Lately, I’ve been playing a game called Endless Sky. I’m thoroughly enjoying the game. I don’t have the time right now (15 minutes) to go into the detail details, but, I’ll throw this out if you’re interested in the game – my evolution playing the game.
First Starting Out, with a Mortgage, I had to count the hops + calculate loan payments. Only take jobs that I could do with a positive; if I had any cargo space left, look to which system I was going to, figure out Trade differences, and buy/sell to squeeze a few more cents out. Run away from pirates! If you die, you restart at the last planet you were at. Pay of as much of the mortgage early as possible – I would pay off any extra bringing my prudent reserve down to 50k.
Sell and upgrade to a newer ship whenever you can. There’s no Buy/Sell penalty; you can go back. and you can save the game.
Then as you get slightly larger ships, you have the ability to take multiple jobs to multiple sectors and really explore. You can earn maybe 1 million per transit of the system using a … it looks like an SR71 blackbird, crew of 3? Phoenix? Beware of keeping your ship small enough so you don’t pay too much overhead in crew.
Then, you get to maybe 10million in net worth or so – you can get a really big ship, where the profit from a meager +100 credit/ton times 500tons of cargo gives you a nice $50k, in 4 hops. At this point, missions / jobs don’t compare.
This is where I am now. Next up – I plan to get up to maybe 3 large ships (Behemoths) so I can earn > $500k per transaction. As soon as I get there, I’m going to start buying a buttload of small fighters, and set myself up to have my own swarm. I figure if I have 20 ships with missiles, any opposition will get 20 missiles at a time. And lots of lasers. Swarm. Yep.
Then I’m going pirate hunting. So I can demand Tribute 
Here’s something NOT to do: Do not run with a SR-71 + 6 berserkers. The way that I had it set up, each berserker was about 1.5million. When one of them got blown up and I didn’t realize it and I saved the game.. I lost 1.5 million. I could not make that back up quickly. So, yeah, save the swarming for later where 1-2 trades = 1 ship.
I did a google sheet about ships, crew costs, trade potentials, DPS, etc. Will share on request.
