Author Archives: Grimmash

A Swarm Interlude

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I just finished Heart of the Swarm’s campaign.  You know, that expansion to some game called Starcraft 2? The Good: It’s fun.  The campaign on normal is a little bit on the easy side, but it’s a fun romp through a middling revenge tale.  The units all seem to have a point and purpose.  Expanding a Zerg base is fun, and expanding the creep is wicked fun.  I have mild OCD about spreading the creep across the entire map, every time.  The cutscenes are pretty, if sometimes silly.  Kerrigan, your main heroine, gains abilities and gets to customize her swarmlings as the campaign progresses, which provides satisfying variations.  Those are all variations on swarm the enemy with lots of bugs, but it’s a fun theme to play variations on.  The various mission types are a nice variation on build-swarm-repeat, with timed missions, control point and DOTA inspired elements showing up in various places. The Bad: Streaming cutscenes are annoying as crap.  I never got a high quality cutscene in my entire playthrough.  If you leave the game, the downloader apparently stops downloading.  Some of the load times are interminable, with no indication of how long remains.  Some of the pacing Continue Reading →

Warring with the Factions

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A few nights ago I had my first foray into faction warfare.  I spent a few days moving ships and assets out of Caldari space to new high sec mothball hangar in Gallente space, bought and contracted a bunch of ships to my new low sec home, and while waiting for the bulk of my supplies to arrive, I hopped into a few ships and took the not-so friendly stars of Black Rise. The first thing that happened was this.  I warped around Nennamaila for a while and ended up in a small complex, I think that’s what it was, and starting orbiting the structure with a timer.  That seemed like the logical thing to do, right?  Shortly thereafter, my new friend warped in.  He had an Atron, I had a Incursus, I figured why not?  Cut to a rather long chase, with me cycling between webs and reps, struggling to keep the Atron in range after my poor drone had turned to space dust.  I’d gotten him to structure, and had a solid scram on him, but this was taking forever!  My Gallente militia mate happend into the room at that point, and a few more shots from his Continue Reading →

Ugh – PI Challenge – Day 8

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Just a quick update on the PI challenge.  I’ve made lots of tweaks to max out extraction.  Last update, I was at about -9.3m isk on the whole affair.  Today’s total running numbers: I broke into the black!  And so far, over 8 days, I’ve averaged a little over 2 million per day in profit.  In revenue, I’ve averaged about 8 million.  8m x 30 days is 240m isk.  For the 500m isk goal, this thing is probably going to be a complete failure.  Assuming no more costs, I’ll be surprised if I get much past the 200m mark. Some mid-challenge analysis.  In 2.5 hours, while working on other stuff, I went mining today.  The sales from that were 29.3m isk.  On another front, I ran a max run of Phased Plasma L ammo.  That sold for 18m isk.  So in less than the time it took me to do a week’s PI, I netted 47m isk into my pocket, for less actual effort than the PI.  I have no idea what that ammo cost me to make, because the materials were lying around, but there you have it. This brings up a bigger question:  What is the most enjoyable Continue Reading →

The Downward Spiral of Depletion

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Warning, this post contains many charts. Edit: Thanks for the link Mabrick! First:  Mabrick stated this in my last comments section: You have extra R) and P1? The way I deal with extra R0 and P1 is to not have any. That may seem a bit arrogant, but hear me out. Robotics is a 2 extractor, 4xP1 and 2xP2 production chain – per planet. When you get to Elite command centers it will be easier to do, but you should aim for 2 extractors each pulling 288,000 m3 of R0 with 2xP1 facilities per R0 type and 2xP2 facilities to take their product. You then have to move one of the P2 products to another planet to make the Robotics. I move Mechanical Parts to my Lava worlds where I have on additional P3 facility in my setup. Precious Metals is typically the weakest producer across all the planets I’ve run and that’s why I produce Robotics on the Lava worlds. All three Lava planets process 1/3 of my Robotics each. I use no silos and I try and keep a day’s worth of R0 in each Landing Pad as a buffer. To keep this working as stated, I actively Continue Reading →

Ever Increasing Complexity – PI Day 2

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In response to my own questions from last post regarding the shortcomings of my production as it was implemented, I went looking at how to use the excess resources from my over-producing R0>P1 planets.  If you are running 4 planets to get the materials for Robotics, you end up with an imbalance among the following P1s: Chiral Structures Precious Metals Reactive Metals Toxic Metals These in turn can be used to create a variety of P2s: Consumer Electronics (used in Robotics) Mechanical Parts (used in Robotics) Enriched Uranium Construction Blocks For nice list of all the PI flow charts, take a look at this.  So the question I had to answer was how can I take my excess PI products and make them profitable, and easy to get to market?  The answer, I think, lies in looking at market prices for the P1s and comparing those to the prces for the various potential P2s, and making the P2s which are worth more than the P1s you started with.  Given the high rate of import and export taxes, this is not a trivial calculation.  I’ll let you run your own numbers, but I was able to find a solid excess line, Continue Reading →

PI Challenge Day 1 Part II

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Although it’s another day for me, it’s the same Eve day, so this goes into the first day, hence the Part II. I took the first batch of Robotics to market.  111 units to be exact.  I also removed some storage facilities and added some ECU Extractor heads on my low yield planets.  I’ve adjusted the tracking sheet to account for a few more things.  Here are the results from my labors: Back of the envelope calculations show this scheme, if static for the next 29 days, will yield the following: Hmm.  We might have a problem here. At roughly 5/6 capacity of Mabrick’s approach, we are looking at about 30% of his estimated income. I found I could add a second production line on the factory planet, which accounts for the increase in Construction costs.  But I am not sure high sec planets will be able to keep two robotics lines fed.  The resource density on one of the planets is already starting to take a hit, and cannot feed 4 R0 > P1 factories.  That means I may not be able to keep even one robotics line running at full capacity. For reference, one Robotics line running at Continue Reading →

Mabrick’s PI Challenge Day 1

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I set up all the planets for the challenge, 3 barren, 2 lava, and have the production planet going.  I also have a sheet set up to track the costs by line item.  I loves me some Excel!  Without further ado, here are the costs incurred in buying the command centers, setting up the planets (including a few mistakes in placing and rebuilding PI buildings), and transferring the first production loads from the resources planets to the production planet (also including one mistake): The Customs Office interface is still horrible, and you can easily transfer crap back to a planet when you think you are loading it to your ship.  Why?  Because CCP decided that the CO inventory screen should not be part of the unified inventory.  That’s great.  That cost me about $500k isk.  Remember to open your ship inventory and drag the items from to CO to there, and not hit the Transfer button. The PI interface still leaves important info out of the equation when placing buildings.  So if you click the wrong facility, you cannot check what it makes until after you spend the money on it once you are in that process.  Yes, I could Continue Reading →

Objects in Space

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Note: This is old material, sitting in my draft bin for a long period of time.  The links are also to the old articles that got me thinking. Why should ships log off when players log off?  This has always interested me in Eve.  My understanding of the current mechanic is that, aside from timers, if you log off while in space, you go into a “warp stasis”, where your ship is apparently in a pocket dimension that you mysteriously come back from when you log back in.  From a technical standpoint, I can sort of understand this.  There are already enough objects in space on the server.  But perhaps if you log off while in space, your ship should stay where you left it? This would fit with the ideas behind stations and POSes.  Stations are where you go to get out of your ship, get other ships, trade, and so on.  Stattions are also the only almost completely safe space in Eve.  No one can blow up your ship while it’s docked.  In space where stations do not exist, POSes fulfill this role with hangars and force fields.  Would anyone leave a valuable ship sitting in a WH Continue Reading →

Precocious Pod-Dweller Planetary Puzzle Day -1

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As mentioned, I am giving Mabrick’s proposition a shot.  From the latest post, there a few things I am unsure of, namely, if his 500m isk/month claim was based in HS or WH space.  But, here are the conditions of my experiment: Skills:   Command Center Upgrades 4  Interplanetary Consolidation 4  Planetology 2  Remote Sensing 3 Production Final Product: Robotics Planets: 2 Barren R0 > P1 2 Lava R0 > P1 1 Barren Production Planet P1 > P3 All planets are in one High Sec system with standard Customs Office rates. A few other notes.  I am not taking up the challenge as presented mainly because I don’t want to move the alt, and it has about 30m skill points.  Those are almost entirely in mining, production, and recently combat. Here are the Planetary Management skills, IC 4 will be done soon: Here are the planets, pending the production planet due to IC 4: Here is the pattern used for all of the R0 > P1 planets: You’ll notice that the extractors are much further from storage than Mabrick indicates.  This is because HS planets have crap for resource distribution, so the R0 > P1 chain is located central to Continue Reading →

Mo’ Planets, Mo’ Problems

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As mentioned previously, I am rather space-broke at the moment.  To me this means less that a few hundred million isk in my account, above what is earmarked for purchases.  So I’ve started two endeavors: The first is a relaunch of the 30 Day Market Challenge.  I messed up the start already, after seeding 20 mil, I noticed I had about 70 mil in modules from the last go-around.  Stupid numbers making accounting hard.   I’m aiming to clear 10% margins each day, at least up to the billion isk range.  We’ll see how it goes.  Preliminary actions in Jita seem to indicate margins have gotten tighter on just about everything since the same time last year.  As long as the isk flows, I’ll be happy.  Not sure about daily updates, it may be more of a when I feel like it thing. The second project is based on a post over at Mabrick’s.  He seems convinced that HS planets can rake in 100m isk a week.  I’m starting with 5 planets, and a lower level of command center upgrades, but I’ll be posting my results over the next few days.  You can all judge based on that.  We’ll call Continue Reading →