X3: Terran Conflict

[Starblade]

The X series is on sale today and being in the mood for another space sim like Freelancer I decided to pick up X3: Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude for $5. This game is pretty hefty. For others who've had it already, what are some good tips to keep in mind for the early game? I started as Terran Defender on my first run through and finished the first major mission (I would have loved a time compression back in Freelancer). I talked about it in IRC a bit but what are some good mods for improving the game in general, little tweaks here and there, things like that? How do I find missions and various things to do besides the main plot one? What are some good things to keep in mind for building up a fleet/station empire? Are there hidden caches of items and secret areas like in Freelancer, or anything like the anomalous areas in that game?

[Agdune]

I just started replaying this a couple of weeks ago. One of the biggest tips I can give is; don't feel bad about cheating every now and again. Seriously. The ship AI is pretty hit and miss, and you're going to see your brand-spanking new $10,000,000 ships plow themselves into the sides of stations every now and again (usually aggroing the sector patrols in the process and costing you standings). Normally I don't mind a challenge in a game, but there's a difference between an intentional challenge and a bit of gamey-related weakness. Being able to magically replace a ship that blew itself up by forgetting that solid objects = not good friends will actually go a long way towards being able to enjoy the positive parts of the game without getting infuriated by the weaknesses. Nothing sucks as much as working to get your first frigate only to see it die to a solar power plant while en-route to the equipment dock. Except maybe having your station complex be attacked by police forces because they ran into it and took damage from it (thus registering it as hostile).

Anyway, that bit's up to you.

Other than that, I would recommend the X Rebalance mod. Adds new ships, regions, equipment etc. Also moves things around a bit for rebalancing purposes (e.g. shipyards come in civilian and millitary types now), so YMMV.

I also really liked the Racial response Fleets and racial invasion scripts. (they're also on the egosoft forum... somewhere). Adds a bit of hostile activity to the X universe, though thinking about it, that could be part of why my transport ships have such terrible, terrible survivability... they keep disappearing when I'm not looking... hmm...

Also, in regards to building up a trading empire? Don't go for energy cells straight off the bat. They're tempting, but they have terrible return for the investment. If you're going into manufacturing, go for silicon wafers. They have a better return (but it's slightly easier to flood the market with them if you're not careful). Meatsteak Cahoonas in Argon space worked suprisingly well for me too, but that could be the rebalance mod affecting things. Hard to tell.

[cf_nz]

Are there hidden caches of items...

There are unoccupied ships in some sectors which you can claim. Co-ordinates for these can be found on the web. IIRC several missions throughout the main plot will also give you some ships. Beyond that I'm pretty rusty as I haven't played it in nearly a year.

[LoneWolf666]

What I hate the most in this game is the risk of suddenly losing something really valuable without being able to do anything about it. You do a bunch of missions, scrounge up money, buy yourself a trader, set him on a SAFE trade route and 15 minutes later he explodes due to a random lolattack by the Khaak or whatever. And there's nothing you can do, really. Or building a station for millions of credits and watching it get blown up by a random destroyer incursion.

But the sense of achievement you have when getting that first trader, that first station, that first warship is great. Almost makes up for the frustration when they get randomly blown up, even!

Maybe I just had bad luck, though.

[Starblade]

Other than that, I would recommend the X Rebalance mod. Adds new ships, regions, equipment etc. Also moves things around a bit for rebalancing purposes (e.g. shipyards come in civilian and millitary types now), so YMMV.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot later on, once I'm more comfortable with the game. I saw a cheat mod a while back, so I might as well slap that on for when the game tries to dick me over too.

Is Albion Prelude basically the same game as this but a different scenario/galaxy to mess around in?

[LoneWolf666]

Albion Prelude is WAR. No, seriously. It's technically "the same" as TC, but they are beating the crap out of each other out there.

The galaxy is the same, only at a time of strife. So same sectors, but what was a peaceful hinterland in TC might be a wartorn frontline in AP.

[MagosMechanicus]

I picked up the X Superbox during the Steam summer sale, so I've been plugging away at a Humble Trader start in TC+AP. This time I'm focusing on stations rather than traders as was my wont when I played Reunion. Giving up my starting freighter to my first Ore mine hurt my moment-to-moment earning power more than I expected, but I'm earning back the money for another one as it trades while I explore the universe with my Discovery, and later on I can build it into a complex for bigger profit margins pretty easily.

Anyone have any tips for currying favour with the Terrans? It seems anywhere I go with them I just get the ED-209 "Leave this sector, you have 15 seconds to comply." treatment, and the borders where they don't do it don't seem to have any stations that want to buy much.

Nothing sucks as much as working to get your first frigate only to see it die to a solar power plant while en-route to the equipment dock. Except maybe having your station complex be attacked by police forces because they ran into it and took damage from it (thus registering it as hostile).

Wow. Guess I have to make damn sure my stations are out of the way. Or just avoid going into a sector where one was built, since collisions only happen around the player.

[Starblade]

Does it matter where in a sector you build things, or just that your stuff is in a certain sector?

[Jonny]

Albion Prelude has got a load of improvements added over TC, new functionality, stock markets, ship equipping, fleets, the war system, that sort of thing. I'd ignore TC and just play AP now, personally.

As for sector locations, don't put things in between gates. Civilian traffic mostly moves from gate to gate, if you stick a station in the way confusion occurs. The best places to plonk stuff in a sector is either just out of the main area (but not too far or your transports will take an age to move around) or inside the gate grid but either above or below to keep out of the way.

Unless you're into all the hard slogging space achievement pish I'd get the cheat script package as well. I've never had more fun in an X game that when I say screw it and use the cheat scripts to spawn whatever I need.

[MagosMechanicus]

Well, for us Steam users... I don't think we have any choice? Usually, Steam installs all DLCs with the base game (and it considers AP a DLC for TC). But looking at the feature set, apparently AP is supposed to add a stock exchange station to Argon Prime which I can't find. That's weird.
Do you have to choose a particular game start to get the Albion Prelude content?

[Jonny]

They're two separate games on your steam list, X3: Albion Prelude and X3: Terran Conflict. Unless you've got a burning desire to playthrough Egosoft's naff plotlines just start up AP and forget Terran Conflict exists.

[Starblade]

I'm only a couple hours in, might as well in that case. I thought the difference was something like Mechwarrior 4 and Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries, instead of a full on sequel.

Jonny, could you toss me a link to a good cheat engine? Google shows several of them. Also do I need a mod manager like with Freelancer?

[Jonny]

They're pretty much exactly the same game, they've just got a different plot and AP has more stuff added to it, so it's best just to play that and ignore Terran Conflict.

Here's the home of X modding - http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=94

This is the plugin manager - http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=265915

and here's the cheat package containing all you'd need - http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=216691

I wouldn't mess around with too many mods to start with until you know what you need and what drives you crazy. Personally I find these two invaluable though:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=217470 MARS Fire Control, vanilla turrets are thick as shit. If you ever want to jump into anything bigger than a fighter you'll need that.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=2728635 Station Financial Manager. If you get into station building, pissing around with transport orders and transferring money is a real nuisance, this one handles it for you.

Finally, here's Egosoft's official package of "signed" scripts that they approve, the exe just installs the ones you want without messing around. http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=3773803#3773803

*edit*

Hmm, the last link just keeps going to the whole mod list. X3AP Bonus Package is the one to click on for that.

[Starblade]

Excellent, thanks Jonny. I'm not planning on getting into too specific mods at the moment, but real general, flat-out improvements like those I'll go for now.

[DoomKnights]

The game is great, but I am not touching it again until X Rebirth. That promises to fix nearly all the issues from the main game. Things you need to understand:

In all games up to AP if you are not in sector ANYTHING can destroy something else. If normally if you had been in the sector this is not the case. Examples a fighter destroying a factory (this fighter while in sector can't even take the factory shields down to 98%...) or my favorite problem a fighter killing a capital ship. The problem is that while out of sector your weapons on your ship vs weapons on the enemy ship are oddly factored in some crazy way, as well shields are just fubared. I can't tell you how many times I watched out of sector my capital ships LOSE to a freakin fight ship. Sense it makes not.

Even if you have fleets in sector the game's God may feel you have left something alone for too long and will destroy it randomly, even with a FLEET guarding a factory, you may find it destroyed by a fighter ( happened so many times I gave up).

[Thorno]

After reading all this I am regretting my latest purchase...

[Starblade]

I'm not, I can't wait to get home and install all those mods and go to town. But then, I'm more interested in going from a fighter to a frigate to a battleship, not so much the trade empire thing. Is it possible to get enough space bucks to do that without a huge focus on trading/economics, and just combat, bounty hunting, boarding enemy vessels, salvaging, stuff like that?

e: Though I guess if not I can just cheat engine my way to it and not give a damn.

[LoneWolf666]

@Thorno: I'd say try it. You might get a real blast out of it. For all it's faults, it gives a true sense of achievement and progression.

Although having already played it for a couple hundred hours, like DoomKnights I'm waiting for Rebirth to give me my space sim fix.

EDIT: @Starblade: combat missions generally bring a ton of money, and so does capturing ships. Just bear in mind you're going to be doing most things personally.

Cheating right off the bat probably diminishes a lot of the fun, I think.

[Thorno]

I'm thinking of doing the same, plus getting some wing men along the way. But reading stuff about AI crashing into all of the things is a bit worrying and I don't like to touch cheats, do you not save manually or is it a save when you quit kinda thing?

combat missions generally bring a ton of money, and so does capturing ships.

That's good to hear.

[MagosMechanicus]

Autosaves whenever you dock to a station. On top of that you can save manually whenever you're docked, or save anytime by buying Salvage Insurance. It's quite cheap, so rarely a limiting factor when you need it.
I'd say it's still well worth a play-through, but my favourite thing with space sims is always the trade empire, and I loved Reunion for its enormous dynamic economy and wealth of options. If AP has improved on that even more (Stocks!), I'm definitely finding that instead. At least Steam recognised the shared files, so my download wasn't for naught, and now I know not to start on stations until I have the money for a second freighter to staff it too.

[Starblade]

Good to hear about the combat money; I always lose interest in the economics side of things unless I find a way to break it to pieces. Having wingmen will be fun too, do you recruit those somewhere or what? How large of a squad will roll with you?

Cheating right off the bat probably diminishes a lot of the fun, I think.

I only plan on doing it if I get dicked over somehow or want to mess around. There's a 'cheevo for blowing up a solar power station; I'll have to keep that as a personal goal.

[Aerozap]

I have over 300 hours in X3:TC. I highly suggest it, but it still isn't a game for everyone. The annoyances people frequently fault the X Series for never bothered me, although I understand why they might bother others. I know it's all subjective experience, but I don't recall ever having the kind of problems DoomKnights had with the Out of Sector (OoS) combat calculations. Only in the rare sectors bordering Xenon space where Qs frequently appear did I ever lose significant investments in OoS combat.

In sector, sure, sometimes the AI is pretty stupid and rams into everything and anything. Frequent pitstops at stations (or using insurance) to save and avoiding using wings (which I understand is otherwise a cool feature) can help prevent this. Typically only fighters have the crashing problems though. I don't recall losing anything bigger than an M3 to AI pilot ineptitude.

EDIT: To answer Starblade's question, any ship you happen to pick up along the way can be added to a wing. There is an early Terran plot mission that explains this better than I could remember the specifics at this point.

Speaking about the early game, I enjoy it perhaps the most. Before the grand fleets and the massive trading empires, there is just you in a poorly-equipped light fighter trying to survive lonely space. Enjoy picking up easy combat missions in the beginning and look for opportunities to capture enemy ships (use your weakest weapons and feather the trigger until - with luck - the enemy pilot bails), but not necessarily to kit out. You can make a good deal of money from capturing heavy fighters or transports to sell while doing odd jobs.

[Jonny]

I only plan on doing it if I get dicked over somehow or want to mess around. There's a 'cheevo for blowing up a solar power station; I'll have to keep that as a personal goal.

If you activate mods it deactivates Steam achievements, if you're into those sorts of things.

You don't hire wingmen like NPC characters, all of your ships can be given orders through their menus. You can assign them to wings and fleets and assign them to the player ship as wingmen, controlling their missile fire probability, formation, turret orders and that sort of thing. There's no limit on how many you can have other than what your computer will take when they're in sector with you. I've got a mighty deathfleet rolling through the pirate sectors atm of 1 carrier, 4 destroyers, 10 frigates and 60 fighters. That's alright by itself, but I've also got a script running on the capital ships which auto-fabricates and deploys 30+ fighter drones per ship. I have to jump out when the fleet jumps in now, or watch a slideshow.

[Starblade]

Ahaha that's great. So you can have all the ships you've ever gotten following you at once? That's beautiful. Screw trading, I'm making my own damn fleet!

Also no I don't care about 'cheevs, they're just things for me to keep any eye on usually.

[Elerium]

Hah, reminds me of the days when I used to use Wasp Missiles to prey on Split M3 ships because they were weakest shielded, then I'd nab their ship and sell it off, but not before spending a good 3 or 4 minutes outside using the astronaut suit's repair laser to fix the hull to 100% recovering the full cost of the ship.

[Starblade]

Ha, I chose the one character in Albion Prelude without a plot. Oh well, I'll just reroll.

e: I should get used to all side missions giving me literally no room for error when it comes to timing huh?

[DoomKnights]

I have played enough so when my wife see's me play a space game she screams it better not be X. I also did the hardest part

Spoiler

Hub mission, the very first version, not the easy mode one they have now a days.

This is something that normally broke people and made them quit.

I had over 1500 ships and over 500 stations making me money. Nearly all the ships I had where from capturing and trading. I nearly never bought from stations.

[Starblade]

I used the cheat engine to give me a capital ship just for giggles on my terran guy. How do you shoot anything? The only things I could fire were missiles, though it had drones, marines, and gauss cannons.

Spent my first hour as an Argon Peacekeeper shooting down pirates and xenon ships. The xenon were annoying because they were twice my speed but I escorted a freighter to safety and upgraded my ship!

[Jonny]

To fire manually you press F1 to cycle between the turret views, cap ships don't have forward firing guns that fire from the default view like fighters do. To make them fire automatically you've got to go into the ships control panel and set the turret orders to Attack Enemies.

[Starblade]

I told them to attack enemies in the autopilot screen, but didn't seem to do it. Maybe it's because I was attacking a station. I didn't know f1 rotated between turrets, though. That explains why the ship kept repositioning itself.

[Jonny]

You've got multiple sets of orders on the autopilot screen. The top ones, Navigation, Combat etc. set what your ship attempts to do, under that you should have (from memory) broadcast to sector which you don't need yet and under that a group consisting of one line for each turret and a set all option.

Clicking on the set all option opens up yet another bank of orders with things like attack my target, protect ship, attack missiles and attack enemies. If you select attack enemies there you should see all of your turret lines light up with "attack enemies" instead of being blank. Your ship will now fire on any enemy that comes within range.

I suspect what has happened is that you've told the ship to attack enemies, but not ordered the turrets to, so the ship will go through it's attack pattern without actually attacking anything. Or you were attacking a neutral station, in which case the turrets wouldn't fire because it's not hostile. You'd need to set them to "attack my target" for that I think, or just manually fire a bank of guns at the station until it gets pissed off and sets you hostile, at which point all your guns set to "attack enemies" would start firing at it.

F1 doesn't switch banks of turrets on and off, if that's what you were meaning, it rotates you through manual control of them. The front view moves your ship like a fighter does, but without any forward guns firing doesn't do anything. Press F1 and you'll find yourself in turret 1, moving around now moves the turret instead of the ship and pressing fire shoots the turret's guns. Pressing F1 again moves you into the next turret and so on until you run out and it lands you on a third person view of your ship, one more press gets you back to the start of the cycle with the forward view.

[Starblade]

Alright, thanks. That's probably what happened then; I told my ships to attack but not the turrets. The ships all fired their missiles, so it wasn't a total loss.

Are there side missions to look out for besides the main plot? Terran Conflict has achievements that suggest it has some, but AP doesn't seem to. I don't have a problem with open-ended, but I like having a goal to try to accomplish.

e: I just salvaged myself a pirate buzzard! What can I do with it besides have it roll with me? With those mods Jonny suggested can I have it start buying/selling stuff for fun and profit, or trade or something?

[Starblade]

How are you supposed to fight ships faster than you without getting lucky and hoping they try to ram you? I just lost an escort mission because the ships were twice as fast as me. The mission was "very easy". Two ships blew up the freighter because of it and the missiles no one bothered to try and shoot down.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Escorts can be very difficult to complete, sometimes nigh-impossible, depending on random factors.

Fighting ships faster than you is a matter of placing your ship and placing your missiles... if we're talking M5s, you should keep a stock of fast missiles for swatting m5s when you don't feel like shooting them. Hurricanes are a good choice for this.

[Starblade]

You just don't get any time at all for anything, do you? I had an hour to salvage a ship one sector over. Easy, except it moves at a speed of 40. So I fail it because it is physically impossible to complete this mission (and I can't know ahead of time this fact), but I come out ahead with one Gladiator which is apparently marked as stolen. Some Argon Discoverers picked up on this, but don't actually give a shit or attack me; they're just listed as hostile. Is this because I have high rep with Argon, or because I'm not in the ship (which has docked)? Should I really care?

Also how do I get the trade commands to do anything? I have Mk.1 and Mk.2 installed and they're greyed out.

[Jonny]

I've never bothered with missions, so I can't really help you with them. As for the trade commands, some orders won't work on the ship you're personally flying and some won't work on the wrong kind of ship. As you're fiddling with the trade commands, try installing them in a TS class freighter you're not flying and see if they work.

With the problem you described with your mission though, damaged ships move at a fraction of their normal speed. It could be you were supposed to hop out and use your suit's repair laser to get it back up to spec and moving properly.

[Starblade]

Maybe, but with its size and max speed, I doubt it. At least nobody seems to care that I "stole" it, so I'm up one bomber. Also because I'll be damned if I'm grinding 500,000 credits and wandering around until I find one, I cheated myself a trade software mk.3 and used the free freighter the plotline gave me to start auto-trading. Setting this up, with a nav satellite to tell me where to go is more fun than I thought. Now to play the markets!

[Starblade]

Sorry to double up on my posts, but I just sold my banged up, semi-stolen bomber and bought a Magnetar and for fighter support for it, 4 Discovers. I'm trying to tell the discoverers to auto-dock at it, but only two did. The others just hold position. How do I get them in there automatically? They are all decked out the same way, and there's room for two more fighters according to the info panel. I want to have it roll as a missile frigate and do trade runs or something.

I tried docking my Nova in it as well and it refused to do so, but I could dock manually without problems.

e: Got it. The "dock" command is bugged, but "protect" will auto-dock the ships successfully if there are no enemy targets in range.

[Mantaray]

i currently own ort cloud. i've got several facilities in there, all self-sustaining and pumping out the warships to defend me against all kinds of shit.
getting started for the new player can be hard. big tip.
piracy in teladi space is TOTALY LEGIT
go take your crappy ship with at least an ire on it, and just shoot it forever untill the pilot bails. claim, send to -insert chose operating space- and when your done, you'll have 5 trade ships to dick about with, sell one or two of them to get the badass trading software and then.. go AFK overnight.

when you come back, you'll either have LOADS OF MONEH and some high level traders. or, a fair bit of money and dead traders (shit happens) either way, you should be more then fine to get into whatever.

big tips so far:

*on startup, run the game in SATA for an hour.
when the game starts, the economy is.. really buggered up to say the least. everythings full supply and it takes a while for demand/suply to even out.

*Argon like to mine. argon space has the most relatively stable economy, but over-produces ore quite often. look here for cheap ore.

* The boron suck at mineing, try turning up at Rolk's Drift or Kingdom End with a full load of ore, there are often large profitsss to be made!

also this guy http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=98222
he knows his stuff.

[Elerium]

There's also hanging around warzones and picking up the scrap from those enemy ships, if you're feeling lucky. Got quite a few nice hornet and thunderbolt missiles when I played back then.

Dang it you make me want to start playing again.

[Starblade]

Is there any special reason no stations anywhere stock any weapons any more? I'm using the cheat engine just to give my ships IREs.

Also, what are some good tips for setting up miners? I have my Magnetar escorted by four discoverers on mining duty while I find another trade software (I may just cheat this in again too, finding a Teladi station that sells one is a pain), and it harvests and collects ore, but I think it could be doing better. Or is that really all there is to it, slap a drill, a scanner, the software, and a collector on and let it run?

[Mokino]

You need to get traders supplying the factories that produce the weapons. Things don't just automatically happen and the economy purposedly has gaps for the player to fill.

[Starblade]

But I can't do that without income, and to guard the traders to do that I need ships with weapons. I have 1 million credits and I won't be able to start supplying weaponry to everyone for another few dozen million. Plus, all stations stock the same quantity of them, for whatever reason. It's neat that they leave that hole open, but I've got several ships I cannot supply with weapons or equipment because they don't exist at the moment and haven't for several hours. I mean I could just cheat myself a few more just to fast track my way to funhaving, but that's kind of boring especially since I've been exploring a lot of pretty (and empty) sectors looking for things. Found a few good mining sectors (several asteroids, no other ships in sight, relatively safe stations in a nearby sector) and a pirate base that way! How do I set up ore mines, by the way? And once I do how do I tell a ship to sell the ore at stations?

Also, I kind of sort of trained a terran armada to Treasure Chest when the Argons weren't looking because I went to the wrong sector and found several cruisers and stations and torpedos looking my way. My framerate was the first to die, then me when I strafed a little too close to a capital ship. I can't wait to go back to that sector with a small fleet.

e: Also I have a sector trader at level 8, so I tell it to do universe trading, but I get an "incoming message" alert (but no message), and the ship stops moving. What gives?

[atmawpn]

A good place to start off is the Argon Prime region. It's relatively safe, and there are opportunities to be had as well. Can't really go wrong with a silicon mine in Ore Belt, due to the various silicon-needing factories in the surrounding sectors.

To set up a station you need to hire a TL-class. Just comm any one of them (you will almost certainly find one in every shipyard sector) and have them dock with the shipyard from which you will be buying the station. Buy the station, then ask the TL to go to the sector you want it built in. Then... build. Later on when you can afford your own TL ship you can skip the whole hiring process and have your TL do the station transporting.

Best bet to automate your own station is to give it a base amount of credits, some cut-off point so that any excess gets transferred to your player account automatically, and finally a TS freighter (Mercury from Argon or Mistral from OTAS). Homebase it to your station, then use the Commercial Agent script: it's basically a best buy/sell on steroids, and lets the ship jump across the X-universe to find the best deals for your wares. However to access those nifty features you need to have the pilot trained to the Cargo Messenger level at least (lets the pilot use jump drive). An easy way to train pilots is to use cheap M5s (like a Discoverer), and install the Commodity Logistics Mk1 and 2 to them. Then have them CLS-waypoint their way around a safe region such as Cloudbase Southwest > Three Worlds > Antigone Memorial > Cloudbase Southeast. Eventually they will train up to the requisite level, and you can transfer said pilot from the M5 to your TS. This is so because CLS and CAG were made by the same author, so there is interchangeability between scripts: a pilot leveled on CLS will also carry the levels to CAG, and to Prospector, and to EST.

This really is skimming over most of the crucial details though, and perhaps tricky to master. But once you get those down you can grow your funds exponentially.

[Starblade]

Excellent, thanks. If I have CLS and CAG installed can I install EST without any additional libraries? The one site I found wants me to install some sort of German library and I'm not too keen on that, unless I don't really need it.

I already have a Mercury and a Discoverer, so I'll get a pilot to work on that asap.

[atmawpn]

Not too sure. If your CLS/CAG is from the bonus pack then they might have outdated libraries, and you might be better off installing what library is required by EST. If you installed CLS/CAG separately (as in the copypaste scripts/t folder) then you would have installed their required libraries at some point, and your EST won't need it.

[Starblade]

Eh, I got UT working anyway (turns out M6s cannot do it, so I transferred the pilot to my Mercury and am now using my Magnetar and Discoverers as protection) so I won't bother. And I got my spare discoverer on CLS duty until it levels up!

[atmawpn]

That said you should try to figure out how CLS1/2 work, as they can be nifty powerful tools for lategame endeavours like the Hub. For instance, apart from my starting mines I've not really setup any asteroid-based mines thanks to mobile mining. More than all the high-yield rocks you can use put together, without the framerate-destroying effects they have when you're IS.

Here is an example of a mobile mining fleet: 50 TSes set to collect from an asteroid you blow up prior (Silicon, Ore, Nividium, depends on what you want), 5 collection TSes collecting from 10 miners each using CLS waypointing and depositing at a deposit TL, as well as a transfer TS again using CLS to offload your loot from the TL to wherever you want it to be. At the point the screenshot was taken the transfer was to the Hub, but later on the mining fleet was repurposed to supply a complex in Antigone Memorial for M2/M7M weapons (necessary, as heavier weapons are so hard to stockpile in the default universe you're almost always better off making your own en masse if you want to outfit a fleet of frigs/destroyers).

Some stuff you can do with CLS

[MagosMechanicus]

I was kinda surprised at just how much profitsss day-trading on the company stocks earns, even with the very simplest trading strategy of bottom-feeding on any stock that falls to its price floor and selling as soon as the profit/loss indicator turns green. In the time it took my first station to earn its first 100000 credits, I'd already picked up 4 million on speculating. Then I spent most of that on a Mercury Superfreighter to start universe trading. Need to get my racial favour with the Split and Paranid up soon.

[Mantaray]

Who would like to see a lets play: X3TC?
having said that.. shiit that would take a long time...
never mind =/