Credits are the currency of Pardus. They are almost as important to the game as fuel, and are necessary to play. Here you will find ways to get credits, and some assorted notes.
Stocking[edit]
Stocking is a good way to make money at the beginning, and a good way to learn the production chain. It is buying commodities from a building that produces them, and selling them to a building that needs them to work. A building, every 6 hours (a tick), if it has all of the things in its upkeep stock, will take them and turn them into another item and put them in the production stock. Most buildings in general need food, water, and energy (FWE) as well as something else maybe. The production chain is how all the buildings are linked together, this building needs this which is produced by this which need this and this from this... An example would be this. We have a starbase (SB) which like all other starbases consumes
- Food
- Water
and produces
- Energy
- Embryos
Surrounding it are some space farms (SF). They consume
- Energy
- Embryos
and produce
- Food
- Water
- Bio-waste
The food and water goes to the starbase but the bio goes somewhere else, the recyclotron which consumes
- Energy
- Biowaste
- Chemicals
The chemicals come from the chemical lab, which uses
- Food
- Water
- Energy
With all of those buildings, we have a well working group of buildings. In the end, they produce more than they all consume, which can be sold to a planet or nonplayer starbase for extra. To stock these, your trip should go like this.
- Go to the starbase and get some embryos and energy
- Go to the space farms, sell them all the embryos and energy that they need, buy the food and water
- Sell FWE to the chemical lab, buy chemicals
- Go to the recyclotron, sell the chemicals and energy, buy food and water.
- Sell food and water to the SB as well as extras.
Once this is done, you should have a fair profit and all the buildings will be stocked. People will appreciate you doing this for them, as people consider it a hassle to do.
FW/E[edit]
FW/E (Food, Water, Energy) is a more popular method of stocking. It's buying food and water from a class M planet (produces food and water) then selling it to a starbase. Starbases need food and water, and produce energy. Class M planets need energy and produce food and water. They both work together into a two way stocking route. First, you find a route. Try to get one with a very short trip, to minimize the AP you use. First, you buy food and water, or energy, then go to the other part. Sell the FW or E, then buy the other part of it and go back. If you keep doing this, you will get a nice profit, usually higher than you would get stocking.
It is most profitable to stock NPC entities like starbases and planets using FW/E because they offer much higher profit margins. In addition, the prices at these entities follow a "supply and demand" type formula. If the amount of upkeep (food and water for starbases, energy for planets) is lower than what will be consumed in the next "tick" (the next time at which the entity will use an amount of each commodity equal to the "Bal" column of the trade screen), then you will get more money by selling the upkeep to the entity than you would if you were to sell the upkeep when the entity already has enough upkeep to fulfill the Bal column.
Buildings[edit]
Buildings, as explained before, take upkeep stock and turn it into commodities to sell. You can have your own building as well, instead of stocking them. Before doing this, you should learn what's needed. Ask some of the people who own buildings in the sector if anything is needed. Often, the area will be claimed by an alliance and will have someone in charge of the area. Talk and ask around for info on it, and once you've gotten an idea of what's needed, find a place for it that you think would be suitable. For example, you'd want to group
- Chemical labs
- Plastics facilities
- Electronics facilities
- Robot factories
- Droid assembly complexes (DAC)
together, because they are all part of the same production chain and would save AP for stockers (some buildings need to be built on different tiles such as energy rather than open space). Click on the create building button and find your building. After that, retrieve the commodities you need for building and go back to the spot. Click on the create building button again and build it. Now, look around at buildings of the same type and see what their prices are. It's usually best to have prices for buying and selling that are similar or the same as other buildings. Sometimes when an alliance controls a sector, they will have price list to follow. Do the math and make sure that you are getting a profit. Then, set your price list and turn your attention to the mininums and maxes. The mininum is the very mininum number of this commodity that you can have. If the number goes below that, people can't buy more from the building until it goes over that point. The max is the maxinum number of that commodity that your building will buy. If it goes above it, people can't sell more to your building. Generally, the best thing to do with this is to put the mininum on your upkeep stock very high (1000) and no mininum on your production. Put a very low max on your production stock (0) and a high max on your upkeep, for 6-12 ticks. If you want more capacity or production, you need to get resources and upgrade it.
Bounty-hunting[edit]
Bounty hunting is killing people or destroying buildings with bounties on them. If someone has a bounty on them, and you kill that person, you will get all of the bounties on that person. People consider getting killed very annoying because you pernamently lose 1.5% of your base skills (1.2% premium) and 5% of your exp. (4% premium). Typically, a person will have maybe a few thousand of faction bounties, which isn't really worth getting killed over (although many bounty hunters will kill you anyways), but if they annoy someone, people will place a bounty on him/her. A player bounty has a 25000 mininum, which is the normal.
Missions[edit]
Later into the game, missions can get you a lot of money by doing transport spy or explosives, as well as VIP's. But You can still make a fair deal of money when doing missions before then by knowing how. The first thing to do, is to plot a course to pick up as many missions as possible. It should end at a sector where there are lots of NPC that you plan to kill. Five to six sectors with a lot of SB is a good bet. It is recommended that you are in a faction, and that you do them in faction space. This will let you get more missions and rank at the same time. Go through the course picking up all the kill missions for a few different NPC and get transport missions for SB and planets along your route. Once you have all of the missions, and are at the point where you can complete the kill missions, complete them. Each kill will count toward all missions that it applies to. If you have 20 kill 3 young space dragons (YSD) you only need to kill 3 to complete them all. Depending on how many missions you had, and what missions, you can get a lot of money!