I love Wing Commander Privateer for its freedom of enabling me to do what I want and be who I want, so far as my piloting skills and credit account will take me. But while you can choose between the live of a merchant or a mercenary, most find it easier to fulfil the role of the latter. That's why I created the Privateer Traders Guide.

This guide isn't about trade routes. Instead, I'm just providing useful information on the characteristics of each commodity, enabling the player to make more informed decisions when buying and selling goods. I'll also provide some tips and strategies to make the life of a merchant easier so that you can get out there and start hauling cargo.

Part 1: The Trader's Guide

Attached are two images that comprise the traders guide, one for Privateer and another for Righteous Fire which has a revised price schedule. You can print these off on an 8.5x10 sheet of paper for reference during your travels through the Gemini Sector. All forty commodities are listed on the guide and the following characteristics are displayed for each:

Image: Shows the graphical icon of the commodity as seen in-game. Note that Construction Equipment and Mining Equipment share the same image.
Commodity Name: The name of the commodity. Commodities are listed in alphabetical order for ease of searching.
Average Price: This is the approximate value of the commodity in credits. There are two numbers listed. The upper number with the white background is the value at bases that produce the item, or the expected purchase price. The lower number with the gold background is the value at bases that consume the item, or the expected sell price. The actual value may be higher or lower than the numbers listed here, but this will give you a good base of reference in identifying a good offer from a poor one.
Trade Restrictions: One in four commodities have trade restrictions imposed on them. These are indicated by a red icon. A trade restriction means that an item can not be purchased or sold at particular bases. There are four types of trade restriction, each identified by an icon: a bandit mask, a wrench and hammer, a radioactive symbol, and a house. A key provided at the bottom of the guide will indicate which bases will not trade in goods with this restriction.
Commodity Scores: I have scored each commodity for three qualities on a scale of 1 to 10, with higher scores preferred over lower ones. Some scores are highlighted with a red or green outline. A green outline indicates that this item is among the top-ten in its class, while a red outline indicates that it's in the bottom 10. With this information you can determine a commodities characteristics at a glance. The scores are listed from left to right as follows:
Profit: This is the optimal difference between a good's purchase and sell values. Trading goods with a high profit score will tend to earn you more credits on a per-unit basis, provided you know the best trade routes. Unfortunately profitable goods tend also to be expensive to purchase so you'll need to earn a lot of of cash before you can start trading them in volume.
Yield: This score indicates how much money you can make from trading a good as a ratio to the amount of credits you invested in purchasing it. Goods with high yield scores are great for growing cash quickly and are especially good to trade in during the early game or after you've purchased an expensive ship upgrade, times when you don't have a lot of cash on hand to buy more profitable commodities.
Security: Privateer has no qualms about selling you goods that it knows you'll have a hard time selling for a profit. Some items might have bad buy/sell margins while others might only be profitable when sold at particular bases. The security score helps you avoid these items. Trading goods with a high score will always yield a profit while low scored goods might be sitting in your hold a while before you figure out what base type is willing to pay the most money for it.

To appreciate the difference between profit and yield, take this example: Let's say that you're flying an Orion, which can carry 75 units of cargo, and have 1,000 credits in the bank. With that cash you can probably fill your hold with grain or purchase one unit of plutonium. Grain has a high yield but low profit score while plutonium is very profitable but has a low yield score. Assuming we can sell these goods at a typical price, one unit of plutonium would earn 98 credits while seventy-five units of grain would bring in 750 credits. Clearly investing in grain is the better value because we're limited in the amount of credits we can spend.

But let's say instead that we have 75,000 credits in the bank. That would be enough to fill our hold with plutonium, which we could sell at a profit of about 7,350 credits. In short, high yield goods are preferable when you are restricted by the amount of cash on hand while high profit goods are preferable when you are restricted by the cargo space available on your ship.

Don't get too worked up over the scores. All the commodities are profitable under the right circumstances. This guide is designed to help you take advantage those circumstances when they appear. Take Games for example. These have a very low profit and moderate yield but are very secure. That makes Games good as a filler commodity when your cargo hold has space available. You might not make much off of the investment, but you'll know you make something off of it. Contrast that to Robot Servants which have a terrible yield and are very risky but can bring in good money if you have the money and know which bases are willing to pay a premium for them.

All commodities are an opportunity in Privateer. The fun for a a trader is in discovering those opportunities and deciding how to best take advantage of them.


Note: For some reason GOG isn't letting me post my Part II on how to use the Com and faction reputation to your advantage. It might be a character cap limit so I'll try posting it later as a separate post in the thread.

great post...thanks for the trader's guide..this will come in very handy.

I used t play this game years ago i am so happy i can download it and play again...

the freedom to do what i want and be who i want is what attracted to the game as well.

thank you.

Ever figure out how to post the second part? I'm very interested in your strategy. I have played this game since it originally released, and I don't think I ever dissected the economy quite as thoroughly as you have. This is good info!

I later posted the complete guide at the Star Citizen forum but for readers here I'll add the rest:

Making Friends by Using your Comm

If you're playing a merchant pilot then eventually you're going to want to upgrade to the Galaxy. This ship s great for hauling cargo but leaves some to be desired in the combat department. The best way to survive a fight, though, is to avoid it in the first place and the best way to avoid fights is to make as many friends as possible.

At the start of the game you're going to be hostile with the Pirate, Retro, and Kilrathi factions. Eventually you're going to run into all of them but in the Troy system you'll meet the pirates and retros very soon. When encountering pirates, target one of the enemy ships and select the Com button by pressing the letter 'C'. You'll bring up a list of messages to send to the targeted pilot. Select option 3 by pressing the number '3' key. While perhaps not very dignified, pleading for mercy this way looks very good to your bottom line. After a certain number of pleas based on your faction relations, the target will cease hostilities.

At the start of the game, it takes two pleas to make a pirate turn neutral and you have to do this for each pirate before you can autopilot away from a nav point. Kilrathi require more pleas and you can expect to be called "monkeyboy" a lot before they will break their attack. In all of my career as a privateer, I've never managed to convince a retro to stop attacking but that actually can work in our favour. You see, pirates and retros don't like one another and for each retro you kill, pirates will appreciate you just a little bit more. After killing about 17 retros, pirates will only require one com plea before turning neutral and after toasting about 45 retros, the entire pirate faction will turn neutral.

This is your goal. By becoming neutral with both pirates and militia, you cut out a good portion of combat from the game and have the opportunity to trade with secret pirate bases at little to no risk to yourself. That's a very beneficial state of affairs for a merchant. Over time you'll also be able to turn the Kilrathi neutral but I would keep travel in Potter quadrant to a minimum until then.

There are occasions when the com doesn't work. Hostiles spawned by missions will never turn neutral, no matter how nicely (or often) you ask. You should be careful to avoid accepting missions that feature opponents other than retros. Every ship you kill sets you back in their faction's esteem of you. The com will also fail if you get tagged for smuggling contraband by law enforcement.

Using the com system to avoid combat may seem gamey (because it's absolutely gamey) but it's also totally awesome that you can "talk your way out of" tough situations like Han Solo or Jack Sparrow. That this is so counter to what gamers expect I think is the reason why so few players appreciate and take advantage of Privateer's coms. They're they best weapon in a merchant's arsenal.


Ship Upgrades

There are a number of guides on how to best outfit your ship in Privateer but most of them are geared toward fighting spacecraft. So here are my recommendations for mercantile players, which you should take as supplementary rather than definitive.

Afterburners: When you have a full cargo hold and a ship that manoeuvres like an elephant, discretion is definitely the better part of valour and afterburners are a day-one purchase.
Engines: These go hand in hand with afterburners. You're going to want at least one engine level upgrade over your shields. With the energy surplus you can afterburn indefinitely or at least outpace any enemy over time. With a two level engine surplus you can both afterburn -and- fire guns nearly indefinitely. The ability to afterburn without cost effectively raises the cruising speed of a Tarsus from 300 to 600 and a Galaxy from 300 to 750.
Cargo Upgrades: This is an obvious choice and you should get it as soon as possible. Increasing your cargo capacity increases your profit margin. Even if just hauling low profit goods like grain, an upgrade on the Tarsus would pay for itself after no more than 10 runs.
ECM Packages: Anything that helps keep you safe is a good thing. You might be able to dodge a missile with a Centurion but the sluggish Galaxy makes for an easy target, especially if trying to flee from a fight. These are the closest you're going to get to automated defenses.
Turrets: Unfortunately your turrets are not automatically operated by the AI. This means that any guns you equip have to be fired manually, which can be suicidal in a dogfight. If you're fleeing from combat, though, having a turret outfitted with weapons can be useful to harry any would-be pursuers. Pilot your ship toward your destination, then switch to turret view while keeping your afterburners active. After a few hits, pursuers should break off to evade your fire. Additionally, it is theorized that outfitting your ship with guns may help absorb component damage when you take hits to your armour. If true, it is believed that Neutron Guns are the lowest prices gun to offer the highest tier of protection. (thanks to Apocalypse at the SC forum for this tip)
Repair Droid: While expensive, the repair droid is one of the most useful upgrades a pilot can purchase. Whether you're playing as a merchant or a fighter pilot, it can save your neck by restoring a damaged system during combat. Eventually the droid will pay for itself by saving you the need to visit the ship dealer and buy repairs.


Missions

I'm repeating myself here but it's worth mentioning twice. If your goal is to make the pirates and Kilrathi neutral over time then you have to be careful about what missions you accept. Scout and patrol missions are perfectly safe but other missions will spawn combat situations you can't talk your way out of. This includes cargo missions! It may seem counter-intuitive but if you're a merchant trying to avoid a fight then it's best not to accept cargo missions. The exception to these rules, of course, are those missions that involve retros. There's no pleasing them anyway and killing retros will help make everybody else friendlier toward you.


Acknowledgements

I'm indebted to Wedge009's Privateer page and the Wing Commander CIC specifically for most of the commodity images I used in the guide but also for their ongoing support of all things Wing Commander.

This is great. Thank you very much. :)

You must talk to them. Use communication interface and choose most friendly response. After some time (if you survive) they'll go non-hostile mode. Then talk again to make them friendly. And fight pirates. Every shut down pirate improves your relation with Bounty Hunters.

Don't worry when you'll meet hostile hunters in other jump points and systems. You need a lot of talk and shot down pirates.

Wow. It finally worked. I fought pirates and talked them down gradually. I could tell they were warming up to me by clocking how many attempts it took to make them neutral. Neat.

Can talking them down do the job by itself? Is it possible to not shoot down anyone and just talk folks into Neutrality? Aside from retros of course.

I don't know. Never tried this. Unfortunately, I can't disable pirates' ships and arrest them (like in Privateer: ASCII Sector) so they go down in violent way. I will not leave them behind to let them pirate other ships.

Sorry, I wasn't notified there was activity on this thread. To answer your question twotone, all factions except the retros can be turned neutral. I never got the Kilrathi to friendly status, but I believe it's possible. If a ship from a friendly or neutral faction is hostile to you, it's because they're mission scripted and scripted enemies can not be convinced to break fire.

I know the mission you're talking about regarding the mercenaries. If you do that part of the chain too quickly without first killing a lot of pirates, kilrathi, and retros, they'll remain hostile to you after the mission. As TPR stated, the best way to bring back to neutrality is to kill their enemies.

Great guide! Very helpful