Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Harvesters and the Economy
Just to add to the excellent suggestions that have already been made....
HARVESTER PLACEMENT RESTRICTIONS
I agree that medium harvesters are a better value than heavies (unless, as noted, you're maxing out on your lots). But there's a catch -- medium (and heavy) harvesters have severe restrictions on where they can be placed. Terrain that's not veryflat or forests will make it very difficult (if not impossible) toplace a medium/heavy. This can be extremely disappointing when a 90+% hotspotfor a great resource appears, but you can onlyset a medium/heavy at something in the 70-80% range because theterrain won't allow placementcloser to the hotspot.
Personal harvesters, however,are much less picky about placement. So once you get to the point where you can afford mediums or heavies, don't sell off your personal harvesters! Keep five or six of them around -- if a superb resource spawns, better to plant six personal harvesters than not tobe able to harvest at all because all you have are unplaceable heavies.
NO-WORRY PRICING
I made my first million very simply: I harvested good (not great, just good)metals and sold them on the Bazaar for 2.5 credits per unit (cpu). In other words, I'd harvest 50,000 units of metal, break them up into 25 blocks of 2000 units each, and price eachblock at 5000 credits.
In virtually every case, I was able to sell every block within two days.
And when I stopped using the Bazaar terminal in back of the Keren starport and started using the terminals outside the Theed starport, I was usually able to sell all 25 blocks within a day.
The secret was that I recognized what the market wanted (metals), and Inever got greedy. I didn't spend time trying to find players to make deals with, andI didn't waste my time trying to think of the highest price that I could charge for a unit of some resource -- I just set my price at 2.5 cpu, used a popular Bazaar site,and sold everything I harvested.
Of course this isn't the only way to go. You could probably sell other kinds of resources, or charge higher prices, or use some other Bazaar terminal (e.g., Coronet) and do even better. This is just an approach that workedwell for me while minimizing the time I spent doing it.
Exciting? Not really. Lucrative? Fairly. 
--Flatfingers
P.S. If you decide to try this, Surveying IV is easy to get and will pay for itself in no time.