So I’ve found the new most overpowered money-making strategy in Elite: having about 200 tonnes of free cargo space and getting lucky.
There’s a boom going on around Turir, and I just happened to stumble upon that one. Not a wing mission, not a smuggling mission, just a normal haulage run. Got a pirate kill along the way, too, which was neat. There are loads of these well-paying haulage missions in nearby systems, generally around 2-3 million per run, but with outliers like this one.
Turir itself is a mess though. Almost everyone is at war with almost everyone else, there’s an outbreak in one of the smaller factions, and even the factions that are booming have those resources tied up in wars in other systems. And the Thargoid warpath seems to be shooting straight through the Turir region, so we might find ourselves having some xenos issues soon, too. Thing is, you can’t really tell just from flying around, and that’s really been bugging me. The BGS is a wonderfully dynamic and complex system that can generate some truly remarkable procedural stories, but isn’t allowed to, because none of this is really reflected outside of mission choices and the prices of some items. It doesn’t really affect the types and content of USS and PoI that spawn, or the traffic you see, wars are almost entirely contained in the CZs, outside of the occasional mission (and the massacre missions are just a massive waste of time) and it generally seems to exist in a vacuum. It’s a terrible shame, really, the main reason why people complain about Elite being empty, I think, is because the effects of the BGS on the game aren’t visible enough, and I do hope this is something that gets taken into consideration in the 3.x patches.
