Did anyone ever find another "special" one? I didn't. That's when I found Gaia, though.[DOUBLEPOST=1388779947,1388779915][/DOUBLEPOST]Gas, explain how trade routes work. Do they automatically keep going back & forth doing your trades?
What MD said. Yeah, I found a special one, do all my upgrades there now. You just gotta go out and start exploring at some point.
A trade route has you go between two ports, selling everything they're buying and buying everything they're selling, within money and hull space constraints. Using a trade route lets you batch repeat that trade hundreds of times with one click.
I've never had a trade route run dry of things to buy/sell. I find after 100 trades or so with a level... 20ish hull, each trade session has decreased to about 2 thirds or half the profitability per run (prices also adjust due to supply and demand as you trade), and then I move on to the next place I have trades.
Also, if your engine is good enough, find two adjacent ports to trade between and do it by realspace instead of warping. If you can travel there in 1 turn in realspace, you can scoop energy in both directions and sweeten the deal with that profit as well.
The only real irritant I've found with trade routes is you can't tell it NOT to sell all your energy at both ends (assuming it's not an energy depot, because why would it be), so I end each trading session with no energy, meaning I've got to scoop/buy another million or so energy in case I come across one of you dirty bastards floating in space and need to burn a few holes in you.