I’ve given up on trading in X3: Reunion as a means of obtaining the much-needed Mercury trade freighter. It’s far too slow and far too tedious to earn money through trading with my starting ship, the Argon Buster. The Mercury will cost me around 200,00 credits and right now, on average, I’m getting about 700 credits profit per trading run with the Buster.
I intend to spend the next few sessions trying pirate-hunting instead. Capturing pirate ships is apparently an excellent way of making money in X3. To do this, you have to take out a pirate ship’s shields and then lightly pepper its hull. There’s a chance that the pilot will eject at that point. When that happens, you simply take over the captured ship’s computer and order it to dock at the nearest shipyard in order to sell it.
That sounds easy enough.
Unfortunately, the more lucrative targets are also tough to take down.
I’m having all sorts of trouble taking on the Pirate Nova. The Nova, a ship class larger than the Buster, has half the Buster’s speed but more than compensates for that by packing an immense wallop. My usual tactic of getting on my opponent’s tail and blazing away doesn’t quite work since the Nova has a turret which can fire rearwards. If that wasn’t bad enough, a Nova is almost always accompanied by a pair of fighter escorts.
Thus far, I’ve not been successful in my attempts at capturing a Nova. I invested almost all of my credits in additional weaponry and shielding at the end of my last game session and I’m hoping this will tip the balance in my favour.
All I need is one Nova and that Mercury will be mine.
I didn’t get it, you plan on keeping or selling a potentially captured Nova? I’d rather keep the Nova (although not the pirate version, i have the Argon Nova Vanguard version, I keep 3 Pirate Nova Raiders patrolling in Cloudbase SW — where I have 2 computer chip plants and a weap component plant — and have seen some pretty intense Kha’ak activity in the sector). As I said I use my Nova and it turns almost everything from M5 to M3’s into space dust pretty fast, and it’s good against M6 cruisers too, although it takes more time. I mean, I dumped money in my Nova like a power-hungry bastard I am, and the results are satisfying. And yeh, I be gettin’ them pirate ships in a jiffy!
Yes, erm.*cough*
…Although I find it hard to “lightly pepper” stuff right now, my weaponry is closer to “blast a 7-foot smoldering hole”, but hey, quality or quantity, I don’t care as long as they’re pirate ships. in prices 3 damaged ships = one relatively ok ship, and I’ve been getting a steady income off pirate ships recently.