glad to see not everyone is against the non mbbs game.

K3, you're saying it's still cheaper to trade down product and sell it to ports then to sdt, and possibly lose the cash on the port? Granted you can still RTR to get your cash back, but how often can you get all your cash back from two equip ports? I've never really played that style game so I'm not familiar with it (that's why i'd like to play it)

Correct my Math, buy down is gonna run you 130 turns in a colt, you spend approx 3.3 million (however I guess if you are in non MBBS, you'd look for ports that sell at a much lower rate then if you were in MBBS, so less then 3.3 mil?), so say 2.8 mil, sell it back for 5 mil. That's a a 2.2 mil profit in 130 turns., then you have to have a red run rtr at 4 turns per cycle to Rob back the 2.8 mil from two different ports. How far off am I from that? (remember I ask in learning, no bashing <G>)

Coke, Graz, take a look at D/RTR on the glossary section of my site. With 30% rob, that's 10 * your exp in creds per rob. MMMMMMmmmmmmm.

With these settings for example, with a 65 xxS port (you want 65's for this, not low MCIC like usual for MR's), if the port is selling 2000, then you want to upgrade the port to 3000 units (upgrade it 100, at a cost of 90k creds.) Then you buydown best price about 3000 units. That puts ROUGHLY 120k on the port. (How much you drain the port is totally dependant on your exp. Don't buydown more than you can swipe in one shot or maybe 2 shots at most) If you have 12k exp (from your SDT, this is quite reasonable), then you can swipe it all in 1 turn. Sell the EQ at a -65 for roughly 480,000 creds. Profit: 390,000 for 17 turns (12 turns of buydown, 1 turn sell, 3 turns to move ships using the beamer) is 22,000 per turn roughly. Better than SDT.

However, once the ports regenerate, then you are talking 480,000 creds for 17 turns, or 28,923 creds per turn.

But, since you are only doing one Rob per port, you are only going to bust every 50 attempts. That is enough to keep your experience more than high enough to not only sustain this, but actually buydown MORE and make it even more efficient.

If you start with 12k exp, this makes roughly 104 exp per 17 turn cycle (30 for the upgrade, 24 ppt, 50 for the rob), or about 3-5k exp between busts (depending on how many upgrades). Of course, as your exp goes up, you can haggle more eq, and steal more in one shot, so you get more eq between selloffs with fewer rob attempts. Fewer rob attempts means less busting. This increases your exp even more. Roberts and I were often able to hit the Holy Grail of non-MBBS robbing: 566k exp. Enough to rob 1.7 mill creds off a port in stock settings with a single rob. (It takes roughly 1.7 mill to buydown 33k of eq at a good port. That is the functional equivalent of a Megga-Rob!) Getting ore throws the numbers off somewhat, but it's still better than pure SDT because as your exp climbs, you use less and less ore. With the proposed settings, you would only need 170k exp to pull a pseudo MR. [:D]

Of course, you need a TON of ports to sustain this. But that number actually goes down as your exp increases. It's all a balancing act with your exp. Experimentation will show you the best way to go.

Gawd...I'm SUCH a Red. heh.

edited to fix numbers. heh, forgot you had to move the 2nd ship.

Here's the problem with rtr at stock settings... you can't maintain your experience. Traitor says he and roberts used to do it, but I have never seen it. You don't make enough experience from your robs to equal out the experience lost when you bust. But all that aside, let's look at the cashing from straight planet trades, no robs figured in. It takes about 3.5 million credits to buy down a maxed seller in non-mbbs (65535 equip). If you sell that back at 165 credits/unit, you get about 10.8 million credits for it. That is a 7.3 million profit. You spend 262 turns buying the equip, so you end up with 27,800 credits/turn. You can compare that to around 20-21k credits/turn doing sdt, not counting the costs of furbing, etc. If we take this one step further, we have to make at least 27,800 credits/rob for rtr to be profitable. Now, unless you want to have a hell of a lot of ports, you're going to have to actually rtr, not just slowly upgrade them. rtr is a 2 turn cycle, so when you figure it up, you'll need around 18,500 exp to make rtr profitable. If you do it traitor's way, you have to maintain at least 9500 exp to make robbing worth your while. Remember, it's all about turns used for money gained. If it isn't turn efficient to get your money off the port, don't do it.

Heh, I just thought it would add a few twist in to the game and give peeps a few different avenues to cash I remember when I played an edit that made RTR worth trying and after a few days of buying down off the same port the 20 mil on the port started looking rather nice to get back the only problem we had was some days it was almost imposable to maintain enough experience to keep the RTR going.

The edit also had a nice equipment producing planet in it making buy downs almost not even worth the trouble once you got a few of them full of colos and mobile.

I guess this edit was a lot like KI just not in MBBS mode.

Yes Graz, I am nutz. It’s the only way I can deal with all you TW peeps.

Seriously though I don’t really care what the edits turn out to be I’ll even play a MBBS mega rob your grandma and bot your buddy to do everything game if that’s what Slim wants to run for this draft game a change would be nice but is not a deal breaker with me wanting to play as long as the universe is at a reasonable size so that the game does not stalemate.

Hey I know what about Blue Heaven?

10k sectors
(i'd still prefer not a draft, but it appears for some reason people like them...)
still need 3 ceo's to step up

Hmmm...
I wish I had more time.

Which reminds me... Turn Bank on or off?

One of the nasty little side effects of the turn bank is that peeps are saving a few days of turns, acumulating them just before mobiles, then blowing several days worth on MR's once they get mobiles. If you are going to have a turn bank, I suggest no more than an extra day or two.