Trade and Refineries

The amount of trade income each trade port generates is based upon the longest linear trade route through your empire. If you have ports spread out between your homeworld and 4 adjacent planets, then your longest chain will only be 2-3 and you'll have smaller revenue per port. If you have a long chain (6, 7, 8 planets) then each port can start putting out 2+ creds-per-second. (Not sure what the exact math on it is). As far as I know, allegience has not effect on trade income, but rather planetary income.

The nice thing about refineries is that they act not only for the planet around which they are installed, but all adjacent planets. So if you have a remote little asteroid attached to 4 other planets, install 2-3 refineries there, and all of the adjacent planets get the same bonus.

To be honest, though, they rarely see use except in the longest of games, imho.

Increasing the size of cargo holds simply increases the rate you earn credits (and for TEC, resources) by x% from trade ships, depending on what level research you have. Your credit income rate is constant and is not increased every time a trade ship reaches a trade port. However, enemies which destroy your trade ships earn credits for blowing it up (though you want to be a little careful approaching Advent Trade Drones - with appropriate research, not only will they give you the credits they held, but will slap bounty on your head for killing them).

Refineries are far less effective than trade ports at producing wealth, and are only useful if (or rather, when) your credit income is so high that you're forced to buy a lot of your resources directly from the black market. If you're not leaning on the black market, you'll typically benefit from extra trade ports than putting up a refinery.

One thing with trade ports is to plan out your longest trade route.  Spam trade ports like mad on worlds along your trade route (and worlds which would not break your chain), and then put your refineries, factories, and research stations in worlds which would interfere with your chain.  This will earn you lots of money in no time flat.

Also, I ran through the numbers for the Advent "refinery".  It seems that unless you've got its level 7 upgrade maxed out, it's actually more cost effective to keep it as a trade port and just use the proceeds to buy from the black market.  Even once you have that upgrade, you need to put it in a high loyalty world with 4 extractors to get reasonable returns.  Seems that it's just not worth the excessive upgrade costs for something only marginally better than running a trade port and buying with the proceeds.  As well, this analysis presumes a short trade chain and 100% loyalty, so if you've got a well established trade network or you're thinking about doing this on a low-loyalty world, it just doesn't work period.

So from what you're saying, "only" put trade ports on the planets that are included in the longest route?  So don't put them anywhere else?  Really?  I always thought more the merrier.

If we go by putting them only on the longest route example, then let's imagine the letter F looking like a trade route.  Would that second line in F mess up the longest route?

Enough said.

Also, allegiance does not affect trade ports.

i'm not sure everything said in here is accurate. don't take my word a gospel though, go test it out.

the impression i have for how ports work is like this, based on my informal observations:

-the income that each port generates is a constant value regardless of where you built it. being on the white highlighted route doesn't actually mean that those ports make extra income. 

-the longest route determines the rate each port in your empire generates. it starts off low (something like 1.0 cred/sec for length 2) and scales up to much higher (i've seen rates of 1.9 cred/sec per port for length 6), based on the length of the longest route (which is what the white highlighted path represents). 

-alliegance has no effect on ports. 

-i still have no idea what happens if a cargo ship gets shot down. doesn't appear to impact the port income though. 

regarding Refineries

the issue with refineries is not their effectiveness but their initial cost. they can be prohibitively expensive to develop. they are also extremely location sensitive. trade ports can be built anywhere, but refineries are only good investments in specific locations. generally you'll need a refinery to be in range of at least 8 resource asteroids before its worth building. this is not a situation that comes up alot, but when it does you shouldn't hesitate to build to spam the full compliment of 3 refineries at the good location.

you can easily boost crystal income by 2 crystal/sec or more with well placed refineries. considering that if you were to buy crystal from the black market you'd spend about 5 creds per crystal you can view that level refinery income boost as being nearly equivalent to 10 creds/sec, which is about as much income as you'd get from 6-8 trade ports. the conclusion is that when you've got a good location for them a refinery is about as good as 2 trade ports. 

however...once you're on surpluses the black market sale value for the extra resources is only half as good as the "didn't have to buy from black market" value you get from just spending your extra resources directly as opposed to cashing them in. moral of the story is this: if you've got a good spot go ahead and build the refineries and dump the resource income directly into research techs. otherwise, just build trade ports and buy resources on the black market as necessary. 

Advent is a different story entirely. they don't do refineries, and resource focus is super bad. just ignore it. 

What about what I said wasn't accurate?

...and you obviously don't have it down.  Each trade ship you lose, you lose X amount of money and the killer of the ship gains X amount of money.  Also, until the trade port builds a new ship, you lose Y amount of income/second.  However, none of this information is shown when you put your cursor over your creds bank.

From testing out the TEC a little while ago, each trade port you build that further extends the line, definitely increases all tradeport incomes, usually by 0.1/s to 0.2/s depending on how many trade ports one has at a planet / roid.  Still need to test it out a bit more to be sure.  But thus far it's looking good.  Let me know if I'm wrong, or give me a scenario to test.

It's 0.1/s per jump. 

U guys have it wrong, it's a multiple not a flat number.  Exact number is hard to pinpoint because the game rounds numbers.  But let's say the starting number is 1.1, 2 will be 1.1 x 1.1, 3 will be 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1, and so on.  1.1 is of course my estimate for fast income game, actual nubmer I'm not sure aobut, it was never disclosed.  Only thing I was told is that it functions as a multiple.

Well then that explains what happened when i built my 5th jump and the trade income from my top planets went from 4.8 to 5.4    The multiple makes sense then.   Good to know! 

Now, what happens when the longest route goes through an asteroid field?  It becomes longer, but does that also increase the income rate?  I'm thinking yes.