I more or less reached the critical point for exponential income with enough trading lanes to make a couple thousand credits a day, so decided to poke around with combat missions and followed the tutorial on it. However, it seems that the global supervillain is Ion Lane in my game, the #1 company. And all the contracts range from tiny companies to the #2 company who want to be defended against them. Literally nobody else is offering combat missions, and shooting asteroids is not all that fun.

The problem is Ion Lane more or less owns all the important hubs, including ones where I have stations, and I have a very good relationship with them. I'm also entirely unsure how war works at all; if I declared war on the only company my size, I have no idea what sort of repercussions there are, and the only clue is a 'diplomacy penalty' research. I've heard many negative reviews on declaring war on companies and didn't want to go in blind. In the end I decided to wage war on Ion Lane, hoping that the few important places they only had a couple bases would have reinforcement from the countless people who hated them.

Long story short I got my ass kicked horribly almost immediately because they swarmed me so much I couldn't refill my ammo or defend all my stations, but they accepted peace with no seeming repercussions and stopped taking over all my stations. And being at war with them completely destroyed my income, too, as all my trade routes stopped working, so all the better they accepted my peace for whatever reason, presumably that I still somehow had a rather positive relationship.

Then I found out where the pirates were! Only to discover I had a good relationship with the pirates and they seemed to operate no different than any other faction. After recovering my trade lanes to get back into the positive, the only thing I have to do is the Pendulum storyline, which would be trivial to finish, and shoot meteors. I guess Orca's are really really fast at VIP escorts.

Is there a proper way to fight things? If I play long enough will wars happen anyway? I'm sort of looking for the point of combat at the moment. It might be fun, but I have nothing to fight, unless I drop a bunch of defensive ships on every base, which is a bit tedious. I'm aware it's a space trading game, but I've more or less solved the formula for becoming super rich at the moment, and the novelty of buying gigaships will wear off fast, especially when I currently have no need to make stations myself. What's the intended endgame look like? Is it to be the #1 company? I suppose I can try to overtake Ion Lane, but it's hard to catch up to people worth 3 million even with the income I currently have...