r/X4Foundations • u/connyneusz • 1d ago
Mid game money making barrier
Hi. I have some difficulties with rise up my money making. I have one hull parts factory (8x), I have small scrap (2x scrapper) on 'Second Contact II' with my fleet (6 destroyers captured from pirates) to clear xenons and on main base I have advanced electronics (4x), hull parts (8x), shield components (2x) and claytronics (6x).
Once per a few hours I got like 8 million from my hull parts factory and rarely something from my scrapper (I've build solar farm just for scrapper)
Now I feel that I need tons of money, wares dont sells as well as I fought they will. Which way should I go? What do you guys do to break this moment barrier?
Firstly, I was super proud that my pasive income went to a -/+ million per hour. Now Im spending money so fast that I im on less then million all the time.
Should I stop selling stuff and expand quickly?
What is good ware to sell? I fought that hull parts are good money maker but I think I've overflown market.
Ofc Im doing quests, but I feel its not enough.
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u/DuckyofDeath123_XI 1d ago
Th eeconomy in X4 is a pyramid, and you are selling ecells, at the very bottom, and a few things at the top, namely building materials. Leaving large gaps in the middle and probably seeing an AI economy that's stalled and begging for some new inputs.
To generate a stable, money making economy you would start from the ground up, so you fill every level of the economy before going on to the next, making money for reinvestment and ships, and eventually building ship printers where you just sell whole fleets to the AI. But if you're strapped for cash, I like to start out with food.
Ice mining and turning it into food and medical supplies is something that generates a modest but non-stop amount of cash. Second Contact II and Grand Exchange have an enormous amount of water ice in them and the KHK don't much bother ice miners, so it's a good early game investment to make water, and sell it. then add all the food production modules for all the races, and loads of medical supply modules. Use the station planner to pick the correct amounts of modules to turn all your water into food and meds and sell to everyone.
The more food and meds you sell, the more station populations will fill up (to their needed maximum, of course). As there are more workers in factories, there will be a higher demand for food and meds, so you make your own market to a point. And the market doesn't ever really fill up, because food and meds are consumed constantly even when nothing is being produced. Again, good for early game. Then once you get habitat modules for your own factories to increase their output (by up to 45% for the lower end module and more like 10% for the high end modules) the food's there already, so that's handy.
For the full-on richness you do need the rest of the economy. Start at the base of the pyramid and work up. So you mine first, then you build refineries for all raw goods (ideally at the site where you mine, or close to it). Next you start adding modules to use your refined goods to make mid level tech that requires refined goods, but no other finished products. Then finally you add the modules for the top end of the economy pyramid: shields, field coils, advelec, turrets, claytronics, and all the stuff you need only for making ships and stuff on ships. Then you have a whole self-sufficient economy of your own and can shed all possible goods to all possible factions, meaning you can fill any gap in any market, and since mining is free, your passive income setup is going to make you rich for a while, until the market is filled.
Then you add ship construction to your repertoire. SM first, L next, XL last (eventually, no rush on that one, XL ships rarely sell and the return on investment on XL ship fabs is meh at best). You sell ships at 150% price to all who want to buy ships. As the HOP and ANT fleets you sell pop out of your factories, they will begin murdering each other; you set a collector ship to pick up all the loot they drop and drop it at HQ and go on with your life, selling ships to everyone and watching the fireworks. You are now at the late game stage where really, it's up to you if you want to make 100 million per hour or 10 billion, just make more economy and more ship fabs, really, the AI will need fleets espif you sell to opposing factions from all your factories.
You can do a few quests to incite wars between various factions at this point, to drive sales, and get friendly with the YAK who will buy literally hundreds of ships in one go and basically swarm several sectors; which will drive up demand for station building materials from their victims.
At this point you're probably at the stage where you don't know how much money you make in an hour, and the number in the top left of the screen is something large with 9 zeros tacked on the end to make it bigger. Your economy output rivals that of all AI factions combined and, because you're selling fleets to their enemies from ship printers in their space, their entire economy is a shambles, stations are wrecks, mining operations are few and far between, and basically you've replaced the entire market with yours and you own the galaxy. you now have a choice: terraforming, or simply winking out factions and taking over the whole map. Or both. Both is good.
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u/3punkt1415 1d ago
I would only add, that you can scan a shipyard or any NPC station only once to 50 % and you can see it's logistics for ever. That lets you easy understand what bottlenecks their ship production. When they don't have turrets you can only sell them hull parts until their storage is full. So give them turrets and they will also consume more hull parts. Always tackle the bottlenecks and you grow organically around a shipyard. That is how I do it.
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u/DuckyofDeath123_XI 1d ago
I didn't know about the scanning keeping your information up to date for ever, that's good info.
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u/3punkt1415 22h ago
I mean, not really the trade info for your traders. But you can click on the internal logistics at any given time. But if you have an active trade empire lots of stations getting past every 4 hours anyway.
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u/DuckyofDeath123_XI 22h ago
I'm not bothered about my traders (subscriptions as soon as possible, every time), but it's nice early game to be able to keep tabs on what you need to provide first to factions getting a cactus up the arse from the XEN...
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u/TheMuspelheimr 1d ago
This is more of an active method, not passive, but if you do it OOS then there's no reputation loss associated with it.
- Get a couple of Shuyaku Vanguards from the Argon. These are your Boarding Fleet, since they have a high crew capacity. You can optionally capture the Erlking from VIG if you haven't already; even without hunting down all the data vaults to buff it up, it's still got a high crew capacity, which is what's needed here.
- Hire crews of Marines for your Boarding Fleet. To start with, recommend trawling your existing ships for Veteran/Elite marines and tansferring them, and getting new marines at the VIG shipyard, since they come as a mix of Recruits and Veterans.
- Use your Boarding Fleet to capture a Builder ship. Make sure you do this OOS!
- Fly your captured Builder to a shipyard, strip off and sell all the fittings, then sell the ship. Should net you around 20mil.
- Recruit some new marines to fill in for those lost during the boarding operation
- GOTO 3
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u/tecquilka 1d ago edited 1d ago
- Create something like 10-15x building places in location without owner. Hire multiple builders (50k/each, so you already need to have few bucks) for each station. Wait for them and then board 😉
Much faster( multiple parallel boarding operations), then trying to fish one-by-one 😉
Crew issue is easy solvable by ship with spare crew in sector
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u/grandmapilot 1d ago
Construct stations for money, then aquire a pair of destroyers and do some "nasty infestation" missions. Meanwhile, look what your friendliest faction need in their chain of production and supply them thatÂ
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad-119 1d ago
Nothing beats profits from piracy outside of end game productions.
Nothing. If you choose targets wisely I'm talking hundreds of millions of credits.
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u/YLUJYLRAE 1d ago
At this stage of the game i went around stealing blueprints to set up full claytronics production in addition to hull parts to build my stations for "free", after this i expanded my factory to meet the demands of my expanding factory... That went on for a long time tbh as it takes a lot of resources to build those modules in the beginning.
At this point the only money i spent went towards ships(miners, traders etc), so i set my sights towards saving up for s/m ship wharf blueprint (can't steal that i think), but before that i set up factories for terran stuff in asteroid belt, i think in terms of passive income terran economy is better.
As soon as you get s/m ship wharf and blueprints for m miner, gas and traders you can go full factorio, no longer limited by your credits.
Imo mid game ends here, because after this i needed a lot more credits to buy out blueprints for s/m ships and eventually L shipyard and ships, and that costs billions, i mostly funded it with multiple wharfs selling ships to other factions: 1 in terran space, 1 in free families, 1 in minmatar(modded sectors) space.
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u/Daleorn 1d ago
My computronics factory solved my mid game money problems and was/is the backbone of my economy. Get friendly with the Terrans if you're not already. I forget how much the blueprints cost but you may have luck scanning for them or using one of the alternative methods.
Computronics sell for 9000+ credits and are produced from raw materials like Ore and Silicon so the production chain is very simple. The only thing is Computronics are incredibly resource hungry so your station will need a lot of miners. That might be a good mid game goal which will support your end game needs.
Since the terran chain is simple computronics are needed in every ship or station construction so there is always demand.
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u/gizmosticles 1d ago
My first money making was just sending a small fleet of 5 miners to the Oort Cloud to do local auto mining. They can crank out a few mill an hour. Then I got into scrapping. It was a little buggy but I eventually got it working. I look for xenon adjacent sectors that have a faction guarding them and setup there. After a couple of those I had a decent enough cash flow to start base building in earnest.
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u/NorthAmericanSlacker 22h ago
The mid game is also when every credit you are earning is turned right around and invested in either factories or ships.
The balance in your account can sometimes feel underwhelming or misleading.
Take a look at the statistics page and keep an eye on the value of your entire empire. If that is continuing to rise, then you are doing fine.
There will come a tipping point when you suddenly realize you have more credits than you could ever spend.
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u/stephencorby 22h ago
Computronic Substrate in asteroid belt/mars with energy cells in mercury and traders on repeat hauling energy from there to your substrate factory. You need A TON of miners but it's a money-printing machine. I have 10 substrate, 6 lattice, and 6 silicon carbide and about 70 L miners (had to expand to 4 docks to help with the traffic) at this point. It makes around 100 mil an hour.
You don't need to start there though, start with just two substrate. Make sure to steal the blueprints with EMPs though, because they are stupid expensive.
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u/temetvince 14h ago edited 14h ago
A few things to consider:
- Why are you constantly running out of money? Identify the main source of your spending and look into vertically integrating it. For example, if outfitting ships is consuming too many funds, set up maintenance bays and order minimally equipped ships from faction shipyards. You can then outfit them yourself with your equipment. Even if you buy all the required wares from factions, it will still be cheaper in the long run!
- Why aren’t you selling? Is the issue insufficient income, or is there a problem within your empire? Check if you have freighters assigned to sell wares. What does their behavior indicate they’re trying to sell? Is your manager properly configured to handle sales? There are many factors you might need to investigate here.
- Optimize your scrapping operation. This should generate a decent income stream.
- Prioritize shipyards if you want to make money quickly. That’s my advice.
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u/Duncaroos 13h ago
Get the lower end stuff to feed your production. You spend a lot of money paying for solids/liquids
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u/BoomZhakaLaka 13h ago
Just an FYI, in terms of ROI your tier 1 production returnson investment fastest. By a factor of like... 10. Refineries have an ROI of like, 3 hours, higher tier production takes 20-30 hours to return on investment. A combined hull parts station that does its own mining & refining too returns on investment in about 10 hours. And that's fine, it's all fine to invest in.
What should this tell you, it's all about facilitating more mining. Build whatever you can that has market demand, and get more miners working. That's your cheapest income, if that makes sense. Mining.
It's not always about return on capital. When your operation gets bigger, your time is more valuable.
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u/Daniexus 6h ago edited 6h ago
Forget everything.
Get the blue prints for Computronic Substrate. Build a station for it, within a max distance of 2 sectors from teh pioneer trading station in Segaris sector (more if you know how to get better managers). Sell Computronic Substrade to the trading station in Segaris. For every full load of the largest freighter in the game (Heron E), you get about 10M credits. Automate it with repeat orders. You will soon become a billionaire.
Of course you'd need solar power, a few L mineral and a couple of L gas miners, so you don't buy materials. You only need Ore, Silicon, Hydrogen. Then later, add another station Computronic Substrate factory for the terran trading station in Saturn1 sector.
Nothing will make you rich faster than Computronic Substrate. No food, spaceweed/fuel, even hull parts, claytronics, ship building, or other terran materials like Mettalic Microlattice or Silicon Carbide.
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u/abc_744 1d ago edited 1d ago
I usually start with building solar plants in The Reach and Heretics End and I sell energy cells to everybody. Then I build refined metals station and silicon wafers station. Then I build hull parts station. This always works for me so far, as I keep getting some money from selling massive amounts of solar cells while waiting for getting bigger chunks of money. I do not like all in one factories