Category Archives: Eve Online

Odyssey Mumblings, The First

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Odyssey is upon us.  As much as I’d love to make a crack a Jester’s great caravan of the stars, there are some other ideas I’d like to spin out a little.  With the hints in CCP’s release at PAX, there’s plenty of opportunity to speculate and put on our tinfoil hats!  I’ll put some posts up over the next few days regarding the topics announced in at PAX, and my thoughts regarding those topics.  Today I want to talk about exploration a bit. Discovery scanning.  We have no idea what it is.  I can hope that it is a system that makes the process of scanning sites down more enjoyable.  Currently the dedicated explorer is pigeon holed into a few core concepts.  You need a scanning ship, either a CovOps or a T3 fit properly.  If you are serious about beating the competition, you probably also have another account with a combat cruiser, again likely a T3, flying with you to jump into those sites as soon as you find them.  The choice of useful ships is rather limited, and the fitting requirements to take advantage of those ships narrows the selections even more.  The skills needed to fly Continue Reading →

Luminotgonnahappen

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I tried to go to Luminaire today, but alas, it was not to be.  A fleet of us got together, sorted out logistics, spooked some camps along the way from FW LS to Dodixie, and then we watched the Live Feed of the Luminaire event.  Once the Leviathan was at about 30% shield, we said screw waiting, let’s go.  We had been holding back to see if the null sec fleets would pound each other down, but that was not to be. We got to the Pettinck-Luminaire gate at were locked out.  For a while.  While watching hundreds of ships orbit a gate on the lowest graphical settings was a new experience for me, it was less than enthralling.  I honestly had more fun playing cat and mouse to move some Caldari gatecamps out of the way earlier.  We were making the route safe for some of our lowsec pilots to rally up. As I was sitting at the gate, idly punching the jump button to see the error message, the gate briefly unlocked, and I was pulled through all by my lonesome.  My Myrmidon was immediately, although languidly, target, scrammed and popped by the fine members of various branches Continue Reading →

Tackling Tempests and Trailing Tengus

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Close only counts… A few days into faction warfare, and I’m fleeting up and roaming around.  Today I’ll give a three informal after action reports of situations that didn’t work. Tricky Tengus On a roam starting in Nenn, intel told us a pair of Tengus were running mission sites a few systems over.  We take a look at our fleet, mostly frigs and destroyers, and decide that between an Arazu and some tacklers, we had a chance to sneak a point in and hold at least one Tengu long enough to get the rest of us in. Operations commence with the fleet holding on gate outside the Tama system, home to our pair of would-be kills.  They don’t appear to notice anything aside from one fleet member warping through system.  We get cloaked eyes into the mission room.  Then it comes to light that the Tengus have a Buzzard hanging out off-gate watching traffic.  This doesn’t seem to be a problem, as we just need to sidle our tackle in and then once point is accomplished, the Buzzard is irrelevant. Then a fleet mate jumps the gate.  The Tengus spook and dock up.  Good game.  The moral of this story Continue Reading →

PI Day 11

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Here’s the update: Trending a little bit better.  I got the Precious Metals output a bit higher, and now Chiral Structures are the rate limiting factor.  This means I’m pulling in an extra 1.4m or so per day on Enriched Uranium sales.  The POCO taxes have taken about 16m in profits at the 10% high sec rate.  That’s not 10%.  That’s an effective tax rate of about 18%. They get you coming and going!  Interstingly, the tax rates are pegged to old values, with P1s going for 50isk/unit and P2s going for 900isk/unit, and P3s for 7000isk/unit.  This results in interesting tax rate anomolies as shown above.  There are a few errors, as I lumped a few things together in the beginning and I can’t sort the out now.  Stupid March 11.  But the overall tax rate of 18% is correct.  If I had no taxes, I’d be at about 51m in profit 11 days in. Edit:  My original effective tax chart was poorly formatted.  I updated it.

Another Day, Another Incursus

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I like the Incursus.  It’s a nice little ship that looks pretty and seems to hold up well in small matches.  And I got another kill in one today.  Nothing fancy about it.  In fact, he got the drop on me because I was sitting in a plex, looking at three different chats and comms trying to figure out where the damn fights were.  And then the fight was targeting me.  We danced for a while, and as often happens, some other militia came in while we were jockeying for position.  Much like last time, I had him in a bit of armor, he had chipped away at my shields.  I find it terribly difficult to manage my screen,  but I’m trying to get the spiral approach down and it seems to be working a little.  At least based on relative shields and armor in the brief 1v1 situations I’ve been in.  So that was fun.  I’m starting to realize how janky the drone control system is though.  Ugh.  I have to stop forgetting to launch drones. After that, I tried to fleet up for a while which was a mixed bag.  No offense to non-American english speakers, but system 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 →