Finding it hard to make money in X2

[TrustyMac]

I'm a beginner who's really early in the game, followed some advice to sell the 25MW shields from the Boron after the escort mission, but then I got greedy and spent it all on a new Teladi ship.

It's fast, but it has almost no cargo space I have almost no idea how to make money now.

[Tranxalive]

I’m assuming you bought a Teladi Harrier. Fortunately, the Harrier is one of the best M5s, and is mildly decent for combat with M5s and M4s.

If you can outfit it with Alpha Particle Accelerator Cannons, which I believe are sold by the Teladi, you can try your luck at Capturing. It’s a great way to earn money early game.

You can also try the BBS missions, their missions vary, but they can be very rewarding. Assassination missions are very profitable, especially later once you start earning millions for them, but that requires a high Combat Rank.

You can try to make do with what you have and trade. In X:T, I sold my Buster, bought a Discoverer, and gave it nothing, and then wasted my money until I had about 100 credits, and traded with its abysmal cargo hold. Eventually you won’t have to worry about slow trading, and you’ll be swimming in money, mostly anyways. You’ll at least be able to buy stuff more often.

I’d recommend you start saving up for an M4, TS, or a station. Actually, you should have Elena Kho’s Mercury. You can use that instead to trade. Taking a reasonable BBS trading mission along with trading is very profitable.

There’s my advice. Good luck, and make good profit.

[EyMann_MachHin]

You have all the time in the world. As far as I know, there is no time limit on the plot missions. You could have taken any time during the Mi Ton mission and use the loaned personell transport to do some trading, with the seed money you got from the first delivery. And as was said, you should also have gotten a Mercury transport from Elena for delivering Mi Ton. Unless you sold it for scrapmetal, the Teladi ship you bought should help raising the funds to repair that ship and start raking in money with a larger cargo hold.
If you got a Teladi Harrier, it is really not the worst ship. It has the largest cargohold of the M5s and is decently fast. Definitely check the stations for shuttle missions of either trade representatives or the gambler. Those pay pretty decent for just flying around. Not sure if it has any impact on the later difficulty you might want to get out of those after 3-4 stops, because they inevitably will end with a time limit you cannot make. I even once had the case where the gambler wanted me to take him to a station that doesn't exist. Not sure how that happened.

You can make it!

[Lin_Kuei_Ominae]

You have all the time in the world. As far as I know, there is no time limit on the plot missions.

IIRC the Mi-Ton missions aborts when Trantor is attacked/destroyed and you haven't finished Mi-Ton by then.
But, as long as you are personally present in Trantor, you can indeed delay Mi-Ton and the Trantor incident infinitely.
Not sure what happens when you park your transport with Mi-Ton in it, in a Trantor station. Though I think the Khaak attack happens anyway after some time and the Mi-Ton mission is canceled/aborted.


Concerning getting money, only capturing ships works fast enough in the beginning. All normal missions have almost no reward, until you reach very high combat or trading ranks.
And capturing ships works super easy with the shockwave guns. You basically can't miss, do lots of damage very quickly and the many hits in a short amount of time raise the chance for a pilot to leave his ship.

This is how you can get money very quick.
1. Make sure you have a few "salvage insurances" (those things for 500cr that you can buy in the Goner temple to save your game in flight)
2. Start the Mi-Ton mission, but don't fly to the Boron trading station to pick him up.
Instead sell the shields, fly to the Teladi and buy an alpha shockwave emitter gun.
Equip that into your rear turret of the transport ship.
3. Find a pirate ship and match your speed flying ahead of the pirate at about 1.5km.
4. switch to the turret and use an insurance so save your game
5. shoot the pirate ship. If the pilot didn't leave his ship when the hull reached 80%, reload the save game and repeat

Pilots start leaving their ship at 87% hull damage. So if it hasn't happened till 80%, you can reload and try again.
It usually takes 5-10 reloads until the pilot ejects.

6. During the pilots speech that he ejects, save the game again with another insurance.
This is so you can now reload that game and make sure the expensive equipment is left behind.
The game has a very annoying random equipment destroying algorithm, when capturing ships. 5-10 frames after the ship is yours, this 'thing' destroys randomly 20-90% of the equipment, even though you captured the ship fully intact.
By saving the game before the the random equipment destroyer hits, you can reload until at least some useful equipment is left.

With a bit training you can quickly earn several millions by capturing pirate ships and selling the Beta Energyplasma cannons or 25MW shields.

My advice, capture a Paranid Demeter. (with the same trick to make sure you get it with >80% hull and all 3 shields still present)
It can mount the Alpha Shockwave Emitter in the front, so you can do easier dogfighting instead of the cumbersome turret shooting.
And it also has a big cargo space to store all the captured equipment.
Use a Transporter (bought from Goner temple) to transfer the equipment after capturing a ship.
Use the remote commands to send the caught and now empty ships into the nearest shipyard to sell them.

Note: Don't capture or destroy the ejected pilots! In the latest game version (1.5 I think) they don't belong to pirates anymore and you get a heavy penalty to your species relationship.

Then keep capturing until you can earn a Teladi M6 with dual Beta Shockwaves front and rear, and go ham capturing even more.

Btw, capturing Khaak and Xenon ships works well too, and if you save fast enough after the ship changed owner, you can also make sure to get the super expensive Khaak weapons. Though you have to be very quick before the random equipment destroyer does its thing, so you can reload.
A fully equipped Khaak Bomber is worth 5million, so a good way to get your own M2 after several successful captures.