How did you guys make so much money, any tips? Beside going all the way to darkmerge to sell weapon
In the current version, the most effective way to make money in the early game is selling slaves. Hire some good mercs and buy 5 whips to guarantee you can get captures easily, and buy some rope. In the early game when there are lots of enemies around you can easily make $20k+ every day selling slaves. Once control has risen and there are less enemies around it's less lucrative since there's just less people to capture.
There are some start up costs since you will have to pay the initial hiring cost for the mercs and you will also want to buy some good armor for them to save on stims. Duraplate is expensive but it quickly pays for itself in stim savings.
I also stumbled onto an additional method to save on stims recently that is pretty effective. Rather than buying duraplate for everyone, buy 1 suit of stealth armor for one of them. Yes, that's even more expensive than Duraplate but bear with me. Make sure to have at least a few nurses in your house, and either just before you go to bed or when you first wake up give that stealth armor to whoever has taken the most damage and spread the duraplate around to your other mercs.
Using that method I can frequently go for weeks without needing to use any stims at all since your nurses will heal both MC and all of your mercs who have taken damage just before midnight every day as long as you're inside somewhere (they won't do it if you're wandering around town). You will also gain additional health when you sleep.
Towards the mid game your real money maker is going to be a workshop. Those are expensive to build and upgrade and you need people with high discipline and an intelligent foreman to get full use out of them so it takes awhile to ramp up. I alternate between having it make plasma guns to sell and rifles/swords to donate to the factions. They can also make stims and doctor's kits (I haven't actually had to buy any of either in several months because of that).