SunDog: Knowledge equals profit

Rolling a new Zed.

I restarted the galaxy, now a little wiser to its ways. In this new game, I maxed out Zed's luck - the only stat which can't be boosted with drugs - leaving the rest at their default of 30/100. Right away, I completely refueled, repaired, and refit my space ship. That last task is made rather tedious by the drag & drop interface and other quirks.

Buying replacement parts

...and installing them

Controlling what is basically a mouse cursor with a joystick is already kind of annoying just because of a senseless scheme based on the stick's absolute analog position, where if you want to click on something in the upper-left quadrant of the screen, you've got to push the joystick partway up and to the left and wiggle it around in that vicinity to get it where it needs to be, and if you release the stick so that it returns to center, the cursor snaps back to the center of the active window as well. You get used to it eventually, but it's never convenient, and there are further inconveniences.

• Ship stores are cash-only, so you've got to withdraw from the bank, and whatever you withdraw, you risk losing to muggers.
• The store view shows you a bunch of arcane icons representing each ship part, and it doesn't tell you what each part is or what they cost until you click on them. Doing this prompts you to buy the component, and if you don't, the shopkeeper gets annoyed and stops talking to you (and gets rude if you re-initiate dialog).
• You can only carry four objects. And with all that cash you're carrying, you might want one to be a gun. You probably will need multiple trips to the store and back.
• Why, oh why, does the act of walking require me to fiddle with weird joystick controls to move a cursor and then click when it's pointing in the direction I want to walk? I'm already using a joystick. Just let me walk with the joystick!
  

 

Before leaving, I queried prices at the exchange. As I mentioned in the last post, you won't get a complete picture. However, I found that the deals you can view will rotate each time you enter and leave, and by doing this repeatedly, I got prices on ten different commodities at a variety of grades.

 

Cargo	Low	High	A	B	C	D	E
Stimulants	180	200				18000
Furs	145	160				16000	14500
Art objects	140	176		17600		14000
Hand weapons	101	156	15600	13900		11100	10100
Pharmaceuticals	72	91		9100	8000	7200
Stock embryos	68	86		8600
Biochips	65	91	9100	8100	7200	6500
Fruits	23	36	3600	3200	2800		2300
Seeds	21	32	3200	2900	2500	2300	2100
Grain	16	22		2200	1900		1600

 

Following the advice of commenter MorpheusKitami, I started exploring the planet rather than trying to warp to others. This can be done by leaving the city grounds, and it's best to do this in your pod. I first transferred my food and medicine from the ship stores to the pod - a tedious process that must be done in batches of four items at a time - and then drove off into the wilderness.

I half-expected random encounters, but found none. The world maps are pretty barren. The only threat here is running out of stamina, which you aren't warned about - you just fall asleep in your pod. You've got to eat too, though if you forget, you'll probably pass out well before you starve to death, and this shows your vitals onscreen when it happens, likely reminding you that you need food. It's better to check your stats manually once in awhile and eat before sleeping.

Exploring around, the first town I encountered was Obburg, which seemed to have the same economic properties as Jondd - same general prices, same black market goods, just no starport to buy fuel at. Repeating the exercise at the exchange, I found these prices:

Cargo	Low	High	A	B	C	D	E	F
Stimulants	144	160			16000	14400
Furs	144	144				14400
Clothing	124	124	12400
Hand weapons	92	156	15600	13900	12300	11100	10000	9200
Art objects	92	144	14400		11300	10200	9200
Droids	58	90	9000	8000		6400	5800
Biochips	47	57		6400	5700	5200	4700
Pharmaceuticals	47	73	7300	6500	5700	5200	4700
Meats	33	52	5200				3300	3100
Stock embryos	29	50		4400	3900			2900
Grain	9	16	1600	1400	1200			900

Running art objects from Obburg to Drahew seemed like it might have the biggest profit yields, but just because you can get B-grade art objects at Drahew for $17,600 a load doesn't mean they'll sell that much, so I kept exploring the planet.

The next town I discovered was interesting.

 

Consisting entirely of an exchange-like complex and a nonfunctional building, I figured this must be the lost colony! Still, my initial goal remained to explore the planet, gather commodity prices, and then use them to make money.

I scouted out the remaining cities - Esposito, Darvilton, and Dramming, and found them all to have the same economic factors as Drahew and Obburg. Esposito had a cryogen stashed in its warehouse, which I noted but ignored. After querying commodity prices everywhere, I compiled a list of planetwide prices using grade 'A' values, estimated where exact prices were unavailable.

	Darvilton	Drahew	Dramming	Esposito	Obburg
Stimulants		25600		20300	20200
Furs		22800	20200		20500
Art objects		19800	19900	17500	14400
Hand weapons	13800	15600		21400	15600
Clothing	9300		9300	11300	12400
Droids	9000		10000		9000
Pharmaceuticals		10200	6800	6800	7300
Stock embryos	5400	9700	6100	4100	4950
Biochips		9100		8100	7200
Meats	4700		4700	5300	5200
Seeds	3600	3200	2800	2800
Fruits	3100	3600	2500
Grain		2500	1600		1600

 

From this list, my best bet for making a profit seemed to be running hand weapons from Darvilton to Esposito, so I went there and picked up a load, throwing in some stock embryos for good measure. Then, checking to see what the local sell price was, I was caught by a big surprise - they sold for more than what I paid!

The hand weapons, at grade A, cost $13,800, and the stock embryos, grade B, cost $4,800. Turning around and selling them right back, they netted $18,200 and $6,400, respectively.

New strategy - buy every offer if it's well below the planetary going rate, and then immediately check the sell price and sell it right back if it turns a profit!

My trade logs over the next session:

Good	Grade	Buy	Sell	Profit
Hand weapons	A	13800	18200	4400
Stock embryos	B	4800	6400	1600
Hand weapons	B	15600	16200	600
Stock embryos	E	3500	4600	1100
Clothing	D	6600	8400	1800
Art	B	15600	18300	2700
Hand weapons	D	11100	11500	400
Art	D	14000	14600	600
Clothing	B	10100	12500	2400
Clothing	C	7300	10200	2900
Art	F	11600	13600	2000
Hand weapons	A	15600	20300	4700
Hand weapons	C	12300	14400	2100
Stock embryos	B	5400	3200	-2200
Hand weapons	C	13800	14400	600
Hand weapons	C	12300	14400	2100
Furs	E	11600	12000	400
Hand weapons	A	15600	16200	600
Clothing	D	8800	10000	1200
Furs	A	18000	8250	-9750

 

I did not sell the stock embryos or furs at a loss, but held on to them with the expectation that they'd fetch a profit somewhere else. This pirate-free, zero-fuel exercise made me $8,800 richer without having to go anywhere, and I had two loads of cargo potentially worth much more than that. But I also learned something about SunDog's cargo economy, even if it raised more questions than it answered.

The buy and sell prices took a real journey! There doesn't seem to be any connection at all between a good's buy and sell price, but I took a look at price trends, using the assumption that each good's grade is worth 90% of the grade above it.

• Art's purchase price relative to quality went up, as did its sell price. The value of grade 'F' art was noticeably higher than I expected it to be.
• Clothing's purchase price spiked twice but ended exactly where it started. The sell price zig-zagged.
• Fur's value tanked after I bought the second load of it.
• Hand weapons were the most commonly traded item, and here you can see quite clearly that C-grade weapons' purchase price went up and down while the sell price stayed the same. The overall buy and sell prices crested and dipped seemingly independently of each other, though in all cases I was able to sell for more than I paid.
• Stock embryos' purchase price went up with each purchase, sharply so after the last one, while the sell price free-fell after my third purchase.
• Fruit prices, interestingly, dropped a bit even though I never touched the market.

 

I took one last look at the sell prices of my cargo, and the stock embryos at gone up in price to $6400, the same price that I sold the first load for! But this time I didn't sell, and took my pod on another tour around the planet to check prices.

	Darvilton	Drahew	Dramming	Esposito	Obburg
Stock embryos B	6400	7700	7000	6300	7000
Fur A	8250	22500	31600	31600	31600

 

I sold both of my loads on Obburg for a handsome profit, and then repeated the exercise of buying stuff and selling it back, which apart from the cost of buying two C-grade stimulants which would sell at a loss here, earned me $14,400. Sadly, these stimulants, though much cheaper to buy in Obburg than Drahew, turned out not to sell for a profit anywhere on the planet, and I sold them for a combined $6,200 loss. But I learned that stimulants are a market drain, and soon after learned that so are biochips and pharmaceuticals.

Eventually, I racked up $120,000, my last big haul coming from a delivery of two loads of hand weapons to Dramming, and I decided it was time to get on with the game. I picked up the cryogens from Esposito, plus some more hand weapons (see Ferengi rule of acquisition #292), brought them to Banville, and took a look at the exchange ticker to see what else was needed; a list of materials unavailable on the planet.

• Rare earths
• Exotic materials
• Woods
• Silichips
• Cadcams
• Synthesizers
• Sunsuns

 

I went back to Dramming to sell my hand weapons for about a $10,000 profit, where I amazingly saw two loads of fur priced at a total of $34,000 which I sold on Obburg for $53,100! With nearly $150,000 in the bank, and the sights of Jondd getting pretty dull, other worlds beckoned.

SunDog: Fuel economy

Space is a tough place where wimps eat flaming plasma death. It's happened to me a lot lately, but I've learned a lot about SunDog: Frozen Legacy's economy in the process, even though I have yet to make any real star bucks.

You make money buy purchasing cargo low and taking it somewhere it will sell high, but there are two problems. The first is a problem of incomplete information - you might see a load of cereals offered for $1,700 at the Drahew exchange, but then you need to know where you can sell it at a profit. There are three ways of finding out what goods are worth at a given city, all of them with some disadvantages.

• First, the commodity exchanges have tickers that show what goods are selling for. You won't see all of the goods this way, and it doesn't show the goods' quality, which affects price, so at best you'll get a ballpark range. The ticker moves fast too, so writing things down is tricky.
• Second, you can enter the exchange as a buyer, and deals will be offered to you directly. This shows you the quality of what's being offered, but you'll only see a random subset of the trades shown on the ticker, and only trades that you've got the cash on-hand to afford.
• Third, you can take any good to any exchange and find out directly what you can sell it for there. This is always a fraction of its purchase price - a fraction which varies from good to good (and possibly city to city).
  

 

Visiting every starport to query purchase prices is an expensive proposition. You can expect a single intersystem trip to use up half of a fuel tank, or about a $900-$2000 refuel charge depending on the city. This is somewhat viable, as Zed's uncle left cash here and there at various banks throughout the galaxy, but eventually you've got to start making money.

What you certainly can't afford to do is transport goods to every starport to query prices that way. As useful as it would be to find out the highest and lowest prices of a specific commodity, the second problem you must contend with as a space freighter is also the reason you can't do that; transporting goods gets pirates on you like stink on a wookie, and space combat is borderline unsustainable. Your ship has enough space to carry two container loads, and if I allocate one to auxiliary fuel and the other to cargo, I'm lucky if I drift into the dock at my destination blasted half to scraps and running on fumes. On a blind run there's no guarantee that the cargo will even sell at a profit, let alone enough of one to completely repair, refuel, and be in a better position than when you started. Transporting two loads of cargo, leaving no room for auxiliary fuel, seems completely impossible.

By the numbers, I estimate that a full fuel tank holds 64 of what I'll call liters. Fuel is sold by "units," and a full tank holds 16, but fuel depletes in smaller increments than that. Your main tank automatically refills when empty if you have any auxiliary fuel, and as mentioned, you can only hold one if you have a single load of cargo. So, for all intents and purposes, you can bring 128 liters of fuel on a single freight run. And you'll need about 32 of them just for travel, assuming your ship is in perfect working condition - a costly initial investment.

A typical intersystem trip involves taking off from your departure planet, cruising to a warp node on sublight drives, warping to your destination system, cruising to the destination planet on sublight drives, and landing. If you carry any cargo at all, you're guaranteed at least one pirate encounter on each of the sublight trips, probably two, and this is where the real fuel guzzling happens.

Missing a pirate

Simply being in the vicinity of a pirate slows you down, which means more fuel is consumed for the trip, and any system component damage further reduces your fuel efficiency. Switching to combat mode requires navigating a cumbersome system of menus in realtime, while coasting on precious fuel and being shot at. Shooting back - you can fire lasers or cannons but I don't see what the difference is - costs two liters per shot, and forget about using shields; merely having them up at the minimum strength will drain half a tank in less than a minute, and that's on top of fuel burned by your engines and guns. At maximum shield strength you'll burn ten liters every four seconds!

I don't know if I'm just doing combat wrong, but making a trip with two loads of cargo and a single full tank seems to be completely impossible. Combat is a simple system where you rotate your craft to face your target, using radar to guide you, and then align it in your crosshairs and fire your guns. There is nothing you can do to avoid taking hits except kill it faster or raise shields. At my absolute best performance, I'll lose a good 4-5 liters just from navigating the combat menu to switch to the tactical view, arming my guns, and then rotating to face the pirate, and after that, I'll waste the better part of a tank shooting and mostly missing the pinpoint precision needed to score a hit. If you win but don't have enough fuel to make it the rest of your way to the destination, you can send a distress signal and get a free refuel. If you run out mid-combat, you're dead.

Alternatively to combat, you can try to talk your way out, and this is certainly the better option. You could jettison your cargo, if you don't mind that the game will basically be over if you do this. You can also bluff, threaten, or fast-talk, and in my experience, only bluff ever works. Taking charisma pills slightly increases the success rate, but not enough to be worth the $6000 or so that they cost.

 

I did some scouting around the galaxy, visiting starports without cargo, just to check on the prices of cargo, goods, and services, and in the process got a better understanding of how the economy works in this game.

• There are 18 planets, split over 12 systems. Most planets have multiple cities, but each has exactly one starport, which is the only place the SunDog may land.
  
• Each city has two invisible and independent factors that determine multiple aspects of the economy, which I will call "inflation" and "fuel rate." Neither seems to determine commodity prices, unfortunately.
• Inflation determines the prices at general stores and ship stores, and works as a simple multiplier. Determining it is as simple as attempting to buy a good from such a store and doing math; if a control node costs $1,520 on Drahew and $2,660 on Malesti, this means Malesti has an inflation rate of 175% and you can expect all goods at these stores to charge 75% more than on Drahew. The lowest prices I've seen were 50% of Drahew rates. Inflation does not affect fuel prices.
• Fuel rate is set on a per-system basis - all starports in a system charge the same fuel prices.
• Fuel prices also determine availability of black market goods. The lower the fuel price, the more items will be available. Most systems only offer drug types to boost your four core stats - strength, intelligence, dexterity, and charisma. Systems with the lowest fuel prices also have illegal ship modifications - concentrators, autoslews, clokers [sic], and ground scanners. Systems with the highest fuel prices may only carry brawnboosters and brainboosters.
  

 

I hadn't mentioned the "pod" before, as I hadn't quite grasped how it works until the writing of this post.

• The "pod" is a ground vehicle that detaches from the SunDog. You may drive it around town or walk on foot. Any building may be entered on foot, but only depots and exchanges may be entered driving the pod, and you must to pick up or deliver cargo.
• If you purchase cargo at an exchange without the pod, it will be stored in an attached warehouse, where it can be retrieved for free later.
  
• Some warehouses store cryogens. These are free to pick up in your pod, but as I don't even know where to take them, I am just leaving them for the time being.
• If you visit a depot on foot, you may refuel and repair the SunDog's hull. But you must be in the pod to buy auxiliary tanks.

 

Some more notes on how cities work:

• Banks safeguard your money for you, and funds in the bank can be spent at exchanges or depots without needing to withdraw first. Each of the twelve systems has its own bank system, and you can transfer funds to a remote system, but not from one.
  
• Bars will sell you cheap food and ale, but by requesting "information" you may get access to a black market dealer. The bartender may or may not request a bribe, but will usually connect you for free if you buy an ale first. Prices seem to be somewhat random, but everything I've looked at costs between $2000 and $9999. I have not looked at these prices extensively enough to determine if there is a pattern, or if local economy affects them. Needless to say, these places are cash-only.
  
• General stores sell rapidheals and stinger pistols. They are always in stock, and they never carry anything else as far as I can tell. Prices are determined by inflation; on Drahew a stinger costs $400 and a rapidheal costs $480.
  
• Ship stores sell shunts and replacement parts, which vary in price from $96 to $1,520 on Drahew. Prices on other worlds are also determined by inflation. Not all parts are available in all stores, and their inventories don't seem to be determined by economic factors. Drahew's stores have complete inventories.
  
• Sometimes you encounter people on the street. The few times that I allowed them to approach, they turned out to be muggers, who might be scared off if you have a gun and threaten them. Or they might just be unfazed and gun you down. If there are other types of encounters, I wouldn't know, because I always run away before they can speak.

  

Vultures, vultures, everywhere.