Trade posts? Refineries?

Trade ports, the more the merrier! There is a strategy involved in placing trade ports, you could go one per planet route, but there are some planets where you don't need to place trade ports and still have the longest trade route possible! Also there are some planets where putting a trade port will cut the length of your route :/

As for refineries, overall you can get by without them at all! If you do choose to put them, placing 1 at a planet will give you a nice coverage without making you go crazy trying to get maximum coverage. The way they work is they visit each extractor within 1 jump. And each extractor can only be visited by 3 refineries max (4 for the neutral sites). So building more than 3 refineries in the range of the extractor is a waste. And since they have a range of 1 jump, to get total coverage would be kinda hard to figure out.

Trade port income is based on your longest line of connected planets with tradeports. The longer you chain of tradeports is, the greater your income will be from each individual tradeport.

x - planet with a trade port
o - planet with nothing

o-x-x-x-x-o

This means your longest chain is 4, so each tradeport will generate that much cashflow according to that multiplyer. If you place 2 on one planet, it give the same amount of cash flow that your other tradeport on that planet is generating, but it will not increase your chain length.

Refineries on the other hand effect the planet they are on and all the planets adjacent to them. Each planet can only be affected by 3 refineries at a time. This means if you build 2 refineries on one planet, and 2 refineries on a planet directly adjacent to it, even though you have 4 refineries, you will only be getting the benefit of 3 on those planets. Best to place a refinery or 2 at a planet with the largest amount of crossroads

2 - planet with 2 refineries
1 - planet with 1 refineries
0 - planet with nothing

0-1-2-0

here, your 2 center planets will be receiving the benefit of full 3.


You get the the idea anyway.

Crash, great, thanks for that info.

Where would I find this type of information?

I found it on another forum, but it seems to be accurrate. However, I have found what might be a bug in the game (or intended) in that my trade port chains tend to cap out at 4, I don't know if this is supposed to happen or not. (Trade ports will report their longest chain when you scroll over that planet).

I believe refineries effecting planets also report back info in this way. If not, it will be under your economic tab ingame.

ok, so you make more...but how much more? equations plz?

.1 cred / second more, per link in the chain. Length = 5, each trade port will make 1.5.

Refineries, I don't know. I think it's a percent increase in each mine's output, but not sure.

I've had trade chains go as long as 7 but at that point it stopped expanding/adjusting itself. I find it slightly annoying also that I sometimes have to wait to build a trade port on one planet that's at a 'dead end' because I want to force the trade chain in another direction - the AI has been poor at re-adjusting trade lines in my experience..

I made suggestions before to let us specificy our 'preferred' or 'official' trade line within the game mechanics (ie we make our own trade chain based on connected trade ports, maybe literally drawing the line through them like connecting the dots).

The other suggestion was a big of a revamp to the system to make it more truly like an economic trade empire: every trade station should get a slight trade bonus from every adjacent trade station, and this could multiply/grow exponentially along the chain or spider web as it would look more like. That would of course be pretty powerful so the amount of 'bonus' trade income would have to be tweaked, but it was just another idea to stew over.