How to make money - buy low, sell high. So with that in mind the first thing to establish is what is a low price and what is a high price for each commodity in the game, which the first main section tries to help with. The second section then goes into some more detailed strategies of what to commodities to buy when, where, and where to take them to maximize your chances of profiting.

Once you are starting to make money in each game, the third section looks at when (and if) you should pay off the debt you initially incurred, when to buy a bigger spaceship, etc.

The last section covers the differences in the game modes and how this affects your strategy.

Each game the economics and prices shift, sometimes fairly significantly, from what you might be used to, so this makes the process of choosing the right cargo to pick up very risky as you get a feel for the range of prices in the system you have landed in.

You already have a few pieces of information - the planet type you are on (which biases prices of those commodities down 20%*), what that planet wanted this turn - shown on the top of the commodity price screen (which biases prices upwards by 20%), and the prices you have seen so far this game. That is a very risky and limited set of information to go on.

So to help with this a rough guide of the prices you might expect for each commodity. Fair warning that this is based off a fairly limited data set (a couple of hundred turns), so you are bound to find minimums and maximums outside these ranges, but they give a guide of the sort of prices you might find (obviously once you have played a few turns in a system those prices should give an idea whether the prices tend towards the top or bottom of these scales, or even outside of the range suggested here potentially, as I can't be completely sure how much varience there is overall based on a few games).


Note that you are unlikely to see the full range of prices above in any single game for any of the commodities - generally in my games it is very rare to see more than 3x the price from minimum to maximum, and frequently commodities the maximum is only twice the minimum (or less in a few cases) over the entire game. So if the first thing you see is Gold at 250, it is very unlikely you will see anything over 1000 for that game, etc.

And just to make blatently clear - these are only guidelines to try and make the first few turns of each game easier, and the prices you start to see after the first few turns in each system you play take precedence, as for example in one game included in the above averages all Gems were below average prices for the entire game (bar one spike) - Crystals averaged 383, Sili averaged 1190, and Amanda 4500 - all about half their broader averages in my games so far.

It does look like the commodity types have a common factor applied to them here - rather than Wood being cheap this game and Food expensive, it seems to be Organics are cheap or expensive compared to average as a group.

I did look at whether the number of each planet type might be behind whether each type was more or less expensive than normal, but while there were some games with a strong correlation along these lines; the cheap Gems game mentioned above had 3 Gems, 2 Metals and 2 Box type planets, conversely the previous game with 4 Gems, 2 Tech, 2 Metals and 1 Box the Gem prices were dead on their average (and interestingly Gem prices were higher on the Gem planets by about 10% than the other 5 planets in the system, but as a 15 turn game this is based on limited data to try and project anything meaningful from)

*The reason for this being assumed as the bonus for the planet type and wanted bonus is partly based on the limited stats used for the averages above, plus an assumption based on the mechanics of the Buyout game mode, see that section for slightly more info

So at this point we have a reasonable chance of working out what is cheap and expensive compared to normal, so we have one or more options of commodities to buy, and need to work out where we should go. This is mostly obvious - the planet that wants the commodities that we think (or know, later in each game) are cheap, after all while there is no guarantees, the 20% (estimated/assumed) bonus to the prices of those 3 commodities compared to normal stacks the odds in our favour, especially if we have correctly deduced the commodity we are looking at is cheap compared to normal (we hope).

There are a few questions even in this fairly ideal situation though - should we take two or more cargoes (of roughly equal cost) or just concentrate on a single main cargo?* Taking two cargoes reduces the ~25% of not being able to sell our single main cargo and having to move on without trading at all in a turn to about 6.25%, and reduces the chance of neglible profits or slight losses, because if both were actually cheap then either one or the other is likely to be at a good price, and sometimes both will be.

*Note using up left over cash to buy the bulk commodities I will ignore here - it is a perfectly sensible thing to do rather than leave money in your account doing nothing, but shouldn't influence the decision making process of what to buy and where to go

Conversely taking two or cargoes reduces the chances of a big win, as both prices have to be very high - so you tend get more "average" results by splitting your cargo across multiple commodities. And while it reduces the chances of not being able to trade at all, having at least one cargo unsellable that turn is more and more likely the more you take (something like 44% for at least one of 2 cargoes transported being stuck I think). Also unless the two commodities are both of the same type, effectively the bonus from the wanted commodity type is diluted when you have mixed cargoes.

If going for a high score, tend to pick a single cargo, if you want a low frustration game, have two or more cargoes most of the time.

The next part is - if I have a choice of where to go, is there any preferences of which one to go for? One initial point is to avoid Box planets if you can, as nothing is 20% cheaper there, which means your next turn is less likely to be profitable (unless on the last turn of course). Another thing to consider later in each game is whether it is a Tech planet - once you have millions in assets/banked and always are carrying 200 of any cargo, the much higher price of Engines compared to the other high end commodities of the other three types* means you should prefer going to such planets as often as you can in the later part of the game; actually as soon as there is significant amounts of left over cash from buying 200 Oxygen/Amanda/Palatium at cheap prices for this game you should be less often going to those planets.

Note because of the fairly limited 20% (again, estimated from limited data points) bonus for commodities being "wanted" compared to knowing the prices of what you are buying, if given the choice being a cheap commodity with no wanted bonus available next turn, vs an fairly average priced commodity with a wanted bonus available, I would always tend to buy cheap and know I can't lose out too badly than risk buying the average priced items.

One final thing to mention: there are no transaction costs here, so generally if you can sell items, do so, even at a loss. You can always buy them back for the next turns trade at the same exact same price, if they are now the best looking deal to go for now. Doing this hopefully avoids you getting stuck for ages carting around one bad trade hoping eventually to find an even higher price to offload it - look for the best deal each turn and move on past your previous mistakes.

* most of the time anyway, I have had a game where Engines, Amanda, and to a lesser extent Oxygen were all about the same price range (although the final turn where engines sold for 58k combined with nearly half the map being tech planets it could just have been bad luck rather than the prices actually being quite so low if that game had run longer)

So the final questions are related to paying off your starting debt and buying a bigger spaceship.

Debt first: as once you repay any part of it you can't reloan that money, I generally avoid paying off the debt until I have cash spare virtually every trip. The 10% interest should be significantly less than amount you profit on an average turn, so you are gaining more by having it until it is clearly surplus cash sitting in your account (except maybe when you are buying engines, but unless you are getting a really good turn around on these that is probably at best 1 in 6 turns, and thus you paying a 77% compound interest rate to use it that one turn in 6, and it rapidly gets worse the less frequently you use that money). In virtually all circumstances don't pay it off before you have get the 200 sized spaceship anyway.

Which neatly leads us onto when to upgrade your spaceship. The first thing to be aware of that there are no trade-ins here, if you buy the 120 sized ship for 1000, the 140 sized ship still costs 4000 and you get nothing back of the 1000 you previously spent. So in most cases you want to use your starting ship, move up from bulk, to medium, to expensive cargoes as you profit, and then move immediately to the 200 sized one when you become able to buy 100 of any of the most expensive commodities of a type. But this isn't an absolute rule, as you may find a particularly good deal on a medium cargo with nothing good in the expensive commodities and that may make it worth picking up one of the intermediate ships (or buying the 200 sized one earlier than normal), as the ship costs are generally quite cheap once your trading empire starts to really moving.

Still it is good to be aware of that extra 100 capacity is basically 25000 credits sitting idle rather than earning money every time you fly without using any of that extra space (in one extreme case that could be two more ship engines you could have bought and sold for over 50k each)

We have four game modes currently, the three turn limited modes which play broadly the same and buyout mode. Firstly I will cover the differences and effects of the number of turns in the turn limited game modes.

Quick - 15 Turn games have a premium on getting off to a quick start, and if things go bad early on at least you will be put out of your misery fairly rapidly. This tends to suggest concentrating on a single cargo per trip to maximize the risks and rewards for each turn. Sure if it goes bad, it will go very bad, and you don't have time to do much about it, but equally if things go well you will get a decent score. As you don't get any score benefit from a bigger ship, you may well not end up even upgrading, or only getting one of the cheaper mid-sized upgrades and never going further.

Standard - 30 turn games are average duration, and thus require a normal strategy - probably a mix of mostly taking multiple cargoes early on to try and keep your assets growing, and then in the later game take more risks.

Extended - 60 turn games have two basic stages - the early game where you build up your assets, and then the point where you are mass trading the expensive commodities. I have gone both ways and both are workable for different aims - playing it safe in the early game to get a few million by turn 20-25 and then just largely trading ship engines around as much as possible, or taking a risk and trying to rush to that point faster to try and get a few more rounds of ship engine trades in before the end of the game, but that does risk getting stuck for ages in the early/mid game stages.

One thing that affects all three of these modes is the last turn effect - any cargo you can't/don't sell in the final turn doesn't count to your score, even if you have 4+ million credits of ship engines in your hold they don't count at all. Given the odds of this happening is 25% that implies buying a single big expensive cargo in the final turn is a risky business (or even the last two or very occassionally three turns, given a run of bad luck of that commodity not being for sale repeatedly), so it is good to be aware of this facet.

Buyout Mode - mostly this game mode plays the same as the other turn limited modes until the point where you have spare cash in your account to start buying planets. At this point it is a good idea to know what buying out a planet does - basically it doubles the effects of a planets type (if not a box type), and doubles the effect of the wanted commodity type bonus. So instead of +/- 20% on the price, it is +/- 40%. This only seems to change when you literally have 100% paid off the planet, owning 50% doesn't give half this bonus.*

This has a few implications - the first tactical is that it might make sense to buy out the planet before selling some or all of your cargo, if that cargo was wanted this turn. Conversely if (for some reason, given the odds are less favourable that you will making profit doing so) you are selling a commodity of the planets type and buying the planet out in the same turn, then you should sell them all first before the price drops (you can always buy it back later at the cheaper price if you want to continue trading that on to the next planet).

Secondly it implies what planet types you want to buy first and last - first should generally be tech planets, to get cheaper engines (and to a lesser extent nanos), and last should be the box type planets where it will only give the wanted bonus extension, all the rest of the prices stay the same.

*Note this exactly 20% change in the selling/buying prices as you buyout a planet, plus the limited stats I have, is why I assume the normal bonus for planet type and the wanted bonus is also 20% in previous sections

Anyway hope this helps, and obviously if you have spotted the flaws there are bound to be in my logic in the guide, feel free to point them out and I will endeavour to improve it where such comments make sense to me.

Clearly if anyone has the patience to work out min/max/average stats over a larger amount of turns and report them I would be happy to replace/combine them with mine, but I am unlikely to bother doing much more of that myself.

Good luck making yourself rich, temporarily, in a fictional far future, etc.