Living Next Door to Brave

We're finding out what it means to have a disgruntled former child star living next door. They visit, break your stuff and attract the attention of seriously well-equipped ne'er-do-wells.

Brave Newbies left nullsec a little while ago and some of them pitched camp in Heydieles. Over the past few days they put some of our POCOs into reinforce. Last night we showed up to repair one and they sent a few Tornados to harass us as we did so. Just as we were about to upship a cyno appeared and a Snuffbox fleet poured out: a lot of Proteuses plus a Phoenix.  We called for help from our friends in Rdraw but the most we could do was take out the small cormorant fleet that Brave had on-field and watch as our POCO went down and a new one was put up in its place. *sigh* I made a lot of money with that ol' POCO, she was a good'n.

We've had things our own way in Fliet for a long, long time. We moved in in December 2013 and haven't been seriously threatened since then. But this new combination of Brave plus Snuffbox is worrying; I guess we'll see what comes next and also if we have any friends with sufficiently big ships to push back.

Edit: Next day, the same thing happened. Another POCO came out of reinforce and we showed up to defend it...and Snuffbox's Proteii poured out of a cyno.

Billy Daniels' tweet sums it up pretty well.

I may be changing my PI setup anyway -- I've found that it's getting really difficult to buy the P3s I need to assemble into P4s.  I had set aside one planet for making P2s into P3s and that is going well enough that I am planning to expand that operation to other worlds. I think I can make more profit by having a P2-P3 operation running steadily, versus the occasional P3-P4 run.

Trading the Citadel announcement

Citadel Profits

I've signed up at evetrademaster so I can see my assets/transactions through a web site, you should do the same!

It's been a while, huh? The last two months have been almost entirely about trading and Planetary Interaction. The announcement of the coming Citadel expansion caused a nice spike in P4 PI prices, because CCP revealed what materials are needed to build these gargantuan space fortresses and it included a huge amount of P4 items. The spike lasted at least two weeks, and I was in the happy position of having a lot of P3 materials piled up -- I'd been acquiring them but hadn't been in a hurry to build them into P4s.

I pushed the P3s into the factories ASAP and built and sold them all! I have an Epithal in Jita that makes the trip to my factory planet nearby and, although I was carrying nearly a billion ISK of stuff sometimes, I never lost a ship, thanks to the cloak+mwd trick and insta-dock/undock bookmarks.

The prices of the Jump Freighters that I'd been buying (I think I had 9 or 10 in the hangar) ALL went up too, and I sold almost all of them, making 250-400M on each one.

Additionally, I've continued building several T1 rigs. I keep looking for more/different rigs to build, but I keep finding that the same small stable of products is the best. If you're looking to do T1 manufacturing, its worth building a spreadsheet, automated if you can manage that, and find them for yourself. You can easily buy the needed materials with buy orders; that stuff just floods in so quickly.  Look for rigs that sell at least 10M ISK worth of stuff per day; I've found that some items look good, but sell so slowly that its not worth it.

I was able to sell most of my datacore stockpile too, some nice profits there. I buy five types whose prices swing from under 100K to about 120-130K, sometimes hitting 150K+.

Going Forward

At my last post in October I had about 100B in cash/assets/escrow; that's now up to 145B! 45% increase in two months is a figure I'm very happy with. I had over 50B cash at one point, but I've invested that in plex (buying one a week now), and more Jump Freighters (7) and datacores; I'm down to about 20B cash plus 10B in escrow.

The PI activity is slowing down as it's become harder to acquire the input materials with buy orders. Both my characters have five planets set up, most of which do nothing now that I've cleared out my input materials. I've considered switching my setups to include some extraction so the planets will be productive, but the task is pretty daunting and I keep putting it off.

I've begun a couple of new activities: trading tags between regions (very nice, if you find the right combination!) and making Ascendancy implants. I had picked up an Ascendancy implant BPC from a Serpentis ghost site and did the math on building it. It turned out to be worth doing, so I expanded the spreadsheet to examine the profits on all levels of the Ascendancy range. I found a sweet spot, bought the BPCs from the contract market at Jita, changed one of my factories to build the P3 inputs needed and I now create one of those implants per day. I think I could expand this, as they sell pretty quickly.

I occasionally undock, run plexes, shoot dudes with my corpmates too.