One point you missed was that big ships can make bigger profits on the deals that require a lot of goods. When you do mulitple loads in small ships each ship that goes there drops the profit margin a little bit. With large ships they can sell there whole load for the original price
if you assign your Trader to a Station, and you have a good Manager there, you don't need good pilots any more, because the skill of the Station Manager takes over. I use the large Traders only if I manage them myself, for example to supply my shipyard with big ammounts of materials. You are right, as autotraders they don't use their capacity, have seen them flying 4 sectors for 50 hullparts.
I agree about station traders if you have a wide coverage of wares. Autotrading pilots can still make the economy go by trading wares not built by your stations.
I've been doing that in HOP territory, using an AutoTrader to make sure that the Hull Parts cycle keeps going. The Wharf/Shipyard otherwise have issues keeping enough in stock.
I personally prefer to use large transports if I can get away with it due to survivability and escort viability: Large ships can carry fighters for escort duty, which means that unless you're absolutely insane with how many ships you have escorting your transports you don't need to worry about stragglers. From my experience the freighter seems to dock its escort before entering a gate or anything else that transitions sectors and deploys them when they're needed. Combine that with more weapons, more shields, the ability to carry drones for repairs, and large transports are (generally) better for travel through dangerous areas (such as sectors bordering Xenon space) if you absolutely need to trade through them and the local faction isn't able to lock down the threat. You might not be able to make full use of a large transport's cargo capacity like with a medium transport, but it's better for high-risk trips or ones with valuable cargo: the large freighter might take a while to get there, but you know it'll get there unless there's a Xenon strike force destroying everything in the sector, in which case you'd end up losing the cargo regardless.
Maybe there is on more advantage of L-Traders. For example you dock on an energycellfactory with an L-Trader with 45.000m³ of freightvolume and buy 45.000 energycells for a price of 9 Cr each, you do this job with only one transaction and get the minimum price for every cell. But if you want to use instead of an L-freighter 9 M-freighter with only 5.000m³ cargospace per ship, you have to make 9 transactions with that factory and the price per cell raises incrementally after every transaction and for the selling process vice versa. So with M-Freighter you have to pay more to buy these cells and get less when you sell these cells, with only one factory involved in that case.
I usually set up traders and miners to be fairly cheap so I usually pay about 500K for M and about 4 or 5 million for L, after a few trades I break even on the M traders and I usually just use one or two L traders for supplying build storage or doing the research missions, that way if I lose a ship to a random pirate destroyer or something it isn't the end of the world and my M traders have usually at least paid for themselves or each other by the time that happens. In my opinion military ships is what money is for, things that can't fight back very well exist to fuel the war machine.
I use M Mercuries for station traders to supply small loads of materials from factory to factory. I use the L Freighters for things like my shipyards, where I will need large amounts of materials at once.
@@WeritGaming my love goes out to the hermes sentinel. it can take a bit of punishment, and is alot faster overall at the cost of 300 storage vs the mercury. and for station traders i got the boa's since their sheer speed allows them to do nearby trades insanely quick in case of no highways.
alright, three minutes in and I already have a very different experience to you :) I'm using L everything to be survivable. My L miners have never died, they are fine, they do well. But my L frieghters, which was your line in the video, suffer so much at L pirates that it's annoying! This latest session I have going on now sees ony L frieghter going 4 sectors over to sell turret components I made in a factory, and it's attacked by a VIG Barbarossa. I defended it, and shot off the engines to give it time to escape, and it called backup. Two more Barbarossa are now traveling in, with 60-80 small ship in tow.
M freighter is always better than L, the fast ones at least (there is no point using a slow M freighter). Once they get in the highway, they can kiss the enemy goodbye. Even if there is a humongous enemy fleet blocking its way, it just passes through using the highway. Especially Split M Freighter. Even its normal move speed is so fast that it can outrun anything it can't kill and kill what it can't outrun.
im in the process of swapping out all my M traders for L, because im having to deal with a huge xenon invasion up north, dont have the time to patrol my own factories, and the khaak keep killing my M ships. so i changed them to L and they survive and return with their goods now
Long ago I used a few Argon L freighters to collect/deliver station building materials to new station locations; obviously they were more useful the larger the station being built.
Medium in the beginning and then the Big Ones, and then just use the mods to modify them for greater speed and agility and even in the shields and artillery for more dangerous areas ; )
I use the Demeter Sentinel for my M Class traders instead of the Mercury. It loses a bit of storage, but has more hull and a nice boost to speed. With my pirate behavior set to Escape, I've never had a trade ship destroyed or forced to drop cargo. With the turrets and fighters on board a L Class trader, I'd more likely set behavior to Resist, but that could be risky with a large raiding party, and even with no damage or losses will make the very slow ship even slower. That doesn't even begin to take into account the initial cost of each ship. Comparing chassis cost, for the price of the Incarcatura Sentinel, I could get 21 Demeters. With the larger trader only carrying about 5.5× the cargo of one Demeter, that's nowhere near cost-effective. (I understand that isn't at all the full cost of each, but it's a decent enough comparison.) All things considered, I'd say M Class traders win hands-down. There's just nothing the L Class ships do better except combat, and you're not going to use a cargo ship for that.
Large transports are too slow. Big beef with space games bigger ships should be faster in straight lines. Less maneuverable less agile but with bigger engines more thrust no drag means faster.
Umm.. there's this thing called 'inertia' that applies just as much in space as it does in atmosphere: a larger, heavier cargo (plus the larger hull's extra mass ofc) will take longer to accelerate & decelerate to its optimal 'cruising' speed, which you can't easily offset by increasing engine power, usually due to hull design or engine tech restrictions..
I like the idea of both and wish there were more clear cut roles for the large. I hope there are future activities we are not aware of yet, in an update to the game, that have an obvious role for the large freighters.
For me "Nearest" is the most important in the long run. Also for me I normally uses L traders for survivability purpose. Other wise the high preset M traders would be more than Ideal case. End of the day, I just bulk high preset M traders(comodant is me recent favorite), the worse case was to use bethmy for pirate prone sector trade.
Teladi M trader has more cargo. I can get those earlier. But later Incarcatrua Sentinel is the best at 54k m3. Crane miners are best at 50k plus per run.
I've found L traders seem good on paper but are generally outperformed by M traders in terms of ROI. I suspect L traders are just too slow to be competitive. I usually use a couple for feeding my stations during construction or to ferry goods from one complex to another. But otherwise its M traders all the way.
I much prefer the Mercury Sentinel (Double so if you can put Split engines on it). I have been underwhelmed by the Large Freighters performance. Please, do a comparison of Medium VS Large Miners.
@@WeritGaming ...the wharf in Trinity Sanctum vii will sell you gear across factions (except split). Or build your own yard..😅 For mining the Plutus is my favorite. It usually outruns anything and fitted with 2 flak can defend itself pretty good. For large stations and especially for mining rare resources like helium you are better off with large ships. Skill pilots as soon as possible, the expert Autominer really makes a strategic difference.
Split large autotraders with 3 starts are kinda best right now for auto-trading as they dont have to much space, but they also have more speed than other large traders. (and they can also survive) Buffalo with 215 speed is just to good for sectors with no roads. It also outspeeds mercury lol. roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/
Uhm, did you forget to look at how much an auto trader transport? A M trader is rarely full, in order for a L trader to compete at all it would need huge traders, but the universe doesn't have that. So you are using a L trader at L trader speed transporting less stuff than can be contained in a M trader... So you get ALL the negatives of the L and no benefit. This is why L is a "manual" trader, because only when doing manual trades can you fill it up and even with the slower speed you still get more hauled/hour. There is no M vs L argument at all, the game simply doesn't work in a way that use L freighters.
Just to spice things up a bit: Why not couriers? :P Actually I do use a few, but only with mods that give them better orders or abilities. I miss the Mercury from X3, it was boxy, but like a cool kinda boxy. Like a car from the '80s. Oh, also I usually mod out the highways, so that gives an unfair advantage to the bigger transports with higher top travel speeds. Another thing to factor in, if you've got an old CPU like me, is that it's probably a lot easier to calculate one large ship than 5-7 smaller ones.
I use Magpie for everything. A fleet of them can work much quicker than most M and L ships and if one gets blown up its not a big loss. I give them minimum loadout but upgrade engines to max.
@@WeritGaming Yeah sometimes, but it's so worth it for the real gems that have come out over the years. I'm sure you could find somebody online (probably on Stack Overflow) who has figured out the emulation/compatibility settings and still play Hillsfar (1989) on Windows 10.
I scraped all my large traders when I noticed them trying to use highways as "faster" route... I wonder if that stupid behavior has been fixed since then...
Generally the M traders have better turnarounds, rarely will need to fill the L cargo hold, but if you need to sell or buy a LOT of stuff its cheaper to buy in large quantities. I tend not to buy Large cargo ships, but if a ship has a raider in the name, meaning a pirate has taken over, I will board the ship and keep it, fill it up with 150 marines and use them as an assault crew. :D
Just putting out there that for your comparison you used a medium COMBAT engine vs a large TRAVEL engine, which is of course going to win out on travel speed. Had both ships been equipped with travel engines, medium would win in every speed category
I am far to shallow to worry about speed or cargo, I go only on if I like the cockpit, so Ides cargo ships for me... saves all the calculating for the most efficient... Nearly had to pick up the soap again too wash your mouth out but you diplomatically avoided any clear statement regarding consoles being better than PC's.... but came very close.
What is he talking about? Consoles were never better than PC's Consoles were made out of 5 year old PC hardware dumbed down to fit in a box and use nothing but a childs controller. It's like a grown ass adult trying to say training wheels on their 10 speed bike is better.
Hey man, have you thought about starting a Patreon? You take your time and energy to create all this amazing, rather niche content, I think it's the heroes like You that deserve support rather than loud and annoying, already huge RUclipsrs.
![Wiz Khalifa - Khalifa's Home [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wnrLCTe0Nz4/mqdefault.jpg)
One point you missed was that big ships can make bigger profits on the deals that require a lot of goods. When you do mulitple loads in small ships each ship that goes there drops the profit margin a little bit. With large ships they can sell there whole load for the original price
This is the best game ever.
if you assign your Trader to a Station, and you have a good Manager there, you don't need good pilots any more, because the skill of the Station Manager takes over.
I use the large Traders only if I manage them myself, for example to supply my shipyard with big ammounts of materials.
You are right, as autotraders they don't use their capacity, have seen them flying 4 sectors for 50 hullparts.
I agree about station traders if you have a wide coverage of wares. Autotrading pilots can still make the economy go by trading wares not built by your stations.
I've been doing that in HOP territory, using an AutoTrader to make sure that the Hull Parts cycle keeps going. The Wharf/Shipyard otherwise have issues keeping enough in stock.
I personally prefer to use large transports if I can get away with it due to survivability and escort viability: Large ships can carry fighters for escort duty, which means that unless you're absolutely insane with how many ships you have escorting your transports you don't need to worry about stragglers. From my experience the freighter seems to dock its escort before entering a gate or anything else that transitions sectors and deploys them when they're needed. Combine that with more weapons, more shields, the ability to carry drones for repairs, and large transports are (generally) better for travel through dangerous areas (such as sectors bordering Xenon space) if you absolutely need to trade through them and the local faction isn't able to lock down the threat.
You might not be able to make full use of a large transport's cargo capacity like with a medium transport, but it's better for high-risk trips or ones with valuable cargo: the large freighter might take a while to get there, but you know it'll get there unless there's a Xenon strike force destroying everything in the sector, in which case you'd end up losing the cargo regardless.
Maybe there is on more advantage of L-Traders. For example you dock on an energycellfactory with an L-Trader with 45.000m³ of freightvolume and buy 45.000 energycells for a price of 9 Cr each, you do this job with only one transaction and get the minimum price for every cell. But if you want to use instead of an L-freighter 9 M-freighter with only 5.000m³ cargospace per ship, you have to make 9 transactions with that factory and the price per cell raises incrementally after every transaction and for the selling process vice versa. So with M-Freighter you have to pay more to buy these cells and get less when you sell these cells, with only one factory involved in that case.
Yep! That is a plus for the L freighters.
I usually set up traders and miners to be fairly cheap so I usually pay about 500K for M and about 4 or 5 million for L, after a few trades I break even on the M traders and I usually just use one or two L traders for supplying build storage or doing the research missions, that way if I lose a ship to a random pirate destroyer or something it isn't the end of the world and my M traders have usually at least paid for themselves or each other by the time that happens. In my opinion military ships is what money is for, things that can't fight back very well exist to fuel the war machine.
I use M Mercuries for station traders to supply small loads of materials from factory to factory. I use the L Freighters for things like my shipyards, where I will need large amounts of materials at once.
In most of my games I usually use Mercury's too for most things.
@@WeritGaming my love goes out to the hermes sentinel. it can take a bit of punishment, and is alot faster overall at the cost of 300 storage vs the mercury.
and for station traders i got the boa's since their sheer speed allows them to do nearby trades insanely quick in case of no highways.
Interesting video. I wonder how the comparison between M and L miners would go.
Good question! Anecdotally, I hear L miners are better as they don't spend as much time going back to base.
@@WeritGaming depends on miners speed..
@@timothypricesr5953 HOP miners are faster, but have less cargo. TEL miners are slow, but hold a ton of cargo.
Thank you for the good information!
This is one of the many reasons i subscribe!
Always happy to help, few games afford for soany informative videos ;)
alright, three minutes in and I already have a very different experience to you :) I'm using L everything to be survivable. My L miners have never died, they are fine, they do well. But my L frieghters, which was your line in the video, suffer so much at L pirates that it's annoying! This latest session I have going on now sees ony L frieghter going 4 sectors over to sell turret components I made in a factory, and it's attacked by a VIG Barbarossa. I defended it, and shot off the engines to give it time to escape, and it called backup. Two more Barbarossa are now traveling in, with 60-80 small ship in tow.
M freighter is always better than L, the fast ones at least (there is no point using a slow M freighter). Once they get in the highway, they can kiss the enemy goodbye. Even if there is a humongous enemy fleet blocking its way, it just passes through using the highway. Especially Split M Freighter. Even its normal move speed is so fast that it can outrun anything it can't kill and kill what it can't outrun.
im in the process of swapping out all my M traders for L, because im having to deal with a huge xenon invasion up north, dont have the time to patrol my own factories, and the khaak keep killing my M ships. so i changed them to L and they survive and return with their goods now
Long ago I used a few Argon L freighters to collect/deliver station building materials to new station locations; obviously they were more useful the larger the station being built.
Yeah, they have their purpose.
Do you like your transport ships bigger or smaller?
Medium in the beginning and then the Big Ones, and then just use the mods to modify them for greater speed and agility and even in the shields and artillery for more dangerous areas ; )
But I use both, a mixture depending on the size of the station.
I use the Demeter Sentinel for my M Class traders instead of the Mercury. It loses a bit of storage, but has more hull and a nice boost to speed. With my pirate behavior set to Escape, I've never had a trade ship destroyed or forced to drop cargo.
With the turrets and fighters on board a L Class trader, I'd more likely set behavior to Resist, but that could be risky with a large raiding party, and even with no damage or losses will make the very slow ship even slower.
That doesn't even begin to take into account the initial cost of each ship. Comparing chassis cost, for the price of the Incarcatura Sentinel, I could get 21 Demeters. With the larger trader only carrying about 5.5× the cargo of one Demeter, that's nowhere near cost-effective. (I understand that isn't at all the full cost of each, but it's a decent enough comparison.)
All things considered, I'd say M Class traders win hands-down. There's just nothing the L Class ships do better except combat, and you're not going to use a cargo ship for that.
Large transports are too slow. Big beef with space games bigger ships should be faster in straight lines. Less maneuverable less agile but with bigger engines more thrust no drag means faster.
Sounds about right to me.
Umm.. there's this thing called 'inertia' that applies just as much in space as it does in atmosphere: a larger, heavier cargo (plus the larger hull's extra mass ofc) will take longer to accelerate & decelerate to its optimal 'cruising' speed, which you can't easily offset by increasing engine power, usually due to hull design or engine tech restrictions..
Future techs can easily explain away the 'limits' of 'inertia'.
I like the idea of both and wish there were more clear cut roles for the large. I hope there are future activities we are not aware of yet, in an update to the game, that have an obvious role for the large freighters.
As the universe gets larger with DLC, large freighters will be more useful.
For me "Nearest" is the most important in the long run.
Also for me I normally uses L traders for survivability purpose.
Other wise the high preset M traders would be more than Ideal case.
End of the day, I just bulk high preset M traders(comodant is me recent favorite), the worse case was to use bethmy for pirate prone sector trade.
Why do you like the comodant so much?
It does have a pointy main gun for one.🤣
@@Akideoni hard to argue with that
@@WeritGaming here my favorite setting for it roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/ship_tel_m_trans_container_03_a_macro/w=31&t=3131&s=370507
@@Akideoni nice! I didn't know that site did builds like that.
Teladi M trader has more cargo. I can get those earlier. But later Incarcatrua Sentinel is the best at 54k m3. Crane miners are best at 50k plus per run.
I've found L traders seem good on paper but are generally outperformed by M traders in terms of ROI. I suspect L traders are just too slow to be competitive. I usually use a couple for feeding my stations during construction or to ferry goods from one complex to another. But otherwise its M traders all the way.
I much prefer the Mercury Sentinel (Double so if you can put Split engines on it). I have been underwhelmed by the Large Freighters performance. Please, do a comparison of Medium VS Large Miners.
I wish there was a good way to make a Mercury with Paranid engines when I put in the order.
@@WeritGaming ...the wharf in Trinity Sanctum vii will sell you gear across factions (except split). Or build your own yard..😅
For mining the Plutus is my favorite. It usually outruns anything and fitted with 2 flak can defend itself pretty good.
For large stations and especially for mining rare resources like helium you are better off with large ships. Skill pilots as soon as possible, the expert Autominer really makes a strategic difference.
HOP transports are great, I would also argue their freighter is competetive with the Argon freighters as it is muuuuuch faster.
Yeah, all the factions have their ups and downs. I just like the industrial Argon look :)
Argon are ok in X4 but I preferred their look much more in X3
Split large autotraders with 3 starts are kinda best right now for auto-trading as they dont have to much space, but they also have more speed than other large traders. (and they can also survive)
Buffalo with 215 speed is just to good for sectors with no roads. It also outspeeds mercury lol.
roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/
Uhm, did you forget to look at how much an auto trader transport?
A M trader is rarely full, in order for a L trader to compete at all it would need huge traders, but the universe doesn't have that.
So you are using a L trader at L trader speed transporting less stuff than can be contained in a M trader... So you get ALL the negatives of the L and no benefit.
This is why L is a "manual" trader, because only when doing manual trades can you fill it up and even with the slower speed you still get more hauled/hour.
There is no M vs L argument at all, the game simply doesn't work in a way that use L freighters.
I mentioned that L traders rarely get filled in autotrading.
Medium are for short range l or xl are for more distances range that is most when you are at mid end game
I could see that being the case for sectors far from the highway. The travel speed can make a big ship valuable.
Just to spice things up a bit: Why not couriers? :P
Actually I do use a few, but only with mods that give them better orders or abilities.
I miss the Mercury from X3, it was boxy, but like a cool kinda boxy. Like a car from the '80s.
Oh, also I usually mod out the highways, so that gives an unfair advantage to the bigger transports with higher top travel speeds.
Another thing to factor in, if you've got an old CPU like me, is that it's probably a lot easier to calculate one large ship than 5-7 smaller ones.
Haha, yeah I love the old Mercury. Well, anything that reminds me of the 80s really.
I use Magpie for everything. A fleet of them can work much quicker than most M and L ships and if one gets blown up its not a big loss. I give them minimum loadout but upgrade engines to max.
PC is, by definition, backwards-compatible with PC games from 20+ years ago. Thus, PC wins. :)
#PCMasterRace
You have to jump through some hurdles to play those older games, but yeah it can be done :)
@@WeritGaming Yeah sometimes, but it's so worth it for the real gems that have come out over the years. I'm sure you could find somebody online (probably on Stack Overflow) who has figured out the emulation/compatibility settings and still play Hillsfar (1989) on Windows 10.
I scraped all my large traders when I noticed them trying to use highways as "faster" route... I wonder if that stupid behavior has been fixed since then...
I believe it has
Generally the M traders have better turnarounds, rarely will need to fill the L cargo hold, but if you need to sell or buy a LOT of stuff its cheaper to buy in large quantities.
I tend not to buy Large cargo ships, but if a ship has a raider in the name, meaning a pirate has taken over, I will board the ship and keep it, fill it up with 150 marines and use them as an assault crew. :D
Just putting out there that for your comparison you used a medium COMBAT engine vs a large TRAVEL engine, which is of course going to win out on travel speed. Had both ships been equipped with travel engines, medium would win in every speed category
think he did that on purpose he lets his biases leak into all his videos
I am far to shallow to worry about speed or cargo, I go only on if I like the cockpit, so Ides cargo ships for me... saves all the calculating for the most efficient... Nearly had to pick up the soap again too wash your mouth out but you diplomatically avoided any clear statement regarding consoles being better than PC's.... but came very close.
Cockpit criteria... I like it. I'll have to check out the Ides out.
Consoles (NES, Genesis) were better until we could actually afford a PC ;)
will there be a Polish version one day?
I'm not sure, sorry :(
@@c0r3s4v3 old and unfinished
whats that stream of debris on your minimap, jeez louise!
Spacefly eggs, lodestone, and empty asteroids I think. I should investigate or send a ship out to collect it all.
2021/01/19
What is he talking about? Consoles were never better than PC's
Consoles were made out of 5 year old PC hardware dumbed down to fit in a box and use nothing but a childs controller.
It's like a grown ass adult trying to say training wheels on their 10 speed bike is better.
Hey man, have you thought about starting a Patreon? You take your time and energy to create all this amazing, rather niche content, I think it's the heroes like You that deserve support rather than loud and annoying, already huge RUclipsrs.
Thanks for the kind words. I'll give it some thought, maybe someday :)