Section 2:
Ports are easy to use, but difficult to master. I decided to break this into two parts in a way that you can with the first learn how to use ports, and with the second, be on your way to mastering them.
Buying and selling from ports is pretty self-explanatory, and is described more in Section 1. But you don’t want to buy and sell from just any port, or you’ll lose money. The key to winning the profits with ports is to buy from the right ones and sell to the right ones. How do you know where to buy and where to sell? Well, we made that extremely easy. There are blue Buy and Sell icons in the game. The Buy icons indicate where you want to buy something, and the Sell icons indicate where you should sell it. So, if you go to Port 1, and you see a blue Buy icon next to Iron, and then a bunch of numbers and stuff, that’s a good place to buy. Once you buy it, you should go looking for a port where there is a Sell icon next to Iron where you can sell it. If no icon appears, that means the price is at a mediocre level and isn’t really that profitable to buy or to sell.
The fleet options of buying and selling are BuyAll and SellAll. These buttons appear next to the regular Buy and Sell buttons. You will be prompted for an amount just like the regular buy/sell, but the difference is that that amount will be added to every ship in your fleet. You will of course need to pay for it all, and it will cost you 1 turn. Watch your turns, you don’t want to have too big of a fleet and then BuyAll and find yourself turnless.
Now, for some more complex stuff. I don’t suggest you pay attention to this until you consider your understanding of the game to be fairly high. Three things decide Port prices.
1. Base price
2. Variance
3. Supply
Base price is just the base price for a good. Every good has a base price. There is a separate base price for the buy price and the sell price. Buy price is always higher, so if you buy from a port and try to sell back to that same port, you’ll always lose money. Base prices are not posted anywhere, they are just an “underneath” thing. Variance is a random value every port is assigned for every good. The variance is displayed on the right closest to the buy and sell buttons. Variance is the key to port pricing. Variance is fairly simple; it’s just an add-on value to the prices. So if a good’s base prices are 120 and 100, and the port has a variance of 200, then the prices at this point would be 320 and 300. Quite a difference, huh? Variance also decides how much supply a port will gain/lose every night. In general, the supply modules are intended to make prices around the universe overall better, so that places you would normally buy your goods have cheaper prices (more supply), and where you would sell your goods the prices are higher (less supply). You affect supply every time you buy or sell a good. If you buy 200 of a good, 200 supply is taken from that port. If you sell 200 of a good, 200 supply is added to that port. So if you trade at two ports for a long time, the prices will have dropped considerably by the time you are done. Supply is one half of the Supply/Demand modules. Yap does not use demand; it is made out that every port has equal demand. Now, for the maths. These get a bit tricky; so if you lose me here, don’t feel bad. It’s not too important.. If the supply is 2000, the supply does nothing to the port price. As it gets higher, 1 is removed from the price for every 100 supply. So 3000 supply means 3000/100 or 30 is removed from the supply. In the other direction, as the supply is lower than the port price, 1 is removed from the price for every 100 supply, so if the supply is 0, then (0+2000)/100 is removed from the supply. If the supply gets high enough, the price can eventually get to be 0, where it is free to buy the good.
So that’s about it with ports. There are some special exceptions to everything above; I’ll get into those later in this section. Colonist Transports in the newbies game and Pirates in the veterans game cannot visit ports by the way, so don’t try using them as trading ships. Colonist transports are for transport only, and a pirate’s cargo is for stolen goods only.
Hydrogen is one of the ways you can make money in the game. You can gather hydrogen from any ship with cargo holds. A ship that is gathering hydrogen will not actually gather any until the maint is run, but at that time, it’s holds will be filled. So a Cog with 500 empty cargo bays will have 500 hydrogen after the next maint is run. Hydrogen can be sold at ports, but is not like a normal good. You cannot buy it, only sell it, and the price is never affected by supply or variance, it has a flat price that is currently 1500. The main disadvantage to hydrogen gathering is that it cannot be done on planets, you must be in a sector, and so you may be fairly vulnerable to enemy attack. As long as you are in your three days newbie protection this isn’t a problem of course, but it’s something to keep in mind. Remember, you don’t get any hydrogen until the maint runs! And if you move your ship, you will have to reorder it to gather again. Usually you tell your ships to gather hydrogen right before you are ready to log off. Due to abuse of people starting their gathering right before the maint and then putting their ships back on their planet afterwards, you must now leave your ships gathering through 2 hourly maints before they will gather on the daily maint.
(note that prices mentioned here may be outdated, as the price of Yap changes sometimes)
Yap is another way to make money. The game is named after Yap, but that does not mean that you must engage in the Quest for Yap to win the game, in fact, you can easially do without. Yap is a risky but profitable business. To understand Yap, you must understand the way the universe is currently structured…
In the current universe there are three galaxies. The main galaxy is where you start. The center of attention here is sector #1, where you buy ships and equipment, and where you start your conquest. Then there are two smaller wing galaxies. The first is named the Yap Galaxy. This is the one we’ll be working with. The second is the Evil Galaxy, which will be described with the slave trade.
You can always reach the Yap Galaxy through sector 7. When the universe is regenerated and there are new maps and stuff, sector 7 might be moved, but it will always have a warp to the Yap Galaxy. The Yap Galaxy is any sectors from 501 through 600. In the current newbie game the sectors don’t go nearly that high, but as more people play the game eventually the Yap Galaxy will dilate to be 100 sectors.
You may have noticed Yap at the ports around the galaxy. Its buy price is 100000 and its sell price is 4000, right? Yap isn’t effected by variance either, much like hydrogen, so how are you ever going to make a profit? Here’s where the Yap Galaxy comes in.
In the Yap Galaxy, there are normal ports just like the ones in the main galaxy. They also have a buy price of 100000 for Yap but their sell price is 500. Even worse! But ahh.. Behold the House of Yap! It is a location in sector 501. Here you can buy Yap for 1000, and make a wonderful 400% profit when you sell them back in the main galaxy! As a friendly suggestion to you all, you should always sell Yap as near to sector 7 as you can find a port. Going anywhere else is a waste of turns, because the prices won’t change.
Getting to and from the Yap Galaxy is no piece of cake. There is a random chance that on your way from sector 7 to sector 510 or back the opposite way your ship will be struck by an asteroid or fall through a worm hole. Asteroids can damage or destroy your ship completely. Worm holes will just throw your fleet to some location on the map randomly. In this way, Yap is a risky business.
Remember that universe map? It was very useful in the main galaxy wasn’t it? Sad that it doesn’t have the Yap and Evil galaxies on it? Well, it actually does.. Here’s how it works. Whenever you load the universe map, it loads the galaxy which you are currently in. So if you’re in the Yap galaxy and you click on universe map, it’ll load the Yap Galaxy map! Same thing for the evil galaxy.