How Do I Trade Equipment?

FutureTrader rocks! It would've been better if its designer could've kept the original recycle values and balanced everything else around that, though, since the value of my "Manufacturing Units" took a nose-dive when I installed the mod! I had what I thought was a huge stockpile of MU's, but that darn inflation ...

It gave me an excuse to engage in a feeding frenzy of looting, though. I've found an excellent L-point for the purpose: Dagda Delta 2 (I think it was DD2 -- it's an L-point internal to Dagda, with no out-system jumps.)

While staking out DD2 I hauled in around 8 of the hard-to-find "Avionics" (Flight Systems, specifically), as well as a wide assortment of more common loot.

When Cal gave his "our piracy days are over" speech heralding Act 3 I was a little nervous, but now that Maas freighters are conveniently tagged in red by the HUD every flight is a continuous orgy of looting.

At DD2 the Maas ships were coming in constantly, with just enough time between arrivals to bring in Jafs. Cargo pods were scattered everywhere, ships were banging them out of the way as they exited the L-point, new ships would arrive and collide with the ships that had just collided with the pods, fighters and corvettes are exchanging fire in between Independents in their modest freighters and tugs just trying to make it to the blue side of the L, and there's Jafs threading his way through the carnage picking out the best cargo to steal. It was magic.

Interestingly if you tear up an L-point long enough ships stop coming through. I guess word gets around ...

You didn't think futuretrader was a little too lenient? I liked the concept, since there is an awful lot of cargo in I-war that just becomes recycle fodder, but it just seemed things were too cheap. I'm sure gold is valuable and all, but I'd expect somewhere like that badlands PBCs are worth much more then their weight in gold - even when there aren't crazy marauders running around.

But, I'm still pinning a lot of hopes on Epic - from the sound of the plan, it will address the useless cargo problem without making it a monty haul situation.

FutureTrader is a great system; it makes all piracy valuable to at least some degree and makes the "Trade" screen a great place to shop for bargains rather than a source of constant frustration. However, I do agree with you that FutureTrader's prices are too low, in some cases ridiculously so.

High-tech ship upgrades like advanced thrusters are available for the equivalent value of maybe 20 pods of common materials like foodstuffs. Blueprints are practically given away. FutureTrader's other flaw is its assumption that I-War 2's customs values are accurate.

I-War 2 intrinsically undervalues things like military hardware, which should be outrageously expensive compared to any goods on the civilian market. Nuclear reactors should cost way more than car stereos.

The prices of finished goods relative to raw materials seems a little low, as well.

The recycle values of finished goods also seems a bit high -- you shouldn't get as much scrap metal from recycling a pod of hovertanks as you would from a pod filled with scrap metal. This would also give FutureTrader's "sell" option a reason to exist: finished goods would logically be worth more intact on the secondhand market than scattered across the periodic table by the recycler.

You could also make good on all Jafs' big talk by using the base's manufacturing plant to turn raw materials into finished products and sell them -- although as Hardwar showed this can be ridiculously abused if diminished marginal utility isn't modeled. (In other words nobody should want to buy stuff they already have too much of.)

That said, FutureTrader still rocks. I'm saving up for a Storm Petrel. I miss the old bird.

Originally posted by UglyAngel

I have 3 "Avionics" I wish to trade for a grade-4 CPU. The 3 trade goods in question are an LDS 1 and 2 LDS 2's.

Unfortunately the Trade Manager does not seem to recognize that I have the required trade goods, and I'm guessing that's because they're in "Equipment" instead of "Cargo".

How do I move the items over to "Cargo" so that I can trade them for a better CPU?

Alternatively, why does the Encylopedia list LDS drives under "Commodities / Electronics / Avionics" when they are in fact not eligible trade goods? Is it not reasonable for the player to assume that if a product is listed as a "Commodity" that it can therefore be traded?

Yeah, the trading system kinda sucks. I think we all have tons of equipment we don´t need anymore, and, considerind the situation in the Badlands, we could earn a little fortune if we could sell it.

Anyways, there is one place you can get as much avionics (and other hi-tech crap) as wou want: Khulna Hi-tech Manufacturing Station, Khulna, Austri, Firefrost II.

Khulna, thanks for the tip.

My favorite L-point is Dagda Beta 1, by the way ... I looked it up last night.

Lots of valuable cargo scoots through there on lightly-escorted SnRV's.

Of course it's more fun to turn some high-traffic area like Baal into a scene of mass carnage (Maas carnage?), but 1 pod of neutronium is worth 1,000 pods of frozen sewage.

In single player i can understand restricting certain trades - the idea that a wanted pirate might have limited access to legitimate trade seems fair enough.

But once you gain allies with legitimate conections that goes out the window.


What i really would have liked to have seen was a way to reverse engineer some, or all of these items for blueprints.

both trade items and ship upgrades should be availible for manufacture.

make it so that you have a chance formulae with an impoving chance of success as more items are sacrificed to the engineering department.

higher tech items should be harder to reverse engineer obviously - but once you can manufacture them they should be valueble in trade.

just some ideas