7. Trading

The essence of trading is to buy a good at one port and sell it at another making both money and Exp for your effort. Often there is a trade off to be made if you wish to maximize both benefits (Cash and Experience). If you're very lucky and or work hard you can have your cake and eat it too.

There are three tiers of goods in SMR;

Tier #1
Food, Wood, Ore, Precious Metals and Slaves

Tier #2
Textiles, Machinery, Circuitry and Weapons

Tier #3
Computers, Luxuries and Narcotics

As you trade at a port you reduce the supply of the port by the number of holds on your ship. Tier one goods start at 6000, Tier two at 5000 and Tier three at 4000. If you purchase a tier one good and the supply of a tier two good is less than max you will add 25% of you holds traded to the supple of any and all tier two goods that are not at their max. The same thing occurs when trading tier two goods, you increase the supply of tier three goods.

You can not trade "evil" goods unless your alignment is less than -100 Evil goods are Slaves, Weapons and Narcotics.

In order to become evil you must locate and visit Underground HQ and have an alignment of less than +99. You can then join the underground which sets your alignment at -150.

The value of a given good is based on three things;

Distance to the closest port that SELLS the item (the further away the better).
The base value of the item (the list above is ordered from least to most valuable).
The supply/demand level of the good at the time you make the trade (the lower the supply the more you get)

So if you buy some Narcotics and sell them in a port that is 10 sectors away AND there is NO other port selling Narcotics with in 10 sectors of the port you are selling at, you get 10 x value per ton plus bonuses for supply/demand level. You will get the max cash for the good if you sell the last 100 tons that port needs. Give the preceding set of facts if your driving a PSF (600 holds) you would receive in excess of 1.75 million credits for that single trade.

Supply/demand level of ports resets much like your per hour turn gain. In a speed factor one game a drained port will regenerate its supply/demand for goods in about 20 hours.

Now lets discuss your racial relations. You will notice that you can bargain with ports by offering them a little less than what they want when you buy and a little more when you are selling. There is a perfect amount based on a random factor that will give you the maximum cash and experience. The closer you get to 1000 total relations to the race who owns the port you're trading at the smaller that difference between the port offer and the perfect number becomes and at 1000 you automatically get the best possible buy sell number.

Two thing go into determining racial relations your personal number and the global relations that a race has with yours. The global relations between you and your race will always be 500 your personal will start at 0 and can go from -500 to +500. Every time you make a successful trade your personal relations increase. If you offer less than they will take or ask more then they will give your relations suffer. The amount that relations move per trade is based on the number of cargo holds on your ship the more holds you have the more you can move personal relations. Your relations with a race will also suffer if you kill a trader of that race or attack a port owned by that race.

Global relations with races other than your own will fluctuate based on the political maneuvering between the councils of those races. You can get on your races council by being one of the top 20 traders rated by experience. If combined relations are less than +300 that race will not allow you to trade with them. At the start of the game global relations between all races are set to -500 so the only place you can trade initially is at ports your race owns.

The best way to maximize experience while trading is to find two ports that have a set of goods that you can buy and sell between them. IE port A sells textiles and buys computers, port B buys computers and sells textiles. The greater the distance between these two ports the more exp you can gain. It is important to understand that the multiplier for distance is based solely on the distance to the closest port trading the same good. In the above example if A and B are seven sector apart you will not get a 7x bonus if port C sells computers two sectors from port A in that case you would only get 2x bonus for that trade.

The best trade ships are listed here in order based on those ships trading the same route. Notice that having more holds does not necessarily make a ship the best, the ships speed is also an important consideration. This list only takes into account maximizing exp defense, offense and cash are not considered.

4636 - Trade Master
4536 - Planetary Super Freighter
4276 - Inter-Stellar Trader
3830 - Planetary Freighter
3715 - Thief

All of the above are available to all traders except two ships, the Trade Master, which you must be Alskant to purchase, and the Thief, in which you must be evil to purchase. The numbers next to the ships are the amount of exp that ship would make per day based on trading a perfect 3x route located 3 sectors from where you park your ship.

These figures (and therefore the rankings) of the ships change a bit when you take into account some more variations on route length and distance from where you park, and distance to the bank.

Basically, the more non trading moves you need to make each day, the better the faster ships become. Non trading moves include moving to and from fed space, or between routes, or to visit the bank. For example, if you make 20 non trading moves each day, and trade on a perfect 3* route, the PSF drops down the rankings to 4th best, behind the TM, the IST and the Thief.

On a strictly trading basis, if you are making more than 16 non trading moves a day the IST is ahead of the PSF for experience earned. Of course the PSF is much more defendable, but the IST can trade anywhere in the universe quite easily, so is much less predictable.

One final note: In order to gain Federal protection at the end of your trading session, you CANNOT have any illegal goods on board. So make sure that you have all of them sold off before heading to Fed, and make sure that you have sold off your weapons to get your attack rating down. (See Alignment for more detail on attack ratings and Federal Protection.)

The next four subsections will give a few more detailed tidbits of information to help you on your quest to be a top trader.

7. Trading

Subsections: