I mentioned yesterday that I started to play X3: Terran Conflict. For those that may not have heard of it before, it can be thought of as Elite on steroids or a single player Eve Online. It's a massive universe sandbox which you can do pretty much whatever you want.
There are a number of ways to start the game, I chose Humble Merchant. This gave me about 10k worth of credits, a freighter and a small scout. One of the interesting aspects of X3 is that you can own and control a large number of ships. This happens in several ways: direct control, remote control and AI control.
Right now my Scout ship is sitting in the Argon Prime system allowing me to see commodity prices and inventory amounts. Once I find myself someone selling satellites, I can deploy one of those in the system instead of using a ship.
In typical space trader fashion, I am buying low and selling high between Herron's Nebula. There are probably 100+ more systems in the game controlled by a variety of races. My current goal is to earn enough money to be able to afford an AI trading module. This will allow my to designate a ship as a Sector Trader, and have it do what I'm doing on its own.
I finished up my trading yesterday with 120k credits. Just to give you an idea on pricing, my ship probably costs ~250k. An Argon Titan, which is one of the capital ships (yes, you can own them too), costs around 70 million credits. That doesn't include outfitting it with equipment. You can also buy space stations. I have a long way to go for that. Plus, I'd also like to get myself a fighting ship so I can have some fun on that side of the game.
Interested? As of this writing, Amazon has it for $6.77.
