HOW TO MAKE THE BIG BUCKS

The usual way to make money is by trading, or if you are evil 
then through various crimes. But, there are better ways that 
require much less work.


1) The Veggie Business. Have an Oceanics Planet located in a 
sector with a port that buys organics. When the port is at 100%, 
port and use the (N) Negotiate command, and sell all the
organics in one shot. You get the 100% price in the MBBS Version, 
and it takes only a single turn to sell the whole lot. (In the 
DOS version, it's best to port and sell the organics one shipload
at a time). After doing this a few times, you will have enough 
cash to upgrade the port to it's full capacity, namely 32,000 
organics. Then, you can sell 32k at a time, which comes to over 
2.5 million credits. Not bad for 1 turn. You will need quite a 
few colonists to do this. Home-built ports offer better prices 
than natural ones.


2) Planet trading. Take a planet with Twarp capability, and move
it to the nearest port. Using a ship with large holds capacity, 
buy everything that port sells, regardless of price, right down 
to the last unit. It's good to start at a port that sells both
organics and equipment, so that you will have a nice inventory 
on the planet for sale later. Then, move the planet to any other 
port, and buy up everything it has, and (N)egotiate everything 
off the planet that the port buys. Just keep doing this until 
you run out of turns. Trading the ports right down to zero would
normally not be profitable, but remember, a round trip trade 
this way takes only ONE turn, instead of the usual 8 or 10 turns 
for normal ship trading. It's easy to make 4-5 million a day 
like this. Be sure to NEVER sell fuel ore, and buy more whenever
possible, because it does take 400 units of fuel to move a planet
one sector. The best ship to use for this is the Colonial 
Transport with 250 holds. Nothing else can even come close. It 
takes a long time to use up your turns this way, but it will 
quickly bring in enough money to upgrade ports for method 3
below.


3) Super-Port Planet Trading. Have a pair of ports in your 
tunnel, preferably home-built. One buys equipment, the other 
sells it. Both should buy organics if possible. Upgrade the 
equipment to the max 32,000 units. Once the port is at 100%, 
bring a twarping planet to the equipment seller, and buy half 
of it's 32k units of equipment, and (N)egotiate sell it next 
door. Also dump all the organics at the same time there! 
Upgrading ports this way is a large investment because it 
takes about 2.7 million to fully upgrade the equipment at 
each port, and another 1.5 million to fully upgrade the organics,
but the payback is huge! Buying 16k units of equipment costs 
about one million, and 64 turns in a ColTran, you will make 
about 1.2 million clean profit when you sell it. And 128
experience points (XP) in 64 turns, which isn't bad either.
Very little fuel ore is used with this technique. The reason 
that home-built ports are best is becuse they usually have 
much better prices than existing ones. I usually blow up the 
existing ports and build new ones. And, the reason for buying
only half the equipment available, is that the price is better
on the first half, so take it now, and wait a few days for the 
port to regenerate, then come back again.


4) Good & Evil Alliance: While some always play "good", some 
always either play a second character, or have a friend that 
is playing "evil" with them. Actually, for best efficiency 
(aka: greed), you need two evil guys. Once the sector & tunnel 
defenses are very very secure, and we control a large number 
of sectors, say a dozen or more, and have filled the area with 
fully upgraded SBB and SBS pairs of ports, we start our 
co-operative robbing venture.  We do the super-port planet 
trading exactly like this: When all our ports are at 100%, we 
take an Oceanic Planet, bulging with 100k colonists, all 
producing organics, and take it to the first port-pair, and 
sell them both 32k of organics. Then, we buy 16k equipment, 
and sell it next door, then move on and do the same at all the 
other port-pairs. A few days later, the equipment is back up to
100%, though the organics is still only up to 50%, so we make a 
second trip around, buying and selling equipment, but NOT 
selling organics. Once this second trip is done, the evil guys 
do their work. They go to each equipment selling port, and rob 
it blind. Fastest way is to port and rob slightly less than 90% 
of the total credits. Oddly enough, in spite of the average 2 
million credits available to rob, the often manage a successful 
steal, if it's done before they do any other robbing elsewhere.
XP points don't seem to matter and we have managed to rob 12 
million credits in one shot, with only 100 xp, sitting in a pod!
Go to each of the ports in turn, and clean them all out. You'll 
get busted at 2/3rds of them, but make HUGE amounts of credits 
at the successful ones. Once the evil guy has been to each of 
the ports, then it's time for the other evil guy to come in, and
do the same thing at all the ports where the first guy got 
busted, thereby cleaning 1/3rd of them out. We find that one 
cycle for each guy is all their luck will allow, but we do try 
it again one cycle per day, until it's time for the good guy to 
start planet trading again when the ports are all 100% again. 
This procedure requires careful record keeping for each port as
to who is busted there, etc., but the rewards are astonishing,
and it takes only 10 minutes a day!

It's important that you follow the exact order as described 
above for these reasons: Buying the equipment increases the 
amount available to be robbed. Selling organics to that port, 
greatly reduces the amount available for robbing. So, build 
the amounts up by buying equipment, and get it all robbed out 
first, before you start dumping organics there. Better yet, 
if your supply of organics is limited, sell it ONLY at the SBB 
ports, where the evil guys aren't gonna be robbing anyway.
It's fine to sell organics at SBS ports, where the credits 
have already been robbed out.

How do the evil guys travel around our tunnel, and not get 
killed by my cannons, mines, etc?  They live in our tunnel, 
and only one sector, way in the back is safe for them. This 
sector contains only a single Level One planet, where they 
can dump the cash they made, so blue can go pick it up later.
The planet is owned by the good guys, but being only Level
One, the evil guys can land on it. The evil guys have a 
corp-owned ship with good transporter range, located in each 
sector that has a robbing port, and they simply transport 
from ship to ship. No ship ever actually moves anywhere, so 
the cannons never do shoot at them. They can even enter a 
100% Haz this way, unarmed, and never be harmed.