Well I skipped 3 and waited on 4(which bombed), and I'm enjoying 3 right now with Xtended mod. Mount and Blade in space, indeed. Good stuff.
finally someone smart.
hint:
Depot is cheap compared to Homebase. So if you have few stations now get depot for that "homebase" feel. Also light carriers are relatively cheap (as they store only like 3-4 fighters so get one ASAP with jumpdrive and you can play then wingcommander with your own wing deploying whenever you want fucking shit up and jumping away after docking on your light carrier.
That will be a while. From X2: I'm used to trading, and then getting a Solar Power Plant/Freighter system going to make money. I understand some parts of that have been streamlined. Right now I'm still on basic trading. I didn't know what the "standard" start was with Xtended, so I started as Terran with the Baldric. As of now I'm sitting on 2x Baldric, Sabre, Buster, and Paranid freighter(captured). Just starting out, basically.
I'll keep your recommendations in mind though, for when I get a few more space bucks.
There is no "standard start" in Xtended. Each start starts differently. From being actual pirate with factions relations on red to being retired colonel with your own battleship.
Imho start you choose is good. Some other useful hints:
- Buy and deploy satelites. Standard ones are ~8k so pretty cheap and when you deploy it it will work like a ship in sector relying you data on prices and such. If you set up network of satelites you will have data on each station in those sectors. Only problem with them is that they are rarely in stock so most of the time you will have to buy advanced ones for 20k pop. So imo if you have already traders try to buy resources for satellite factories and deliver them at the same time and buy each sattelite they produce right after production (because someone may buy them if you wait because there is ton of demand there)
- Don't invest in solar factories at start. They are good source of money but they are super expensive and unlike X2 or vanilla X3 Xtended stations are usually well fed with with energy as universe will expand and there will be soon new XL stations that will produce shitload of energy to distribute.
Also unlike vanilla X3 it does require Crystals and those are not cheap to get and there isn't any way of reliably getting them cheap (so you would have to hunt for good prices) Since solar powerplants really fast eat up crystals you need steady supply of them at good price to get good return from investement in short time. If you will build one without proper chain you will spend hours trying to recover costs. Proper solar energy industry is not cheap and will require you at least 50-60 mln to generate proper money.
It would be much cheapter to you to use one of those XL stations as your own buying overstocked energy and selling it that buying your own solar stations for a while.
- if you want to start production imo silicon and ore are good ones to start they are relatively cheap (you can buy L station for like 1,5 mln) and there is universal demand so always someone is starving for those.
- Good mision to do is usually ship re-trivial. It is good money but you need to look out for timer and where ship is as there is a chance that ship will be so slow it won't be able to reach required station in time (those kind of things are handled by light carriers)
- missles. They are expensive but use them. If you have to take with normal guns M5 or M4 and you are flying something like M3 or heavy M4 it is better to send barrage of missles instead of spending next 30 minutes trying to catch up game. Mosqitoes are cheap (200 per pop i think) Stock always 20-30 of them in case of some shitty pirate m5 bugging you.
- military grade shields. They are expensive as fuck and hard to find or buy but they are well worth the price if you fly fighter or battleship.
- bombers. Unlike vanilla game ships now have strict weapon requirements. This is extended to missles. Bomber wing now can do ton of fucking damage with proper missles. So if you want to take on M6 or bigger ships without spending bilions on cap ships get yourself bomber wing. It will cost a lot but it will be much cheaper than fully equiped cap ship.
- buying super expensive cap ship is nothing. Fully equipping it and what is more important maintaining it (missles, shields) is money black hole. Salvo of thorpedoes can cost you 100k a pop and battles can last a good while.
- As above. Generally good idea about buying ships is that you need to x amount of money to buy it and exact same amout of money to fully equip it.
