quote:Originally posted by Speed Demon

quote:Originally posted by Traitor
rewrite some of that stuff to reflect what I've learned about haggling in the last few years...and to add some of the stuff I didn't tell anyone.

Come on spit it out no keeping secrets around here! [:D]

Heh. At this point, most of it's already in these forums. Just read all of my posts, and all of Elder Prophet's posts. [:D]

Seriously, I should sit down and put some of the lesser known stuff together and stick it on my site. Maybe I will.

I'd just like to note that, contrary to some of the comments here, planet trading can be more profitable than (or at least approximately as profitable as) SST even with 60% ptrade, especially if you're playing solo (and thus would have to spend turns furbing yourself to SST). (Note: This still only applies to blues. If you're red, you're better off buydump-RTRing rather than SSTing if you have access to a mobile planet, as this is way more profitable than planet trading by the below method or SSTing.)

The key is, with 60% ptrade, you *don't* want to use negotiate for your "turn-sink" method of profit-making. Under 60% you even start entering the territory of it being *worth* the turns spent picking up the product.

How so? Well, you're already spending the turn to port to buydown the product you're going to sell, so it's only doubling the turn requirement to go ahead and pick up stuff off the planet to sell while you buy. It isn't the difference between one turn and 100 turns to sell 25000 of something, it's the difference between 101 turns to buydown-nego and 200 turns to sellbuy-pickup.

To clarify, this method is even more like standard pair port trading but using a planet as a ship with unlimited (functional) holds. Instead of always buydumping equip and selling it off with a nego (which if you're not red to rob back the creds you spent on the equip will only net you about 12k a turn--about 24k per sale - 12k per buy; if you *are* red, again I say just buydump-RTR), you sell org as you buydump the equip, and then sell equip one load at a time and simultaneously buydump org. Org is *not* that much worse profit than equip, and after playing in low turn stock games almost exclusively for a couple of years, the overall profit per turn is better than straight negoing off buydumped equip.

Again, this only applies if ptrade% is around 60% or less, though. In the 60-65% range it may still be worthwhile to do it this way, as the profit/turn is nearly the same and it requires less upgraded ports to perform (since you're spending more turns per unit traded), and requiring less ports in a 5% regen game is definitely helpful. Above 70% or so, definitely nego your heart out.

Here's the math to support my claim. I'll assume high MCIC ports (but not necessarily max MCIC as especially in a 5% regen game, you may have to deal with only moderately good ports sometimes), so overall I'm assuming a std sell of equip will net 40k, nego 24k, std sell of org will net 24k, and on the buy side, one load of equip costs 12k, one load of org costs 6k):



Note the profit/turn is only negligably lower. The key is that you spent 400 turns making the same profit per turn as the other method, and that 400 turns traded down org and equip on two ports. The other method traded down just the equip on two ports with 100 turns, so you need a LOT less upgraded ports this way, a major boon in a 5% regen game.

Now with 100% ptrade, you're right by a longshot about sticking with nego:


In summary, per 1% above 59% the ptrade% is, you earn about 400 more credits per turn buydump-negoing than with sellbuy-pickup, but require 4x as many upgraded ports to do so. One option even on a slightly higher ptrade% server, say 70%, is to sellbuy-pickup to make money while upgrading ports and waiting for them to regenerate. You still make about as much as solo SST w/o a blue to furb you, and can retain the safety of being blue yourself.

Note that you have to be careful and do the math on a 60% ptrade server. Some things seem like they would be useful and turn out not to be. For example, it seems at first thought, given the above data, that you'd be better off using a variant of this strategy to make money with your mobile farms. Instead of nego-selling the organics for only 14.5k per 250 because of the poor ptrade, you can sell it one load at a time while buydumping your equip, then nego-sell the equip on the other end (without buying back organics on that side, since you've got plenty of them being produced). But it turns out you're better off without selling one load at a time in this case:



Just felt I should chime in since I kept seeing people say always always always nego, and there ARE cases where it can be worthwhile not doing so on stock servers.

Edit: Attempting to clean up the formatting. :/

quote:Originally posted by Xentropy

I'd just like to note that, contrary to some of the comments here, planet trading can be more profitable than (or at least approximately as profitable as) SST even with 60% ptrade, especially if you're playing solo (and thus would have to spend turns furbing yourself to SST).

Ok, if you are gonna play a solo blue, yes, it looks right. Fewer ports needed is a good thing with 5% regen.

But...unless the edits STRONGLY favor the blue, you almost always want to play red as a solo.

Assuming stockish edits:
Until you get mobiles, the expected profit for a solo red running SST and buying furbs is about 10k per turn with fairly average ports. (Elder Prophet could correct me, but I seem to recall that we each made about that much per turn in the solo game we played against each other not too long ago.)
I think the math is something like 150 turns SST'ing, 20 turns getting a furb, 10-20 turns getting the next port setup. so about 185 turns between busts, and at 155 credits per hold (-65 ports go as high as 179.6), 1,937,500 creds between busts, 1,845,500 after expenses (furb and next port upgrade), 9972 creds per turn.)

Blues, prior to mobiles, running PPT can expect about 2k per turn, under good conditions.

In a 1000 turn game, even if the red only worked 2 days a week, he's still making more money than the blue. 14 mill for the blue vs 20 mill for the red per week. That means that the red has more figs, more grid, more % explored because he can spend 5 days doing something other than make money. Like finding the blue's planets and taking them over.

I'm aware of all that, Traitor. That's why all the caveats about "if you're red, just RTR". The original poster implied he already had mobile planets, though, and sounded like he might be playing blue, so I was just bringing up another way to use them on the buydown-nego side of the convo. Once you have mobile planets, reds still have a cashing advantage, but it's much smaller than in the pre-pwarp game.

Once you have a mobile planet to do it, buydown-nego-RTR definitely beats the hell out of SST, though, if you can get the ports set up for it. Especially solo, since furbing is a non-issue for this setup. You just need plenty of XP, unless it's an MBBS-enabled game (which I avoid, because I don't like the idea of bug exploitation, even if it is a bug that was so popular to exploit it was put back in as a setting on purpose it's not like reds need another advantage over blues anyway).

Note most of my comments come from the background of small servers with few players and either everyone playing solo or corps being no larger than 2 or 3. In those games, blues are just screwed. Without heavy edits, anyway, as you mentioned.

yeah. Re-read my post, and it could have been less pissy sounding. You brought up good points.

rtr with 100% rob settings is non-selfsustaining. That is, as you rtr, you lose experience. Additionally, I think your figures are wrong.

quote:
so overall I'm assuming a std sell of equip will net 40k, nego 24k, std sell of org will net 24k, and on the buy side, one load of equip costs 12k, one load of org costs 6k):


You may start out at 40k and 12k at the average port, but as you trade the port and the % changes from 100, your sell profits decrease and your buying cost increases. You either have to have a lot of good ports and trade them only small percentages or you have to have a small number of ports and trade them into less profitability. Also, you want to look into the payback period on your investment. It costs 5-6 million to max one equip port. How long will you have to trade at a slightly elavated rate vs sst before you pay that back?

Good point on the 100% rob settings. The servers I play on are generally on 50%, where you can keep pretty even in general. And with the proper setup, BD-RTR can net about 21.5k/turn, which playing solo where you have to furb yourself is about twice RTR. 5% regen the 6M will take like a month to pay for itself, granted, though 10% will only take a couple of weeks.

Just goes to show every single server setting can have an effect.

As for trading worse further from 100%, the same effect seems to occur with nego trades. I tested by selling all, failing to trade it, then trading half, and the half sold for more than 50% of the full. I assumed that was because negotiate was being affected by that same factor. So the math should be affected evenly all around.

A planetary negotiation sells basically all the product at whatever the optimum price is for the first hold. So if you trade 30k product at 100%, you get the 100% price for all of it. If you sell 30k equip by ship, you get the 100% price for the first load, the 98% price for the second load, the 96% price for the third, etc.

ok, not to get off the topic at hand, but I have a side question from K3's last post. If planet nego is based off the sale of the first hold, at the percent the port is at, in a MBBS game, is there a certian percent you should wait for at all costs before selling back to the port? Take into consideration if say your corp and another is stealing a port back from each other, but no one seems to want to blow it =) Exp. I have a port at 75%, should I zero it out there or wait till say 80 or 85% and take a chance of losing it?

ok I think I worded that right....

Coke,

The answer is, that is your choice, and what you think you can get. The difference between 50% and 100% is huge when you think of a -65 port. So if you are hoping all over the place (10-12 hops) to get to each port, you might be wasting the turns. Consider that if you had 10 ports as listed. 10 hops apart. You would make, say 2.5M per sell off (5 total buydowns worth). You traveled 100 hops, which is a cost of 40k fuel. So 25M and you had to buy 40k fuel. Or, if you waited until they were 75%, that is fewer selloffs, so less fuel.

Jhereg

quote:Originally posted by Harley Nuss (teamEIS)

A planetary negotiation sells basically all the product at whatever the optimum price is for the first hold. So if you trade 30k product at 100%, you get the 100% price for all of it. If you sell 30k equip by ship, you get the 100% price for the first load, the 98% price for the second load, the 96% price for the third, etc.

The thing is, you can negotiate a lot higher with a ship trade than you can with a planet trade, assuming you keep your experience over 1000. The thing to really look at is where the ship trade becomes less profitable than the planet trade as the % on the port drops. That's the point where you want to stop. Of course, if you are playing a blue, and you want to be fedsafe, I'd just go for the planet negotiate.
I haven't checked Xentropy's math, but it feels/looks about right for what he's talking about. I was sorta hoping Elder Prophet would jump in here and add his $.02

Actually, the thing to look at is where ship trade becomes less profitable than sst