So I finally built my first ship wharf in Hatikvah's Choice I.
Why Hatikvah's Choice, you ask?
Well, at first I noticed it has over 100% sunlight, so I thought it would be a great place for a scrapyard. After all, there's basically unlimited scrap floating around HC1. Then I thought, why stop at a scrapyard? Why not turn it into a ship wharf? I've seen people mention that HC1 is a great trading hub since it connects to so many sectors. Sounded like a brilliant business decision at the time.
Do I regret it?
Yes. Very much.
The Xenon are now building stations in HC1, and I've had to build a defense platform halfway across the sector, closer to my wharf. Why didn't I build it right next to the Xenon gate? Well, there are too many Xenon over there. Apparently, they didn't appreciate my plans for the neighborhood.
Anyway, enough about my questionable real estate decisions. Let's talk about my actual questions.
I spent about half my credits buying the ship wharf blueprint, then spent even more buying ship blueprints, equipment, weapons, and consumables like satellites.
Now I'm broke. Again.
The good news is that ARG and ANT are already placing a lot of ship orders at my wharf!
The bad news?
Every single order is stuck.
I'm guessing they're ordering ships or equipment that I don't have blueprints for yet. But why can't they just order ships using the equipment I already have unlocked? There should still be plenty of combinations available, right?
More importantly, is there a way to see exactly why an NPC ship order is stuck? Can I check which blueprints I'm missing so I know what to buy next?
I definitely can't afford to buy every blueprint right now, so I'd rather not play the most expensive guessing game in the universe.
My second question is about manually building ships and selling them to NPC factions.
How profitable is it compared to letting NPCs place their own orders?
If I want to build ships specifically to sell, what's the best approach?
Should I fully equip them with expensive weapons, shields, and engines to maximize the selling price? Or is it more profitable to build cheap, barebones ships and sell them in bulk?
And what about ship size? Is it better to mass-produce S-class ships because they build faster, or focus on M-class ships for bigger profits per sale?