormously. It is far better to make the return trip empty to repeat the more profitable run quickly. It is even better to take an empty Dostoevsky to make the return journey.
Time has to be balanced with profit though - if you have a trade route with 40% profit, a route with 30% profit only needs to take 25% less time to be more profitable, a route with 20% profit should be twice as fast to compete and a route with only 10% profit must be more than 3.5 times faster to compete.
How, then, to get to 100 M credits quickly?
Start on the initial Atlantis - Serenity run taking expensive liquor to Serenity and metals back till reaching 50 k or so, then buy a jump drive and go exploring. What you're looking for is a system with a Factory or Trantor class planet and an arid planet or a Mining Colony. It helps to have several factories, then you never run out of cargo to buy. If not, you may need two or three such routes and change system - if so, fly empty, fly fast, use a fighter to travel. Take high-value manufactured goods such as recycling tanks, atmospheric scrubbers or PAI wetware (dependent on just what run you can find) and work your way up. Don't bother taking a return cargo, just fly back fast. Eventually you need to buy heavier and heavier cargo to reinvest all your money, construction vehicles or factory constructors will eventually become cargo of choice, and they should always be dumped on an arid planet to minimize flight time (with heavy cargo, docking on a mining colony is too difficult) and to maximize profit (arid is better than rocky for this type of equipment). If the cargo hold of the Llama is full, buy a Plowshare and a Dostoevsky. The Plowshare hold can take as much as 2 M credits in manufactured goods (both production and mining) - at which point you enter a linear growth phase. The runs are very slow, therefore always go to a planet. Take the Dostoevsky to fly back quickly (unless you consider that cheating). With 2 M credits in the hold, you can make 800 k Credits of profit per run - which means you need only 8 runs to get back to exponential, since then the AI core which costs about 10 M in a Commerce Center and can be sold with 40% profit at a mining colony becomes accessible. Fly AI core runs with fighters and other fast vessels. A good commerce center holds 20+ AI cores - the profit per run is then 80 M, so the 300 M credits for the Clydesdale are in reach with only a few runs (which moreover are very fast runs!). All of this is doable within less than 12 hours playing time.
If you want to play completely honest and account for pirates, modify as follows: Pirate attacks are usually rare, but especially with a heavy cargo, you just can't run, and shooting the pirates only attracts uln and forsaken - so don't. Instead, you have to dump cargo and run. Thus, only invest 50% of your cash into your cargo as long as cash is growing exponentially - this way, dumping cargo will only be a setback of two runs and will not ruin you. In the linear phase, there's enough cash left anyway.
Afterwards, go buy all the goodies and go bounty-hunting for a hobby...