I don't quite get this one... Yes may fight more enemies and the mission may take slightly longer but you aren't being relegated to only being payed for one mission... you get payed for all three. So if you plan it right you can do three overlapping five-point patrols... You hit all five nav points only once and you get payed for the same patrol three times.

I can see if your ship is weak and you have no missiles though that you may want to avoid many long patrols to start with, but in that case, try and line up various cargo runs that coincide with delivery missions.

I found a sort of funny and easy way to make money in the early part of the game. You may think it's cheating, but it works!

What I do is load up on the in-system patrol missions, which say go to 5 (or whatever) nav points. (IMPORTANT! DON'T do this in a system with asteroids in it! It's too hard! Troy and New Detroit systems work fine though.) If the mercenary guild and the mission computer don't have enough of those patrol missions, add one in that says to scout a specific waypoint to eliminate Kilrathi or retros or pirates or whatever... and it will be one of the patrol points anyway.

Now here's the trick. You complete each of these mission segments by flying through the waypoint -- NOT by killing stuff. So if you've got a ship with an afterburner, you're set. Set your shield level ONE below your engine level (2 Shield and 3 Engine works great) and you can stay in afterburner forever. Now you're off to the races. Select each Nav point, hit the Autopilot if you can, and then afterburn straight THROUGH the crosshair. You may get chased. No biggie... hit N for Nav, select the next waypoint, aim your ship at it, and keep on burning!

This can be fun as you may end up with a dozen pirates, retros, and cats coming after you, but eventually you'll blow through a waypoint where there are helpful hunters, Confeds, militia, or even merchants. They'll pull some of the baddies off your tail. (Haha!) Doesn't matter though... take a loop around the system, hitting (flying through) each waypoint, and burn your way back to the base to land and collect your dough.

A couple of notes: As you pass each waypoint, check the Nav/mission log to be certain you completed that waypoint, then select the next point and turn and burn straight to it. Also, some missions say things like "Destroy Hunters at Nav 4" and those won't work unless you actually kill the ships there. Look for the ones that say things like "scout" a nav point for suspicious bad guy activity.

Anyway, good luck. If you make a few circuits like this, you'll build up your cash and once you have the Centurion fighter with all the goodies, you can go on and do the plotline missions.

I returned to Troy to do stacks of 5 point patrols until I had enough for an outfitted centurion. I didn't know that you didn't need to even kill the enemies though. 30k to 40k each stack of missions.

Go to mercenaries guild.
Accept all the patrol missions over 11k or so (they go up to 17k!).
Save.
Load the save game you just saved.
Go back to mercenaries guild and repeat until you have 3.

You totally right, the commerce in this game was always BROKEN, it only deserve your time if you are doing anything else at the same time, as an extra money... of course you have merchant guild (was named like this? ) and you can do missions for them, that are more profitable...

Anyway is the only Wing Commander I hate as a game... is totally overated, and boring as hell... the plot is stupid and I never liked it, at the end only a couple of ships are ok, and only 1 if you want to finish the plot or do combat... the same with the addons, more with weapons... I though the same not only now, but even when i first bought it many years ago. In fact i re-bought it here thinking maybe in it´s time I had some kind of prejudice vs it, but honestly I finish the gog version last year and I found exactly the same flaws. (And not because is old, WC1 and 2 are older and I finished recently and still are awesome games for me) And not because is commerce, I use to play the X series games, and I was an ELITE player back in the 80s.

Honestly, I always found Privateer as a very bad ELITE wanna be game that was suscesfull just only because it had the "Wing Commander" logo on it.