EVE Online - Catch All & new meat check-in

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Crom, why did I read this thread?

(runs away gibbering)

Because Eve has two of the three greatest things in life: to Crush Your Enemies and See Them Driven Before You. For the rest ... well, everyone knows Eve doesn't have sound.

IMAGE(https://techraptor.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/EVe-has-sound-meme.jpg)

IMAGE(http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/Gallente2/eve_has_sound.jpg)

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Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and read the lamentations in Local (or on forum).

I considered trying out the alpha clone freebie, but "just a little heroin" is still a bad amount...

For context, my main was T2 proficient (L4 or L5) in: every frigate/dessie/BC/BS, nearly every weapon system (T1 and T2), all 4 T3 ships to L3/L4, and was just starting to get into carriers. Could even do industrials T1/T2 (no freighter/miner - at least not on the main)

Years of continuous sub, hi-sec, lo-sec, null, WHs, done it all... but man, it does still tug, ever so gently on my mind, to return...

Lo-sec, or wormhole, living are probably tied for my favourite times.

I don't think I want to even go for "just a taste, the first one is free."

Nope.gif

Especially now subsequent tastes are also free.

I also really enjoyed living in a wormhole.

I hear you Wink, I played from 2003-2010 and pretty much did everything. Never got into wormholes though mainly because they came out too late in my playing as I was too established in null sec. But the tug is still there. I am going to see what I can do with just an alpha clone.

If for nothing else, the Alpha clones are a great non-commital way to jump into Factional Warfare.

Working my way through new player agents again with a Gallente. Figure I will try out ninja huffing, exploration, FW, and or Red vs Blue at some point. Not having a cloak will make some things very rough.

Finished up my career agents and decided to give Red vs Blue a try. Sadly my only industrial ship can only carry one of my other ships at a time, so moving is slow. But soon there will be blood!

Was finally able to log in today, created a new character to try the New Player Experience, as it were. Not bad, opportunities are a nice way to slowly open up the game's concepts.

Had a "I've forgotten how all of this works" return to normal Roam last night through FW space again, this time in "oddballs" - ships deliberately chosen to be a little away from the normal T1 Rifter type fit.

One of the Frigates was a Firetail designed to go 6km a second to surprise people parked 100km off the warp in in a FW complex and I was flying a Maulus drenched in sensor damping. If your base targeting range was 50km I could lower it to around 9km. From 35km away.

As a result we didn't lose any ships for most of the roam because we could tackle you from further away than you could target us, but then right at the end of the night we jumped into a gate that had, count 'em, seven of those instalock artillery Thrashers parked, all of which are designed to one shot a Frigate.

Just through random chance I was the only one to escape the camp, but I had no safespots in system, so I had to warp to a planet and through sheer chance again there was a Punisher sitting there.

He got to see me coming in out of warp so had me targeted and scrambled before I could even move. I couldn't warp off and the MWD wouldn't switch on, so I pushed my two remaining drones over the side and targeted him, then hit him with all three sensor dampers and tried to use manual piloting to twist and turn out of range.

I finally got clear and managed to warp off... with 4% armour left.

But it turned out that my drones had done a tiny amount of damage to the Punisher, which meant that when he warped into that very same Thrasher gate camp and got blapped, I got on the killmail.

Last week Fogrob did indeed come through as an Angel Investor to the tune of 850 million isk. I was frantically busy getting everything set up before my trip, but it was fun. I put up buy orders for five days of four planets worth of P4 production, which took all of that money and some of my own besides. I also got the old planets emptied out and the new planets built up how they needed to be for 5 days of input/output storage. Sadly at my level 3 CC upgrade skill that didn't include a second launchpad, which I was concerned about.

When I hopped on on Wednesday half of my inputs had been purchased. I paid a corp mate a tidy (tipped way too much) sum to short notice haul it all to my base. After fruitlessly waiting a bit more for the cheaper buy order prices I canceled all of my remaining buy orders and got the rest of my required resources from outstanding sale orders. I then started the long and arduous process of moving the goods myself, as no other freighters were available.

I was super careful, too great of a loss could severely impact my likelihood of paying Fogrob on time, let alone pulling in my own profits after that. I had 450 million isk of goods to move without a hauling alt. I first scouted the routes ahead in a shuttle searching for war targets. This was lucky, and successful, I lost a shuttle, pod, and full set of level 3 implants :(, and even more critically two hours of time waiting for the route to clear. However, I crucially did not lose any cargo.

When there weren't War Targets around I moved my goods in 30-40 million isk packages to protect myself from ganks. I also only moved a few systems at a time so my scouting info wouldn't be too much out of date, and I moved a mixed batch of cargo, so that one lost shipment wouldn't stall out an entire production line.

Luckily much later on in the night another corps-mate came to help out in a blockade runner. This guy deserves a larger tip than he originally got from me, once I have a bit more cash on hand.

By the time everything had been moved into the base it was very late, and I could reasonably safely fill up the customs stations. This was where I feared a bottle neck, and sure enough had one. The process had taken so long, and the max transfer refresh rate (8 hours) was so high that I couldn't get all of my inputs down. I could only fill the launchpad, transfer it once, and then fill the launchpad again. That was enough for a lot of the time though.

Luckily I was able to hope on Saturday evening and get the rest of the cargo down. I also was able to get some of the P4 inputs up. Not all though, I was finally out of cash and I couldn't pay all the export taxes I needed. However I was good enough. I got the batch of exports back to base and made a courier contract to get the 350 million isk of goods to Market.

When I got home yesterday those goods were waiting for me there. I sold them, got the rest of my products off the planet and in to base, and bought 1.5 days of imports. I've got two contracts up to get both of those where they need to be. Hopefully tonight, and if not, tomorrow, I'll have both of those shipments made and my planets will be humming along again, and I'll have cashed in the larger hunk of the production. That should be enough to pay off my first 510 million isk installment to Fogrob (due tomorrow) as well as another day or two of inputs. From there I'll be able to settle in to that routine while I slowly accumulate a large enough buffer to leave things alone for 3-5 days, like I was just able to.

That's some really smart work, Yonder! Really impressive.

I joined the Blue side of Red vs Blue with one of my alphas, and a PVE corp for mission running with my other. Did a little exploration last night, but all I could find were wormholes and combat sites. I even entered a couple of wormholes and all I found in those were MORE WORMHOLES! No money in that. Did find a 1m ISK warp disrupter off a mission rat, so that will help.

Speaking of Red vs Blue, I only skimmed the email, but the Eve Uni and Red vs Blue are starting a mutual/friendly war soon. Tonight I should have a chance to look at it in more detail for the when/where/what ships we're allowed details, maybe you and I can murder each other Mix.

Yeah! I'd be game for something like that with my lowly alpha clone.

Yes, the RvB forum has an upcoming week long with a group called The Ivy League. I guess that's Eve Uni adjacent? They're limiting the fight to only one region. I'm training tackle and ewar for it. Maybe armor rep, too (unholy space priest). Should be very exciting!

I know that the Ivy League is us (Eve Uni) I don't know exactly what other corps are also in that alliance.

Yonder: It feels like I'm playing Eve without playing Eve!

The PI is going decently, but not great. The important thing is that I got Fogrob's first debt installment out on time, so my space knees should remain intact!

The hang up is the hauling. I have been using a discount hauling service affiliated with Eve Uni (1.75 Mill for each 7 jump trip), and there has been quite a bit of time between my Web Application being accepted (so I can make the Contract to the right person), and then that contract actually being fulfilled. It's especially frustrating because I know that when my Web Application is accepted it probably means that the person is online and playing, and if I was on at that time, or had already made an in game contract to the corporation, it would probably be fulfilled right then!

Because of the hauling delays my four planets sat idle for more than 2 days after I returned, and by the time I get home tonight they'll have been idle for another six hours or so, and who knows how much longer before the shipment sitting at the market hub is brought the rest of the way in.

In the long run this is definitely an indication that I'm going to need my own hauling alt, but it's over 36 days of skill time to sprint straight for freighters, and the T2 industrials aren't much less. Not only is that not an amount of time I want to stop skilling my main, by then I should have the reserves to absorb a two-3 day shipment delay without much issue.

In the short term... well the simplest solution would be to do it myself. Every day I go through 180 million isk of inputs, I can semi-safely transport that myself (only worried about War Targets) in five trips, although that would be tedious. The issue is that every day those inputs also turn into 480 million isk of products, and making 12 trips to do that safely is just out of the question.

The second thing I could do is jump up to Red Frog Freight, they are a much bigger hauling corp than our friends, so the response time will probably be a lot better. The downside there is that they are much more expensive. The round trip from them would cost me 28 million instead of 3.5. That would be less of an issue if I was doing it weekly, but that's also when the friends slow response wouldn't be an issue. Right now I need far more frequent hops, which cuts out Red Frog Freight.

The third option is just to go with random corps mates. And that's what I'm leaning towards right now. It was two random corps mates that got my shipments where they needed to go on Day Zero, and I think that going forward I'm going to chime in in chat a couple times a night to see if I find someone immediately available, and only after that going with the discount hauling.

Edit: Forgot to mention that during my vacation I got the ability to add a fifth planet in to my ecosystem, but I haven't had the opportunity to actually set one up yet, and probably won't for another week or two at this rate.

Have you tried your luck with public Courier contracts?

By splitting the packages up into smaller bits (5-10 km3) you should be able to get a 24-48 hour turnaround time with a 5% payout / 100% deposit contract (ie, if the haul is worth 100m, set the delivery price to 5m with a 100m deposit). This way, if they get ganked or decide to steal your cargo, you don't lose anything but time.

If the systems have any traffic at all, and the route is all highsec, these tend to get picked up fairly quickly. Post a link to the contract in Local and see what happens.

(quick noobie tip - you can split stacks of goods in Eve by holding down shift, left clicking on the stack, and dragging the mouse to an empty space in your inventory, another container, or your ship's cargo hold. When you let go of the left mouse button, it'll ask you how big to make the new stack. You can also do this when combining stacks by holding shift and dragging the first stack onto the second)

Yonder wrote:

Speaking of Red vs Blue, I only skimmed the email, but the Eve Uni and Red vs Blue are starting a mutual/friendly war soon. Tonight I should have a chance to look at it in more detail for the when/where/what ships we're allowed details, maybe you and I can murder each other Mix.

Started moving some ships and mods to our staging system in Black Rise. I plan to fly Hero Tackle/Scout in Atrons and maybe some Tristan Drone boats. So excited for the war!

I have not, and I'm not 100% sure I'm allowed to. The Mining Campus of Eve-University has a "No trading within five jumps of base" policy to lessen the amount of traffic that comes near our campus. We have our own affiliated services to do the buying and selling we need (The ore buyback service is much, much more responsive than the hauling one I'm using).

I don't think that public courier contracts are expressly disallowed, but I don't really want to be advertising the fact that I am working with hundreds of millions of isk of PI commodities in a particular area on a regular basis, given how frequently War Targets are lingering around.

Hmm, maybe I should ask the corporation that does the Ore buyback if he would be willing in branching out into PI stuff as well.

manta173 wrote:

Yeah! I'd be game for something like that with my lowly alpha clone.

RvB hires alphas. Checkout rvbeve.com/forums for setup instructions.

Mixolyde wrote:
manta173 wrote:

Yeah! I'd be game for something like that with my lowly alpha clone.

RvB hires alphas. Checkout rvbeve.com/forums for setup instructions.

Actually I meant the fights. I'm currently in Eve Uni. Thanks for the offer though.

I've had some bad luck the last couple of times I played which reminded me why people with no time don't play MMO's.

2 nights waiting on groups to form that didn't form. 1 night actually forming a group that didn't know what they were doing and got ganked. That could have been 9 hours of something vastly more entertaining with my limited play time. I need to stop trying for groups and go for PVE or I am going to start losing interest.

Le Sigh. More hauling tribulations. Still no response from the Hauling corp yesterday, but I did get a very nice random corps mate to bring my last day and a half of output into Market, but he wasn't going back the other way.

At this point I've given up on reliably delegating out my shipping, even in the near term. It's time to start making trips to bring in the inputs myself. I can go back to moving in 40 million isk trips immediately. I have seen references to this cloak MWD trick, as well as practices to set up waypoints for instant docking and undocking warps.

I can skill into the improved cloak pretty quickly, and have started doing so. Once I am comfortable that I'm doing a decent job with these more advanced tricks I think I'll start risking double the value hauls, since I can absorb one of those being lost if I need to. That still won't help me get my exports into market, but if I only need to rely on help for one of the two legs that's twice as good as my current situation.

Next I'm going to skill my main into DSTs, that wasn't my plan yesterday, but a fresh alt would need 29 days to do that, and my main only needs 19 days (entirely from Gallente Industrial V) and, well, time is a factor. That's 19 days longer to wait for an Orca, but if I could get this blasted logistics situation under control I'll be making more money with PI than an Orca would get me anyways.

I've decided to settle into a new routine. Five 40 million isk shipments is more than enough to get a single day of input materials. Making those round trips, with a 40 million isk return means that I'll be breaking even every day. In the mean time I will be accumulating the excess products back at home base. Hopefully every few days some friendly corps mate will make a run in a BR or DST into market, and that will be my profit.

It's a time consuming process, but that will hold me over the 19 days until I get access to a DST and this becomes easier. Or my buffer fills up enough that I'm fine using Red Frog's 28 million isk round trip cost, because I only have to do it once a week or so.

Of course no sooner had I decided on that routine that circumstances changed. Amarr completely sold out of Genetically Enhanced Livestock. WTH? I was expecting (and have been experiencing) price fluctuations of inputs and products, but I had assumed that working out of one of the main trade meant that I would always have something to work with. Checking out Eve Central I saw that the Jita area had some, so I flew out that way to buy a day and a half of inputs, as well as making a much more generous buy order in Amarr for the medium term (which was 1/4 filled over night). That did take some time though.

I think tonight I'm going to set up an Ocean Planet to make Genetically Enhanced Livestock. I have been holding off on my fifth planet because my import throughput is my current limiting factor, but a P0 to P2 planet that will lessen my required input is just the ticket. In a few weeks when I'm more stable I can dismantle everything and move elsewhere if another P4 planet would be preferable.

I hear you - in my own neighborhood, the P1 I've been buying off the market has almost doubled in price, while the value of the P2 it produces has been steadily dropping. I think I might have to change tactics, move a whole bunch of my P1 excavators to new planets, and start harvesting the rare one for sale directly.

It's scenarios like this that actually make Eve exciting for me. If I was stuck with the same plan day by day, it'd get old really quick.

Got the email today that my account was converted to an Alpha account so I thought I'd swing by here and lo and behold, a fair amount of chatter in the last two weeks. I don't really have time to give the game the attention it needs, but I think I'll be jumping in again periodically now that it's free. Basically the same way I play LOTRO and Guild Wars 2.

It's time for another exciting installment of "Yonder tries to move things from point A to point B!"

Holy crap, in High Sec I knew it would be a stretch to provide all of the Genetically Enhanced Livestock I needed for a single P4 planet (with 2 P4 factories), but it takes 97.23% of my power to run the extractors, 2 Basic Processors, and one Advanced Processor that I need to make one batch of Genetically Enhanced Livestock, which is only 1/8 of what my planet needs!

And I don't even have to power to run enough extractor heads to keep that one factor going full time, it's at 78% capacity!

I spent a good part of my playtime this weekend reallocating which planets are doing harvesting for which materials. I don't see the particular ingredients I need getting any cheaper on the local market anytime soon, so after too much time playing with Excel, I set into rebuilding and upgrading my command centers on new planets to focus on what I need right now.

Between losses due to cancelled runs, buying, planting and upgrading Command Centers, buying raw products to kickstart the assembly lines, opportunity costs (time spent not L4 mission grinding) and productivity hits from all the downtime, I figure I'm down about 250m ISK. On the plus side, I sold off an Orca I wasn't using, so I've gotten my PLEX for next month squared away and I'll be able to buy another if the opportunity presents itself (still sorry I missed it when they were down to 950m from the Black Friday sale)

If the reallocation works and I can meet my production numbers without having to buy the P1 materials from the market anymore, and the resulting products don't just suddenly sink in value, I think I've set myself up for a more reliable and more profitable revenue stream. I want to add a third Advanced Industry planet at some point, once I know I can meet the demands of my other two. I'm also working on Interplanetary Consolidation V for my alts now (they're both at IV now), just to be safe.

I skilled into the MWD Cloak jump trick (not hard, Cloaking III is the most time consuming/expensive skill) And after a bit of practice I can do it pretty easily. I also have an Amarr Insta-Dock bookmark set up now, and a couple Insta-Undock ones. I steadily started increasing the amount of cargo I was carrying, and at this point have made several 330 million isk trips into and out of Amarr with no trouble (in my T1 Epithal). This is just fantastic news for me, because I am now able to carry a full day and a half of PI inputs/outputs in a single trip, which has finaly moved PI from "full time job to not get my planets producing at full capacity" to "something that can be maintained at full production for a bit over half an hour a day".

It's also meant that I could hold off on skilling into DSTs on my main.. I can get by doing this for now, and at some point in the nebulous future I'll make a true Hauling Alt. Additionally this experience (and some other youtube videos) has made me feel a bit more prepared for eventual activity in Null-Sec space.

It's not all good news though. First of all, I'm now in pretty significant fear for my Space Knees. A combination of my planets being idle around half of the last 10 days due to my hauling problems, and market fluctuations, means that I am not going to have Fogrob's second and last installment ready for tomorrow. I am probably going to fake my own death, but don't tell him that. In reality, I'm lucky that Fogrob isn't even playing right now (to my knowledge) so a delay in paying him back doesn't matter at all to him, but it's still quite a blow to my pride.

For those market fluctuations, two and a half weeks ago I set up 4 P4 planets dedicated to the three highest profit P4 products in Amarr space at that time. One of those is still very profitable... the other two (including the one with two planets dedicated to it) are not, with input prices rising and product prices falling. Tonight I'm going to half transition those planets to new, more profitable products. Once they have worked through their old inputs I'll fully transition them over. In the future I'm going to have to recheck profitability more often than once every two weeks, so that I can see this issue coming sooner.

Additionally, after dabbling with that Ocean planet and finding that it couldn't even produce 1/8 of one of the 6 inputs for my P4 planets I'm going to scrap it and open up a fifth P4 planet. Between the new planet, the resolved hauling issue, and the product changes I think I'll be able to pay off my loan next week.

The other piece of bad news is that on Friday I was celebrating the weekend and my newfound ability to do other Eve things other than 40 million isk trade runs by mining and drinking too much wine. I didn't realize that a War Target had warped into local fast enough, and he killed my Covetor. I then stupidly jumped in my Vexor and warped a bit away to see if he was around. When he wasn't I went in the rest of the way to retrieve my drones and the equipment on my wreckage. However he was just shuttling spoils back and forth to a Station. He popped in on top of me and killed my Vexor too :(.

Sounds like a rough weekend for you Yonder. Take your time. I play a month every 2 years or so.