Mixing It Up Some More: FW Missions

I finally installed the new launcher for Eve yesterday, since they're going to turn off the old one. I immediately panicked as I launched the game and was greeted by the introductory video and Aura saying "Welcome to Eve." It turned out that despite successfully importing my old client settings then launcher didn't think I'd want to use them. *sigh* I figured out the weird popup setting button (the button should stay "down" while the popup is active) and selected the imported data as, yes, the profile I wanted to use, and all was well.

I've written recently about my efforts to have ships ready for use for a wider range of activities and that has been working. It ranges from a PvE Dominix built to take on Besieged Covert sites (still not fully tested) to three copies of my salvaging Imicus stationed in nearby systems for cleaning up after running PvE sites if the mood strikes me. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that I don't have to have just ONE instance of a useful ship!

Faction Warfare Missions

The Gallente are in Tier 3 at the moment and I don't have much LP so I've been looking for ways to run more missions without using a Proteus and a corp-mate mentioned he was solo running level 4 Faction Warfare missions in a stealth bomber. I remembered that CCP had rebalanced this missions for all races a while ago (Reddit discussion here) and wondered how it was going for him? He said the bomber could handle two missions: Dead Men Tell No Tales and The Reprisal. I correctly guessed this was because both missions requires killing just one target, but despite the reduced jamming from the rebalance, it still happened frequently.

We have four FW agents in our home station and I have taken to asking them every day for missions, in case they offer me something close by that I can do. The missions can be as little as 3 jumps from our home and you can ask each agent twice without penalty: you can decline the first offer and delay the second till their 4 hour timer expires, then request again.  I had actually never done level 1, 2 or 3 missions so when they came up in a nearby system I went ahead and ran a few. The first paid about 1k LP (about 1M ISK), the second about 3.5k LP and the third about 14k LP. I was able to run them in a Tristan, Algos and Vexor respectively with no special fittings needed.

The serious payout is at level 4: 50k LP per mission.  There are ten possible missions and I want to know which I can run without a Proteus. You may remember my earlier post about Cutting The Net being easily completed with a cheap frigate. So when the level 4 agent offered me Dead Men Tell No Tales in a nearby system I took my Nemesis out to see how I went.

[Nemesis, Nemesis]
Damage Control II
Ballistic Control System II

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Warp Disruptor II
Phased Scoped Target Painter
Phased Scoped Target Painter

Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Inferno Torpedo
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Inferno Torpedo
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Inferno Torpedo
[empty high slot]

Small Anti-Explosive Pump I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

I took the second target painter off and put in...damn...I can't remember; it's going to need some more ECCM anyway because I got jammed several times. I had almost killed the target structure when I reached about 10% armor and decided to warp out and repair. After doing so I returned and two more shots completed the mission. I had messed up my entry and not taken advantage of a trick described here wherein you arrived at the site cloaked and get into orbit around the target before starting to shoot. You'll get in a couple of volleys before the rats even start firing at you. I also spent too much time trying to identify the right target because the mission text used a different description of the target than the site did!

I may even set up a clone with low-grade Spur implants to defend against jamming even more. Now that we can switch clones in Citadels with no cool-down timer, why not?!

I now have ways of running three out of the ten possible level 4 missions cheaply: if I take a tour of the dozen or so FW agent station near us I'm likely to get a good haul of well-located missions of all levels. And the home-station agents can be pestered regularly to get a quick-to-run mission every couple of days at least.

Planetary Interaction Update

The new schema (see two posts down) is working well, not only financially but I find myself more relaxed about letting the factories stop occasionally. I'm able to supply all my own raw materials though do occasionally set up a buy order for stuff that I need which is selling cheap. If you watch the P0 market you can find some bargains. For example I bought several million Complex Organisms very cheaply and now don't need to extract so much; I'll just refine it for a while.

Three Workhorse Ships: Ratting Atron, Probing Imicus, PI Epithal

This is a quick post to write about three ships that I use a lot: a belt-ratting Atron, a probing Imicus and m'lovely Epithal which carries the juicy PI products around

[Atron, Fly, You Fools!]
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Damage Control II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Medium Shield Extender II
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Fleeting Compact Stasis Webifier

Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I



Void S x1163
Null S x1263

This shield tanked Atron is a tight fit but a joy to blap rats with. It has about 4k EHP and delivers about 200 dps. It will kill anything up to and including Serpentis clone soldiers (not Guristas, which fire missiles that have no problem finding you) and Serpentis Baron/Commodore vessels. Just orbit your target at 500 meters and open fire. A pulse from the MWD will cover about 35km, letting you get close quickly. You may need to downgrade some of these modules to make it fit for you.

--

[Imicus, Looky]
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Warp Core Stabilizer I

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Scan Rangefinding Array I
Scan Pinpointing Array I
Scan Acquisition Array I

Core Probe Launcher I
Prototype Cloaking Device I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

A simple scanning and probing Imicus for finding cosmic signatures - there's nothing special about this fit, it's just a good workhorse to have around for digging up content. The warp core stabilizers is just me being paranoid. I have probing ships with Sisters probes but this simpler fit is a good place to start.

--

[Epithal, Blue Night]
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Warp Core Stabilizer I

Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Deluge Enduring Burst Jammer
50MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II

Improved Cloaking Device II

Medium Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Medium Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing I

A good Epithal is a must for those doing Planetary Interaction. It has a specialized cargo bay that carries at least 50k m3 of PI material. The modules I'm using are for running away - I usually pre-overheat the burst jammer and activate one of the  invulns. It can do the Cloak+MWD trick that will get you safely away from gates as quickly as possible. Here's a longer video specifically about transports.

Space Farming: Self sustained Planetary Interaction

I've almost completed my new PI setup, which is driven entirely from extraction. I got tired of the price swings I encountered in buying input materials from Jita and decided to see if I could make it work solo.  Eveplanets tells me that my home system of Fliet can build Recursive Computing Modules from scratch and since we have 0% taxes on our POCOs and I'd like to avoid going through stargates that's what I decided to make.

I'm using all three of my characters in this effort (five planets each), which I hope will only require me to pay attention for a few minutes a day. One lives in highsec, where planetary yields are lower than they are in low-sec, but by getting her to dig up the most common materials like Bacteria and Biofuels, my two lowsec characters can focus on the rarer stuff. My main has CCU V and the others CCU IV.

How Much Can I Make?

P4 items are worth an average of 2M a piece. I started with a minimalist setup that produced 1 every two hours; that's 12 a day which is worth 24M a day or 720M ISK a month...that's almost a plex right there! RCMs are selling for 2.2-2.5M right now.

This table shows the quantity you'll need to supply if you want to produce half a p4 per hour (see the QTY CALC 1 column).

Stage	Amt Per Hour In of each input	Amt Per Hour Out	Ratio	QTY CALC 1	QTY CALC 12	QTY CALC 24
p0		6,000.00		12000	288000	576000
p0-p1	6000	40.00	150	80	1920	3840
p1-p2	40	5.00	8	10	240	480
p2-p3	10	3.00	1.67	3	72	144
p3-p4	6	1.00	3	0.5	12	24

It's very common to see raw extraction rates of 8-10k per hour of a p0 so we're in the ballpark of the 12k per hour for each p0 material that we'll need. The 12 and 24 columns tell you how much material you need per day for for 1 RCM every two hours and 1 every hour, respectively. 

I'm going to expand my factories to be capable of spitting out 1 per hour, but I don't think I'll be able to maintain the materials to supply that steadily. My estimate is that I can produce somewhere between the two, right around 1B ISK per month.

What Materials Do I Need to Extract?

Look at the schematic for the final item on eveplanets - here's the RCM one. Note all the items at the bottom row of the tree - that's what you need to dig up.  Here's what RCM requires:

Raw Material (P0)	P1	P2	P3
Noble Gas	Oxygen	Supertensile Plastics (Oxy + Biomass)	Guidance Systems (Water CPU + Transmitter)
Planktic Col	Biomass	Test Cultures (Bact + Water)	Synthetic Synapses (Supertensile + Test)
Microorg (2)	Bacteria	Water CPU (Reactive + Water)	Transcranial Microcontrollers (Biocells + Nanites)
Aqueous (2)	Water	Transmitter (Plasmoids + Chiral)
Base Metals (2)	Reactive Metals	Biocells (Biofuels + Precious)
Plasma	Plasmoids	Nanites (Bact + Reactive)
Non-CS	Chiral Structures
Carbon Comp	Biofuels
Noble Metals	Precious Metals

I then compared that list to what was available at the planets I could use and assigned the work among my three characters.

I ended up with 15 planets of which 13 are doing extraction. Those planets also refine to p1 right there on the planet, a very common practice. 

Here's my final list of which alt did what work. I divided the p1-p2 step between the two Fliet characters. Each one picks up the p1 materials from their extraction worlds and sends the appropriate material to the other for refining. Vic's all use Bacteria, Reactive and Water, so that's quite tidy :) .

HS Alt	Vic in Fliet	LS Alt in Fliet
Bacteria 2	p1 to p2: Nanites, Water CPU, Test Cult. Fliet III	p1 to p2: Biocells, Transmitter,Supertensile Plastics Fliet III
Reactive Metals 2	p2 to p4 Fliet I (mixed in with Biofuels/Precious extraction)	Fliet I: Biofuels and Bacteria
Biofuels 2	Fliet II Plasmoids and Chiral	Fliet II Plasmoids and Chiral
Precious Metals 2	Fliet V: biomass and water	Fliet V: biomass and biomass
Other	Fliet IV: oxygen and reactive metals	Fliet IV: oxygen and reactive metals

My HS Alt is doing some extraction on one planet that isn't related to this schematic. She's doing two extractions of Bacteria, Reactive Metals, Biofuels and Precious Metals for this operation. The yield isn't great, but it's good enough. I pay 6% taxes, but it's cheap stuff so taxes aren't high. I do Project Discovery slides during the journey which more than makes the money back :)

The most surprising thing to me was the final half of the process, turning all the p2s into the RCMs themselves. I'd imagined setting aside a planet for it but as I came to the point of actually building it it occurred to me that it only required 4 factories which used a total of about 2500 MW of power....so I just turned off 5 extraction heads on one of my less-critical worlds and built the p2-p4 factories right there among the extractors!

How Is It Performing?

Pretty well! I'm not refining Planktic Colonies or Non-CS Crystals fast enough so I'm going to add more basic factories to pump out more. You often end up switching between 1, 2 or 3 basic factories for a raw material to match the volumes you're pulling out of the planet.

I ran it at the "1 per 2 hour" rate for a few days and just last night added another bank of p2-p3 factories so I can get up to 1 per hour. I'm seeing my p2 supplies pile up sufficiently to feed that, except for Supertensile Plastics, which is my bottleneck. I've switched one of my Ice planets to have BOTH extractors pull out planktic/biomass to try and address that imbalance. Vic is getting his sixth planet next week so I'll be able to add more extraction/processing if necessary.

So there it is, my new PI setup. For something that was supposed to be less work than the old one, it sure took a while to plan and set up! The clicking, oh gods, the clicking....

Less Planetary Interaction, More PvE and PvP

I was flying one of these hull-tanked Megathron battleships.

Our Sunday night roam led into a great battle where we teamed up with RDraw and temporarily with CalMil in order to whale on some guys that had just left the Snuff alliance. Kirith wrote about it here - our fleet lost 5B of ships and killed 16.4B. Our job was to land after the main forces had engaged and take out their five repair ships. Props to the brave pilot who got us a warp-in so we could land right where we needed to be.  I got out with a nice chunk of loot too, some of which I'm using for PvE. I could've got more but my cargo was full and I forgot that I could transfer some of the cheaper loot INTO the wreck with the juicy loot in order to make room for said juicy loot. I'd already done one jettison operation and couldn't do another in time. I left with my fleet before the CalMil guys decided that the temporary truce was over.

PI Sales

I have been watching PI prices at Jita and slowly selling the stockpile of 13,000 P4 items I have accumulated over the last couple of months. The prices are mostly drifting slowly downwards, except Sterile Conduits which has climbed. Broadcast Nodes had been holding at 4.4M each but just this morning dropped to 3.6M. I haven't seen any notable spikes in price so I'm going to push the remaining stock out faster and take my profits. I'm also still considering what to do with my PI setup: I'd like to set up a much less labor intensive scheme. I'm still doing well on High-Grade Ascendancy implants so I need to at least keep making Gel-Matrix, Cryoprotectant and Synthetic Synapses.

Besieged

I solo'd my first Besieged Covert Research Facility! After watching this video I modified his fit a bit and tried the first Besieged site I found in Fliet. I wasn't watching my sentry drones and lost one. I went back to station for another, and to strengthen my tank, which had been failing. This took a while and by the time I got back and repositioned myself the site timed out and vanished.  But I tweaked the fit a little more and the next night I ran another Besieged site. Success! Shitty loot (9M isk) but I cleared the site.

UPDATE: THIS DOESN'T WORK!  I'll leave it here in case you want to try tweaking it. Mordu's Legion actually do omni-damage, (the advice in that link is good!) hitting you wherever you are weakest. It worked once for me, maybe because the first wave had only two battleships, but the two subsequent tries both failed. I tried increasing my tank with a second ENAM and a Reactive Armor Hardener, but my reduction in DPS meant I couldn't finish the site in time.

Here's the old incorrect advice and fit - 

Here's my fit - I'm going to try dropping the ENAM and putting a Thermal Hardener (or maybe a second Kinetic), since Mordu's Legion do 70% Kinetic, 30% Thermal. It'd be nice to fit two guns too. I may put a deadspace armor repper in place of the tech II version I'm using.  This fit is cap-stable at around 40%.

[Ishtar, Ishtar - Besieged Covert Research Facility]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Centus C-Type Armor Kinetic Hardener

50MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive

Phased Scoped Target Painter

Cap Recharger II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Small Remote Armor Repairer II

250mm Railgun II

Drone Link Augmentor II

[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II

Warden II x5

Salvage Drone I x5

Garde II x5

Ogre II x2

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x1

Hornet EC-300 x5

I'm continuing to assemble ships to be ready for various PvE sites like that one. I've sorted out my best probing ship so I can scan cosmic sigs down faster, I want to have ships ready to roll for 3/10, 4/10, 5/10, various wormholes and of course our corp doctrine ships, of which I have plenty already.

Lastly I want to try some solo PvP - I found a couple (Jalep) of good (Solomon - I love this one!) Atron videos that I intend to start with. The Atron's falloff bonus is a really useful tool that doesn't get used effectively by a lot of pilots.

It Begins!

Trade - PI

Well, I'm excited!

I logged in a few nights ago and some had bought ALL the Broadcast Nodes on the market. They usually sell for ~2.5M each, but this deep-pocketed individual bought the lot and  listed them all at 9.75M. I quickly put a few hundred up for 8.7M and started checking the other P4 products. I assumed other sellers would quickly list theirs too, the question was how far down would the price go? (Note to the deep-pocketed guy; it's hard to corner the market - you can't do it with an item that people create by the thousands every day)

As you can see from the sales below several other P4 items had decent price spikes too and I managed to sell a few.  They have all settled down somewhat today, but my aim/hope of getting 3M each for the "big" P4s and 2M for the "little" P4s seems achievable.

A day or two after writing this part of the blog, the prices spiked again. I sold more Wetwares for 4.9M, Sterile Conduits for 1.9M, Broadcast Nodes for 4.9M and 3.8M. Prices continued to fall; at time of writing they're above their pre-spike prices. Power Cores and Integrity Response Drones haven't spiked at all yet, which is interesting. I've sold about 1000 P4s at most and still have about 13,000 to go -- I'm definitely betting that prices will increase after the Citadel launch.  If I'm wrong about that, well, I'm pretty certain prices won't be lower than they were before so I should be able to at least break even.

The market for P4s is an interesting place. You're betting on interacting human psychology, between sellers who make them and buyers who want to build Citadels and other stuff. Will buyers who want to build Citadels jump in now and buy what they need because they think the price will go up later? Or will they think that sellers will flood the market and push the price down, and be content to wait a while? And will sellers put their goods up for sale now to make a quick sale, or wait for eager hordes of Citadel constructors to beat a path to Jita after April 27th?  And, of course, they're thinking about what other people like themselves are doing too: buyers thinking about other buyers, and sellers thinking about other sellers, and trying to get the best deal by outsmarting everyone else involved.

I have listed a few hundred for sale at quite high prices in each of the products I have. If there's another surprise buying spree, I'll make the sale and be happy with those profits.

Turning to Jump Freighters, Nomad and Rheas have had a good price spread recently and I flipped a couple for 400-600M profit each time. However the gaps have all closed and they're not worth trading at the moment. 

My investment in plex isn't working out at the moment; I have about 35 of them, purchased at regular intervals during the long slide down from 1.2B to just under a billion now. I'll just consider it a long-term bet; when they next spike up I'll sell a few, but I'm going to keep buying.

My total value, cash, escrow and goods is sitting around 180B right now.

Trade - Rat Loot

One consequence of the recent module tiericide is that two of my best trades are dead: I used to buy Faint Epsilons and Phased Muons, which are dropped by our local rats, for about 1.3M-1.5M each. I'd use public contracts to move them into decent sized piles, with other stuff, and ship them to Jita where I'd sell them for 3M or higher, during spikes. Imperial Navy Major Insignia I tags were also really good, buying for about 1M in my home region and selling for over 2M at Jita. I'd throw in low-ball buy orders on meta 4 jammers (BZ-5, Enfeebling etc) and between them I'd get some very good profits.

Tiericide made the modules worth very little, and the price of that tag has dropped a lot. I'll keep looking for something else to trade, but there doesn't seem to be much profit in buying pirate loot in region-wide buy orders and shipping it to Jita any more. I tried doing this for the various Disruption Field Generators that our rats now drop, but the price spread is not great and they're 50 expensive-to-ship cubic meters each, versus of the tiny tags. I'll keep checking, though, especially for opportunities in tags.

Combat

We got into a doozy of a fight last week, teaming up with a GalMil/CalMil fleet to take out two Archons, two Vindicators and a Bhaalgorn. My killboard got 7B of green on it! 

I got an escalation to a 5 of 10 difficult Serpentis site, the Hydroponics Corp. It was too far away for me, so I gave the site to a corpmate of mine. Thus began his six (?) hour saga. It cost him a Stratios and a shitload of travel time, leaving and entering the site, which was 140AU from the gate, as he tried different tactics to handle the final room. Eventually he upgraded to a Dominix and succeeded in clearing the final room. The loot fairy was kind and he made enough to cover the cost of his Stratios, but I think he's swearing off PvE for a while!

Other

I'm building some T1 rigs again; I might as well name them here and see if that affects the market :) Small Particle Dispersion Projectors cost 19K to make and sell for 120K. My old favorite, Small Transverse Bulkheads cost about 150k and sell for 220k, which isn't a huge profit, but they sell fast.

I did quite a bit of Project Discovery - enough to get the SoE combat suit for my two main characters. I'm really glad they added this to the game and I hope the results we give them are considered good. The interface is a bit annoying and the tutorial has some problems, but I believe they're working on revising both those things.

I had loaned 5B isk to a corpmate who wanted to set up a PI operation. He'd borrowed money from other friends before and paid it back, so myself and a few others pitched up to help him out again. He made monthly payments, then paid back the principal after just a couple of months. If you can find someone to help out, and you trust them, do it! And if you want to build up trust from people you intend to scam later, smart small and work up to the big con! :)

Lastly, I was very pleased to get an in-game email from someone telling me that they really like this blog and that the ideas I share here are valuable to them. It's always nice to get confirmation that you're helping people get into Eve.

You Pays Your Money, You Takes Your Chances

It's decision time. Having spent almost all my liquid isk I have to raise a bit of cash to keep the PI materials flowing to feed my PI installations. I have a pretty good supply of them stashed in Fliet, but the pipeline that tops up those supplies is not getting fed like it used to. I've decided to start selling my approximately 10,000 P4 items now; I'm going to sell about a quarter of them. A friend of mine who plays Eve expressed scorn that I was chickening out by not waiting till AFTER the Citadel release to start selling :)

There's another good reason to do this; I've come this far on the assumption that PI prices will spike even higher after the Citadel release, as everyone rushes to build. But there are surely plenty of new industrialists starting to build P4 items now in anticipation of that demand. It's possible that prices will stay stable, or even fall, after the release. I don't think that is likely, but it doesn't hurt to hedge my bets, take some profit and raise some spending money.

And the profits are good! Most P4 items are yielding about 500k - 1M profit per item, if you built from P3s acquired with buy orders.

I used the asset search window to check what items I had stashed away that might be worth selling and was sad to find a few hundred Phased Muon Sensor Dampers and sixty Faint Epsilons. It's a weird feeling to think these once prized meta 4 items are now just a cheap variation of a module, nothing special.

Planetary Interaction Ramps Up

I've spent most of my time since January creating and running a new Planetary Interaction setup. I had sold off my jump freighter collection as prices rose, resulting in an 80B ISK wallet balance, with a similar amount in material between my two characters. Time to invest! I bought a plex or two each week, to average out my cost, more jump freighters (as prices became favorable) and datacores.

I'm going to start with the introspective passage I was going to write at the end of this post, because its probably more interesting than the details of "blah blah I'm getting rich", which follow. Why am I doing this? Why does making money in Eve feel, to me, like winning? 

I read something in a reddit discussion that rang true: having money makes you more like you were. Couple this with an observation I heard delonewolf make: you will probably play Eve in a way that matches your real life personality.  Add a dab of Jakob's observation of the five stages of Eve  (I'm a textbook stage three) and I think it summarizes how I see myself fitting in New Eden.

In real life I'm careful with finances. I look for opportunities to optimize spending and make the most of what I have. I'm good at deferring gratification and can make the most of what I have access to already.  I like helping others do the same thing!

In Eve this translates to looking for bargains, trying to turn money into more money and making the most of the ships I already have and can already fly instead of trying to get into more and more hulls. In all that, I try to maximize my return for a minimal amount of risk.

I also enjoy writing guides like this blog and wiki entries for our corp so that other players can, if they choose, do what I did with a helping hand to get past the difficult parts. I know this will help keep players in the game, and not quit because of space-poverty.

And as I achieve the goals I set for myself, my net worth feels like the scoreboard and I enjoy looking for ways to repeat that hit.

I think I've reached the limit on what I can do with the time I have to play. I don't want more characters or accounts, and keeping two PI setups running and attending a couple of fleets a week is a pretty good play style for now. I do intend, one day, to learn how to PvP though :) I'm training Advanced Weapon Upgrades V on my main!

How I Invested

With the announcement of the Citadel expansion prices and availability of top-tier PI items started to shift around. This was because Citadels require a lot of tier 4 PI items to build. I have built tier 4 items straight from tier 3 items for a while, but it was getting more and more difficult to acquire those materials, and my factories were spending a lot of time idle.

I came with a new plan (google doc here describing it), aimed at making the tier 3 Gel-Matrix Biopaste and Cryoprotecant Solution. Those two feed into two different tier 4 items, plus other items I manufacture.  I would extract and build what I could in Fliet, and build my tier 4s from those materials, plus other tier 1,2 and 3 bought in Jita. It took a while to get the balance right but the flow of materials is enough to keep the factories humming, with a fairly healthy buffer of supplies sitting in station. With the April 27th release date now announced I have about 10k tier 4 items ready to sell and plenty of items to run through the factories to keep producing more. There have been some very encouraging price spikes already!

I couldn't have done it without the excellent Jump Freighter service provided by Aideron! And our friendly neighbors helped defend or recapture POCOs when we lost them to our less friendly neighbors. I'm usually attentive when transporting goods to the POCOs, but I did get too engrossed one night and lose an Epithal on a PI alt that I created. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I finally used my third character slot on my account! I gave him 2-3 weeks of training and set him up on five planets, extracting on four worlds and assembling two tier 3 items on a fifth.

I've stopped producing Tech 1 rigs; the sell prices are all close to manufacturing cost and those juicy profits of six months ago are gone. It was a good run, though, and I still have my researched BPOs to fall back on; I'll check prices occasionally, but there's not enough meat on the bone right now.

Interface Complaint

If CCP want more people to do PI, to feed Citadel construction, the PI interface needs to be less clicky. Volumes have been written on this topic, I hope CCP will find some dev time for it. Remove the spinning building graphic, have an auto-routing button, have a simple "error report" that identifies duplicate outgoing routes and missing routes from factories that aren't sending their outputs anywhere. Otherwise it feels like you're being punished for overlooking a step, something CCP should try and avoid where its easily detectable. Templates for setting up common layouts would be nice. Being able to drag and drop an existing layout to a new location would be great. Charge me a fee equal to tearing it down and setting it up, just don't make me do all that clicking again, please!

If they don't do that, it's possible Citadel construction will suffer due to a lack of materials.

Other Stuff

A guy in Jita offered to contract me some items that I thought were about to be merged with much cheaper, more plentiful modules in the March patch. I rejected his offer and got two long emails back saying it wasn't a scam and that I'd misidentified the items he was offering. It was exhausting to think about and I haven't read them carefully yet.

Speaking of which, my very enjoyable and profitable trade in Faint Epsilon and Phased Muon meta 4 items has come to halt with the last round of tiericide. I sold most of my stock before that happened, but still had a substantial amount in storage. Oh well. I'm no longer buying loot in my home region at the moment.

I got my Jita alt's Sisters of Eve standings up to the point where she can do level 4 missions, but needs more training to fly a battleship well. It was a good experience, nice change of scene, going to the level 3 agents and running missions for a couple of days. I made a new friend too, in the process, finding a guy who was willing to share SoE LP when I was at the bottom of level 3 agents.

I had a few nice one on one fights with a neutral in system. She said I was the first person to honor a 1v1 fight request, which surprises me! She won 2 fights (her rocket kestrel vs my blaster atron) and I won one, when my Tristan's drones caught her Condor as she changed direction.

I'm enjoying doing Project Discovery, though I wish there were some lower level rewards. I mapped Shift+Alt+D to launch the window so I can bring it up quickly in a quiet moment during a fleet. The two videos from Spaceships Involved really helped get my head around this!

For fun I'm taking an Atron to the Abandoned Mining Colony in our home and killing a rat battle cruiser every 15 minutes for a sec status boost and the occasional good loot drop.

Here's the fit I use for that; it's quite a tight fit so you may need to downsize things for it to work for you. I get about 190 dps cold and over 4k EHP. I didn't EFT this, it just grew in stages. It can kill Serpentis clone soldiers!

Here's a tip for the start of a fight; you should know how far a pulse of your MWD will take you. For me this goes about 30-35 km. If I need to cross 20km quickly and want to slip into orbit cleanly at the end, I pulse the MWD and set my speed to about one-half. As the cycle finishes I max out my speed again (with MWD off, of course!) and start shooting.

[Atron, Ratting Atron]
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Damage Control II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Medium Shield Extender II
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Fleeting Compact Stasis Webifier

Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I



Void S x1000

Life Speeds Up

Life Speeds Up...then it goes away

Faction Warfare Missions

I've had a productive couple of weeks lately and I think there's enough material to tell a story or two. I have been out with friends and run Level 4 faction warfare missions, earning about 360K lp in two sessions, totalling about 5 hours. The second set of missions we run seemed to be cursed from the start: my friend undocked his Proteus and the Eve server crashed. When he logged back in he found himself on the station undock, but luckily nobody had attacked him. We set off on our route and suffered two more disconnects. Most of the first missions were mine and we happily blasted through them, noting how quiet the systems were. "I've probably jinxed it now!" said my buddy.

Yes. Yes he had.

When we warped to his mission in Asakai he found a Succubus on the gate, waiting for him. He got scrammed...I landed just behind him and jumped into the mission. I wondered if he could use the acceleration gate too, but it seemed that being scrammed prevented him jumping in with me. I pressed ahead, getting into the field of rats, wondering if I should bounce out and go help my friend.

As in many engagements, the question arises, "whose friends will get here first?"...presumably our attacker had allies coming and we had nobody...but wait! Who just jumped into system?! X Gallentius, a well-known Galmil FC. I quickly convo'd him and asked if he could help. He said yes and we waited...my friend's armor was going down and a Pilgrim had landed to help the Succubus. He was being neuted too, and it was starting to look bleak.  Still no sign of our blue buddies landing.

Into structure and a couple of galmil began to arrive, but it was too late. The Proteus turned to wreckage, but the Succubus and his friend were scrammed and destroyed. The gal-bros were kind enough to send some ISK to my friend to help pay for his next ship.

My luck held and I completed my sixth and final mission on my own and headed back home, where we turned in our missions and collected our reward.

Jita Trading and PI

My Jita alt has added some Planetary Interaction skills so I could take advantage of a low-ish tax rate on a good set of POCOs I found near Jita. I did a little math and found a setup that I think will work. I screwed up my first batch and sold them for one-tenth the cost I was looking for, but I'll make that back shortly. I'm using the Customs Code Expertise to lower that tax rate even further. I'm sticking with the same setup I have in Fliet, buying level 3 PI materials and producing level 4s. I could have tried going from level 2 to level 4 but that's frankly more logistics that I care to deal with. Three-to-four will make me about 80-100K profit per unit produced, which I'm perfectly happy with.

The jump freighters I bought are on the verge of returning to higher prices so I can finally sell them. It was an interesting experiment, but too slow to be worth it. I'm going to return to the quick flip, even if the profits are lower.  Some of the other items I've been stockpiling have just had a nice price spike so I'm trying to offload them now.  I've also written a piece of software that will be capable of watching that information for me, when I get around to writing that part of it.

Trading With Stockpiles

Too much cash, not enough flow. 

In an earlier post about station trading I recommended that traders sell their acquired goods as soon as possible, so they'll make a profit right away and be able to put that money into something else. I still think this is good advice, but I've recently hit upon a different "mode" of station trading: trading from stockpiles.

My trading alt has too much money! I know, I know, nice problem to have :)  She was sitting on 3B ISK recently and my usual cash-burner, acquiring expensive Cybernetic Arms (500-700M a piece) and tattoos (100M to 600M each) wasn't working...my buy orders weren't getting filled. She also had about 4B ISK worth of stuff in her hangar: datacores, tattoos (the Prototype/Wreckage style) and some level 4 PI products. My PI production was on hold at the time, so I wasn't spending a lot on level 3 PI products for my factory planets, which is something that usually eats up a lot of money.

I could have been selling her items, but I reasoned that it wasn't worth it. All I would get is cash; cash that I couldn't spend on anything worthwhile.  I looked around for new stuff to invest in but didn't find anything expensive enough to make a dent in the cash pile. So, what to do?

I decided to wait. Specifically, I'm waiting for price spikes

Price spikes come along surprisingly frequently. Small Remote Armor Repair IIs, for example swung between 1M and 2M several times over just a few days. I bought a bunch at 1M, sold a lot of it at 2M...but it's currently at 800K, so I have to wait and see which way the swings will go next. There were opportunities to sell at lower prices, or to panic and get out when the price dropped, but patience has paid off.

The price of the Gallente Datacores I own is strongly influenced by the Faction Warfare standing of the militia. They're at Tier 4 now, so the flood of those datacores has finally started to push the price down. The price had stayed surprisingly high while we were in Tier 3 and I managed to sell a lot of datacores around the 150K each mark, or higher. Patience paid off here too, though it was a long wait for these to go up from the 100K or so I paid for each of them to the 150K I sold them for.  I'm going to look for opportunities to buy the Caldari Quantum datacores - they have spiked to over 200K a few times.

The last example is Vaccines, which I bought in vast quanties for about 40K each before Crius. I sold a lot of it off before the new Industry system came out, waiting to see what effects it would have on PI. But I still had a good amount left at Jita, about 12,000 units. The price dropped below 40K and I held on to my stock. Sellers started to dwindle and the cost of Sterile Conduits, the P4 item that Vaccines are used in, surged by about 50%, from 600K to 900K. The few people selling Vaccines got cleaned out...and in steps me, Johnny-On-The-Spot. I put one-third of my stock up for sale at 60K and it's selling steadily. I'll wait and see what happens next, but I think I can raise my price to 70K and still find buyers.

Edit: Update from 8/18/2014: I had a stockpile of Balmer tracking disrutors, obtained cheaply on buy orders. The Jita sell price has been hovering around 800K for a while, but I waited, and yesterday it spiked to 1.4M. I've sold a dozen or so, and am trying to get the rest out while the price is high.

The vaccines price dropped to 57K and I've decided to use them in the manner they were intended; making Sterile Conduits, which are holding their price in the high 800K range. Their usual range is 600K.

I also saw a price spike in meta 4 damps (Phased Muon) and sold my stock into that spike. I went a bit early, though, and the price rose even higher. Never mind, it was still a very nice of 1M on each item.

Moral of the story: be prepared to change your investment rules if you think you can make more money in a different way.

---

A nice industrial thing happened yesterday. Our corp needed to quickly acquire some rigs, and it so happens that I'm set up to make a lot of rigs. The market price on these items was pretty high and I was able to quickly tell the boss that we could make them a lot cheaper...80% below market price! Pro-tip: a lot of rigs are sold at crazy markups; you should get in on that! I got the BPOs (that was my alt's first trip to my main's station) to my main character's factory and started 5 lines running. It's nice to be able to help your corp in new ways.

Planetary Interaction For Maximum Profit

from flickr user nixter

Most of my planning/thinking time has gone into Planetary Interaction (PI) lately. With a free JF service available to members of Aideron, and our 0% tax rate on Player Owned Custom's Offices (POCO) in Fliet and Heydieles, I realized that the best way to maximize my PI profits (see fuzzwork's PI list for guidance, set to 0% tax)was to go straight to the top end of town, by making 100-200K profit per item, and making as many items as possible per day. This occurs at the P3 to P4 levels, making, for example, Broadcast Nodes, Sterile Conduits, Nano-Factories etc. This yields me about 43M ISK profit, per planet, per day, if the markets don't swing too far, with each world producing 270 finished P4 items in 30 hours, or 216 per 24 hours if you prefer to measure that way.

Starting up an operation like this is pretty capital-intensive: a full load of P3 inputs averages about 160M or 240M, depending on which P4 output you're building. I've spent over a billion isk so far, but the returns are starting to come in.

You will need access to a POCO that charges 0% tax and also a cheap jump freighter service to Jita.

Layout

I currently run three barren/temperate planets, (later expanding to five) each of which has a PI layout with 3 launchpads (LP) and 9 High-Tech Industrial Facilities (HTIF). I buy all the inputs I need from Jita and have them shipped to me (thanks, free JF dude!), then use an Epithal to ferry the inputs out to my planets. Each LP is linked to 3 factories, and is loaded with one product only, and of course that output is routed to every factory. Each factory will chew through its inputs in 30 hours, so maintaining a steady supply of inputs is important. The outputs are sent back to the LPs, then picked up each day and shipped off to Jita for sale, again with 0% tax paid and our excellent corporate jump freighter service delivers to Jita at very low cost (woohoo! Join Aideron!)

I spent some time considering the use of Storage Facilities instead of Launch Pads. SFs use much less CPU, which would let me have more HTIFs chewing through the inputs, and creating more output per day. But the realities of "cooldown time" on transfers between storage units made that unfeasible. Yes, you can get cooldown time as low as 5 minutes, but 5 minutes delay, twice, per planet would make the logistics of doing a pickup AND reload run too annoying. Let me know if you found a way to make it work, I'd love to hear it!

Market Fluctuations

At 200K profit per item, and about 216 (9 factories times 24 hours) items made per day, this works out to about 43M ISK profit per day, per planet.

BUT!

The market for the outputs can be fairly volatile. For example, by the time I got my Broadcast Nodes to market, the sale price had dropped from 1.4M to 1.2M...profits all gone. What's more, the cost of Neocoms, one of the inputs, had jumped from 50K to 70K, making the process unprofitable. Luckily I had secured a good amount of inputs at good prices and was able to continue with building. Look around for sources outside Jita and, if you find them, use PushX or RedFrog to ship them to you. And buy from buy orders, not from sell orders. Even though the price of sell orders went up, for some reason the buy orders stayed cheap. And if THAT isn't possible, just wait till things cool off, buy large amounts be ready to ride out the storm.

I'm continuing to produce Broadcast Nodes, since I got my inputs fairly cheap, and am waiting for the price to increase before I sell it.

My second planet is making Sterile Conduits and things are better there. For 600K of inputs I get 800K of value out and just completed my first sale at Jita overnight, selling 207 of them for 160M, yielding 40M profit.

My next world will probably make Nano-Factories. I'm hoping that by diversifying across other P4 commodities, there will always be something selling at a good price.

[Update from Oct 2014: I'm also making Self-Harmonizing Power Cores now. All the P4 items fluctuate in price and so do their P3 inputs. When the input prices drop below about 40K I buy a lot of stock. I hold the P4 output at Jita until there's a price spike.]

Loading Your Launch Pads

This is important! Don't load your launchpads to full, because, remember, the completed P4 items will be stored there. Leave room for them! Each LP has 3 HTIFs routed to it, so every hour 300m3 will arrive. If there's not enough room at the LP, your expensive output will be destroyed!

Broadcast Nodes eat 108m3 (6 x 6 x 3) for each 100m3 item created, and all inputs are the same size. So this one is easy: load 1616 units of each input into the LP. That occupies just under 9700 m3, leaving 300m3 for the first 3 completed items to arrive in. I don't know if the game, when faced with output and input on an LP at the same time, takes the inputs OUT first, or tries to put the finished items IN first. Playing it safe, I left room for the finished items to be placed in first.

Sterile Conduits are an example of the other kind of P4 item: six each of two P3 inputs of 6m3 each, and 40 input of water at 0.38m3 each. You should build a spreadsheet (This! Is! EVE!) to figure this out, but I came to 1616 again for the 6m3 inputs and 11,000 for the P2 inputs such as water. Both types will run out after about 30 hours.

I'd share my spreadsheet, but it's a messy piece of crap that should not be seen by human eyes.

Final thought: most people do PI covering more than one stage of production; that is, they go P2 to P4, or raw materials to P2. I've done that too, but if you have the ability to pay 0% tax and can do very cheap or free transport, it seems to me that going straight to the most profitable stage of the process makes the most sense. I'll write more posts on this as the story unfolds! One of my Aideron PI buddies prefers having 2 LPs and 2 storage facilities, which would allow me to fully load the LPs, direct the output to the SFs, and let the factory run for longer.

(BTW if you can't do free/cheap transport, consider making a huge amount of output before paying PushX or Red Frog to move it for you. A JF can holds 337500 m3, or 3375 items of P4 output. If you're making 200K profit per item, that's 675M ISK profit, of which the cost of transport would surely be a small-ish part.)