Your right you can make more in combat missions now. But Maybe it was just the way I started (since there was no clue as to which is easier and which is harder) But my combat guy got damaged soo much after a few missions I had to restart because I couldn't afford to repair it. I just slowly worked my way up and got 3-4 freighters and spent a few hours doing trade. Now I have a small fleet of them and working on building up an attack force. Not enough hours in the week extra to really sink into it sucks.
Terran Conflict is all you need. I picked up all the X3's version for like 5 dollars on the xmas sale, but only playing TC. Also doing a bit of web research helps when starting a new game.
Munching On: FF14 storyline, SAO PS4, Horizon.