Just another energy credit thread.

atticusmas

Alrighty, I am at a loss. I have no Idea how people get energy credits to the tune of 500 million, it's ridiculous.

I've asked in game, and I get a slew of answers. Among them are "DOFF missions, Do the tour galaxy! Do the (Acronym I don't know goes here) mission! Blah blah"

I really don't get any of these people's advice.

Can anyone explain to me, simply, and THOROUGHLY how to get a lot of ec?

dilbart

Doff missions, Tour the Galaxy

thecosmic1

You play the game. It's really just that simple.

You do missions, and replay missions, and you sell the desirable items on the Exchange. You do Doff missions and sell desirable Doffs on the Exchange - and the same for Boffs. You do special events like Tour the Galaxy that can earn you over 1 million when you get good at it. You grind Dilithium, convert it to Zen, and they buy Lockbox Keys in the C-Store and sell them on the Exchange for 1.4 million ECs each.

Either way it still requires you to play the game. The people who earned 500 million EC didn't do it a week. It probably took them a year or more to earn it. Many of us have been here for over 3 years now and have accumulated huge stockpiles of ECs. There's no magic way to earn 500 million EC in a month.

futurepastnow

Buy low, sell high. That really is all there is to it.

atticusmas

thecosmic1 wrote: »

You play the game. It's really just that simple.

You do missions, and replay missions, and you sell the desirable items on the Exchange. You do Doff missions and sell desirable Doffs on the Exchange - and the same for Boffs. You do special events like Tour the Galaxy that can earn you over 1 million when you get good at it. You grind Dilithium, convert it to Zen, and they buy Lockbox Keys in the C-Store and sell them on the Exchange for 1.4 million ECs each.

Either way it still requires you to play the game. The people who earned 500 million EC didn't do it a week. It probably took them a year or more to earn it. Many of us have been here for over 3 years now and have accumulated huge stockpiles of ECs. There's no magic way to earn 500 million EC in a month.

You said pretty much EXACTLY what I said for you NOT to in the op.

thecosmic1

atticusmas wrote: »

You said pretty much EXACTLY what I said for you NOT to in the op.

Because it's the only true answer. That's how you get a lot of EC. You play the game. You earn things from playing the game and you sell them on the Exchange. You do events like Tour the Galaxy. That's how you get the EC. There's no magic wand or super-duper exploit that gives you 50 million ec by pushing 1 button. You earn it by playing over time.

duaths1

500 million fast? really simple.

you get Zen for 50 Eur, buy 50 keys, sell them for 70 millions EC on the exchange.

repeat.

lol

or you actually play the game and take a look at the mechanics. this is not Anarchy Online afterall.

nobody mentioned foundry missions. so, there are several foundry missions created for the purpose of grinding EC. i think Royal Rumble was one of them, never played it, but fleetmates mentioned you can get a million pro run out of it. Of course there is a daily cap on foundry rewards, so you cannot grind it all day long on one toon.

im making 2-3 millions pro toon pro week just by DOFFing. PLUS Dillithium.

wildmousex

I do agree that someone just telling you to do the tour the gaxaly mission doesn't seem all that helpful - as that doesn't really tll you how or why to do it. in a nutshell it's a timed event that goes on for an hour, and it rewards E.C. for each sector in evry sector block that you fly through

getting a small fast ship, with a fast engine - all power into engines - running a path with precise tight cornering and using the sector trans-warp power every chance you get - will allow you to do the missions 3 times, plus clear out 3-4 more sector blocks netting you 1-2 mil in that hour. - and this can be done a couple of times a day.


--

another way to make E.C. seems to be holding onto lockbox's for a long time - I only play when new content comes out, so I'm getting in shape for the Rommies (which I've been asking for since pre-release - yay!) and saw that I had several rows of ferengi lockboxs sitting in my bank - I put a stack of 20 on the exchange for what I thought was a good price and it sold in less then an hour - the buyer had split the stack and was offering them each for a nice little profit for himself. - by my calculations, I have a good 12-20mil of "worthless" lock box's (selling them off wholesale) sitting in the bank.

smokeybacon90

wildmousex wrote: »

getting a small fast ship, with a fast engine - all power into engines - running a path with precise tight cornering and using the sector trans-warp power every chance you get - will allow you to do the missions 3 times, plus clear out 3-4 more sector blocks netting you 1-2 mil in that hour. - and this can be done a couple of times a day.

Warp performance does not depend on ship size, turn rate or engine power. For the tour you should look at getting the Borg engine, DI/RP, maxed driver coil and the antimatter containment critical reward. Ships that will perform better than most are the Ody (advanced slipstream), Vesta (uber slipstream) and Excelsior (transwarp).

jetwtf

More of a question is HOW to do the tour in the most efficiant pattern not what to use doing it. say you are a low level character with warp 10 and ESD and fleet starbase for transwarp. what sector to hit first to last would be what he is looking for. saying "Do the tour" doesnt help, but saying "Do the tour this way...." with a sector by sector description of the route does actualy help.

You can make good EC with a commander to captain toon doing foundry farm missions. even green items can have value and sell good on the exchange and you could get lucky and get one thats worth a million plus. once the toon reaches admiral delete it and start a new one. dont do anything with it but foundry farm missions and the extra 40 exchange slots. best to buy zen with dilithium and get 2 extra slots. use one slot as a klingon for the farming and that gives you 3 for playing.

reason for commander to captain level is because new players have learned the game and now know they need X component to make a good build but cant afford the purple versions, so those blues and greens can sell for a good price because they are willing to settle for them. Once admiral is reached only purple MKII sells as good pricewise but harder to comebye.

stofsk

The exchange is how you make serious money in this game, as others have said. There are a few dependable ways, selling doffs can give tens of thousands of EC, grinding for dilithium to convert to zen to purchase lockbox keys is another way - both already mentioned. A couple that hasn't been mentioned: do the 'Children's Toys' doff assignment (search on STOwiki for the details), get an unpowered alien artifact, do the doff assignment that makes it powered, put that on the exchange for a good price. Rinse and repeat (I made tens of millions of EC I still have on two of my characters this way). Another thing is do buy crafting materials and sell them on the exchange. This is something like a dilithium>EC thing. But I don't know if that still goes for a good price. I'm not in-game so I can't check the exchange but search for 'uncommon unreplicateable materials' or whatever it's called. It costs 1000dil to get one of those, and obviously some people would rather not spend their dilithium that way, and would rather buy them with EC over the exchange.

For a laugh I searched for the Path to 2409 datachips you get once per day at the Academy daily or two if it's during the event. The prices were absurd - from 100 EC for common chips to tens and even hundreds of thousands for others.

vestereng

It used to be you could sell saurians with the efficient trade for a few million. And people who didn't know about the trait would put them on the exchange for as little as 50 EC.

You can still find stuff that is being sold cheap and sell it for a profit but it does require you keep up with current events and you are lucky enough to be online same time as the item - since other people are scoping the exchange for the exact same thing.

My first real profit I bought a jacket for 8 million and sold it for 19 which was mainly lucky, I couldn't know if other people were about to put it up for way less or maybe several people would dump the price continously.

Then somewhere over 20 million I went into console fabrication from engineering.

And from my experience it's the easiest way to earn EC. Mainly because you aren't doing anything, it's purely afk'ing.

But, it does require you be ready to go a long stretch on the initial investment.
You need 5 doff's at 1.2 million and every attempt is 1.4 million.

You might get 4 purples that are all equally useless after 25 attempts.

I made 200 million in next to no time, bought a few items I liked and now have nothing left in the game I want.
And I did it not grinding but buying powered artifacts and running the project every 4 hours.
To me waiting 3 days on the next attempt is a waste of time.

However like I said you need the initial investement, not that's it's risky, it will evetually turn over a profit but it make take longer than you have ECs for.

The only overnight method is lockbox ships. Either people had keys or bought them and then got lucky.

If you are ready to grind it out I suggest you do the colonization chains for doff's for youself, for doff's to break down (sell or use in your fleet) and for refugees you can put in the exchange program chains and hope to land a purple.

It's just a million a day is still 500 days worth of grinding to get there.

gavinruneblade

A few reliable sources of EC:

Contraband farming with a klingon. GEt a klingon with duty officers unlocked and stock up on as many aggressive security and tactical officers as you can find. Cruise around in any area of space and pickup marauder missions. Emphasize the 45 minute ones vs the federation, and capturing transports (but not vulcan transports). Sell in stacks of 5, 25, or 50 for fastest movement.

Prisoners -> Dilithium -> crafting materials (common or uncommon unreplicatable materials). While you gather contraband you'll also get lots of prisoners. There are many "forced labor camp" duty officer missions. Never use the mission at the security officer, only use the forced labor camps. These have much higher dilithium returns and lower chance for failure. Turn your dilithium into unreplicatable materials and sell on the auction house. Commons sell in stacks of 50 or more, uncommons sell either in singles or stacks of 5.

Selling Duty Officers. Most mini packs can be bought for between 120k and 200k EC and these have 3 white and 1 green or better officer. The whites will sell for an average of 50k each except for science and civilian which sell for 1k to 6k if you're lucky. The greens average 45k, blues 120k and purples 700k. If you open 1 pack you might lose money on it or you might make a little profit. But over time the average is a 15%-20% profit.

Earn extra money by always running the free duty officer recruitment missions in the academy. don't sell your science or civilian doffs, instead upgrade 5 of them to a single green doff and sell that.

In the foundry you can run most any space combat mission and sell the drops plus earn some dilithium. I particularly like battleship royal rumble but there are many options. These earn about 250k EC and 700 Dil each 15-20 minute run.

lebtron

If you have a good damage dealer you can play missions like sb24, minefield etc. The first places get purple equipment mk xi, on klingon side you can get up to 4 for just one minefield! With 3 toons playing this I can easily get about 20 millions a day by selling the valuable items.

Additional playing the exchange is a good way. With the upcoming lockboxes the trade on masterkeys will rise and you can make a lot of money by buying low and selling high. Last time lockboxes were released I made 400 million in one week.

vestereng

Well, with keys at 1.4 now assuming they hit 1.8, you'd have to have:

400,000,000/400,000 = 1000 keys to sell to make 400 million.

And at 1.4 million a key that would put you at 1,400,000,000 EC initial investment.

I am not sure he'd be in here if he had 400 million more than the character cap is...:D

If the current 1.4 price doubled to 2.8 you'd have to have:

400,000,000/1,400,000= 285,7 keys to sell, which would cost him 400 million to buy right now

Or in short, even if the profit off keys doubled, you'd still need 300 keys to make 400 million.

/edit

ps. I am sure some cash people or LTS'ers do have stacks of keys about but your suggestion is buying keys, so.

smokeybacon90

A Ferengi with a Tuffli can afford to undercut normal vendor and exchange prices for rep commodities and still make a 100% profit. With the Tholian rep coming up it would be wise to stock.

lebtron

With an upcoming sale for keys (last two times it was the case, so I am sure there will be one again) I doubt they will be much higher than 1.6mio. But thats not important, they dont need to fluctuate a lot to make profit. I started that 400 millio week with excactly 1 million.

The wrong part of your calcs is that you assume I would buy them before the week starts and sell them later. In reality I sell them as fast as I can buy them. There are a lot of people selling their keys for more than 500k under the average price. So buying for 1 million when the price is about 1.5 is not a problem and after 3 sold keys you can buy a second one. So I have no idea how many keys I traded, but usually more than 20 per hour, about 3 or 4 hours a day. And if you have enough cash to buy whole stacks of keys, which are sometimes even cheaper than 1 million per key, you can also start trading other things. New lockbox ships etc.

And of course there are even more tricks on the exchange. Selling things at the right time is really important. When the new lockbox event starts a few minutes decide about the first 10 millions made out of a lot less than a key worth;)

So if you dont want to invest money, the exchange is the fastest way to get EC. Its just not everyones taste.

redsnake721

When Phased polaron weps came out the unopen boxes were going for about 100k and if you got a XII Acc X2 DHC or Turrett they were going for 5 to 7 mil and higher. So I made about 70 mil in profit from them.
Once you get a few hundred mil and buy about 60 keys you can control the Exchange. Wait until the price for keys is high and post about 10 of them for about 10k less and with in seconds someone will undercut your price.
Then remove your keys and undercut him. He will get mad and remove his keys and undercut you again.
Usually by then he/she will get mad and post thier keys for 1 mil to 1.2 mill just so his keys sell and yours dont. Once you have driven the price down about 100k less than when you started, buy all his keys up and then repost them for 1.4 mil.
People get mad when you keep undercutting thier prices and will almost always lose thier temper and list them for way under the going rate just to spite the person that keeps undercutting them. Thats when you pounce and buy up all his cheap keys.