Tuesday 28 October 2008

Planning in EVE / Cost of EVE

What I love most about EVE is the fact you have to plan a lot in order to progress.

We all know about skill training plans... I'm talking about industrial planning (as we're predominantly a industrial corp).

Right now, corp has 8 blueprints being researched or copied simultanouesley by me alone (never mind other members). This is on a long term plan - each bpo being researched in will increase profit - and we only research pre-researched items (some items don't make profit at all!).

Theres not only that planning. Its also which BPO's we'll be making next. What are good sellers - and where is a good station to sell items (and sell items consistantly for a higher mark up than a major market hub). etc etc. This is all data which I certainally wouldn't share on a blog post sadly.

Last night I ran a lot of missions.... I took the opportunity to upgrade my weapons systems on my primary battlecruiser "DSTI Cookiemonster" to a named t1 equivalent prior to starting. Right now all systems on the battlecruiser are best named, or T2. This cost a lot, but has made the tank on the BC a lot stronger - prior to upgrade I used to have to warp on a few missions. After this this upgrade (and in doing 8 missions last night), I've not had to warp out at all, so thats 12m on equipment well spent. I've also optimised my railgun setup, so I can both snipe at 60km, and do serious damage at 20km, just by changing ammo types.

I hate to admit, I made a mistake when thinking I could use T2 weaponry. I thought medium railgun specilisation just required Medium hybrid's to L5. It didn't. It also needs small to L5, + small railgun specialisation to 4. Thats another month. But it'll be worth it. In meantime I'm going to concentrate on drones and other support skills.

The downsides recently to my playing is the cost has increased for us UK people with the recent exchange rate movement (this for those who havn't noticed). This means its now cheaper (I base what I pay on the cost per month) for me to sign up for a 12 month subscription from CCP direct in Euro's rather than pay in GTC's in USD sadly. I think I'll be treating myself to 2 12 month subscriptions next month, then a renewal of my EON subscription next month (my one year sub expired on the recent EON issue). I'll go back to GTC's once the dollar/pound rate gets better - its annoying as I like paying by GTC as it doesn't require me to hand my credit card over (I'm a bit paranoid about this).... I'm kicking myself for not buying a power of 2 sub last month, as a third character would really help me now. The cost of EVE has increased certainally, so I think I'm justified in saying I've been "Credit crunched"...

3 comments:

Bahamut said...

Running a industrial corp sounds like it requires a lot more mirco-management and planning then a combat-based corp.

DeafPlasma said...

Yeah, I think translating the corp into a larger amount of people would mostly make my time be spent doing lots more management... which I am keen to avoid.

The good news is right now we have a plan, and its working and generating profit on a daily basis... and every time we get more blueprints it = more profit.

The whole thing is made more complex by EVE's permissions model not being quite there for what I want to do with it.. and by there not being enough lab slots in empire to do what we want. But we have a plan for that too.

Anonymous said...

We pirates give carebears a hard time when they let loose with emo rage upon loosing a load of BPC's to a gate camp, but you really need to understand how much time and work went into producing them. When I see posts like this, part of me really twitches as it reminds me just how hard that poor carebear I just popped worked to get that stuff that I looted.