An interesting thought

As I said earlier, I do follow closely a youtuber named Delonewolf. In his latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDegLW4E2Xc) he came to the conclusion that most industrial players will move to a public Raitaru instead of deploying (or using) their own POS for their activities. Interesting thought, since I came to that same conclusion a few months back when CCP announced the engineering complexes, and released a few details about them. 

For me, it’s a hassle to plan for the logistic needed to deploy the POS, while using it at its max potential for a few days: I have to have enough fuel in it for 1-2-3 days in a row, I have to stock up enough minerals in a NPC station to be able to produce items around the clock while the POS is up, with as minimum downtime as possible between batches, across 6 characters. My goal is to extract as much work as possible per fuel block, for the amount of time the POS is up.

For a solo corporation like mine, keeping the logistic up for more than a few days is not possible. I have to ferry back and forth million of m3 of items and minerals, with just one freighter. In a 24h period, I could build more than 2 million m3 of items (ships/modules/rigs), and need at least 2 trips from my production system to my tradehub, more than 40 minutes per trip. Then, I have to keep buying minerals, without buying too much of them, and ferry them back to my production system. That’s close to a full time job if you ask me.

Now, having a bunch of public engineering complexes available, I won’t need to be as committed as before at keeping the pipe full of jobs. For sure, I may have to use more than one engineering complex, to profit from the various rigs. I may split my production to various engineering complexes, and maybe even to multiple systems, but at least, I won’t need to move hundreds of millions of m3 of minerals each day. A single Kryo, or two, may be enough for most activities. For sure, I will have to adapt my logistic chain, but I could deal with that. 

My first immediate benefice is that, I won’t have to bother with the inherent cost of running the POS , while nothing is running in it (slightly less than 3m ISK per day, and less than 90m per month), and only paying the factory tax plus the system factory index. 

My real biggest issue with Ascension, is to find a way to hack my excel sheets to deal with the new way of calculating taxes. The owner of the engineering complex could change it whenever he want, and change its rig configuration without warning. There must be a way to find this information from the CREST API interface.

Post Ascension Release

Hi there.

First of all, congratulation to CCP. I truly think that Ascension is a success. Of course, there were a few glitches, but I think that, globally, that release went well across the board.  I could see that the market is now in a complete chaos, there is so much trading now in the T1 market that it's pretty impressive. I can't produce fast enough to re-fill my Sell Orders. 

Those new industrial complexes will be a game changer I think. After two weeks, there's already an incredible amount of them around Jita, and even, at least, one large one has been deployed by Eve Mogul in New Caldari. When properly rigged, they are slightly slower than a POS, and costlier too. If you make it public, with a decent tax, they may pay themselves overtime. I've seen some at 0.1% up to 8%. The extremely low tax may be doable close to Jita due to the amount of jobs you may potentially attract, but 2-3 jumps from Jita, forget it. As for those at 8%+ (un)rigged Raitaru, they are just marginally faster than a NPC station and quite less secure. If I had a 500m-1B isk BPO to research, I would still use a NPC station for the last 3-4 steps in ME/TE.

Industry

On the industry side of my activities, I'm currently building an incredible amount of T1 items, and I just can't produce them fast enough. Some of them are in such demands that I sell all my production of the day in a few hours. I realise that I should have more than 3 or 4 BPOs for most of my items, which is not the case. Of course, I have a bunch of BPCs for items that I don't produce often (structures mats, standup, etc) but you can't use BPCs for a day-to-day production of modules and ships as a BPC most often runs out before 24h. 

My main goal here is to use all my mineral stock in my production system to prepare for my next steps in Eve Online (more about that later on). I still have close to 6.5 Billion ISK in minerals in a NPC station, so, I'm not done producing. Sadly, my intense industry activities are increasing the Factory index tax of my system to a point that I plan to move my tower to another one and resume from there.

As I'm doing my planning, I found out that I have been extremely lazy on my PI activities. Most of the time, I forget to restart the extractors after 5 days, and I was collecting the PI materials maybe once a month at best. The annoying part was that my PI planets were in systems that were partially taken by TEST please ignore back in World War Bee, and the corporation which set the new POSes did put a 25% tax on them. I had to stop using most of my P3 factories since it was way too costly, hoping that, at some point, Project Mayhem or CO2 would retake these planet and reset them to a more bearable tax.

It never happened, and thus, my PI activities were almost halted for the last 6 months. As my planning continued, I decided to move all my mats closer to my industry system, and find a couple of 10-15% planets to setup P3 factories to use those PI mats. I did jump when I realized that I had more than 4 million m3 of PI materials! As of 29^th of November:

PI stock value:
P1:	432 487 577,89
P2:	11 322 504 633,81
P3:	2 993 157 041,98
P4:	0,00
Total:	14 748 149 253,68

I still have to find the time to plan carefully which P3 to build to extract the maximum possible of ISK from those items. My initial planning indicates that I would need more than 15 days to transform most of them with 5 planets. I don’t want to redeploy more than 1 character for that operation.

I try to keep all my research slots used, but I find that quite hard to be honest. It's quite easy when you have one account, but on multiple accounts and multiple characters per account, it could become a bit messy. I'm thinking about creating a script to check my industry/research for each character via an API key, and send me an email when a job is about to end (in the next 6 hours or so.). Of course, this may already exist, as a phone app or another integrated tool, but I'm a bit paranoid I think, and I don't really trust an online app with my API keys :-) 

Trading

On my trader alt, things are going well. Or I could say, thing are going extremely well. I feel a bit ashamed to profit from other people's laziness: instead of doing a 2-3 jumps trip, they are willing to buy items at an inflated price (and sometimes, at an incredible one). I could make a 100m ISK profit on an item, which could be purchased way lower at 3 jumps from where I sell it. That's just insane.

To go back in time slightly, with the release of Ascension, there were a lot of opportunities to do a lot of ISK with some risks. I did manage to get a hold on a truck load of items that I know would sell well when Ascension will be release.  If I had enough ISK at that time, I would have even risk more of them by the end of October, but I've been too "conservative", and kept a good amount of ISK in my wallet, limiting my stock to approximately 1.5B isk of items. I resold them for close 3B isk a few days after the release, and honestly, I should have waited until the week after. Prices for those items skyrocketed on that week.

Yesterday, on the 27th of November, I had to make a decision. On my 145 possible orders, I have only 2-3 free. I would need a dozen more at least, but I try to keep those 2-3 free, in case an opportunity arises. My wallet was oscillating around 2.8B - 4B for the past week, and I don't like to have too much idle ISK since it doesn't help me getting richer.

So, what to do? Try to gamble on some items, and hope that their price will recover at the next big war? (I have already 1.3B of items in such gamble) Stock some items that will sell for sure over time? (Doable, but I would have to make another excel sheet to keep a track of them). Or what?

While I was pondering about my options, I noticed the ad on the launcher: Black Friday sales on the CCP website. I took a look at the PLEX price, and noticed that it was dropping since the last two days. My mind was set; I would buy two PLEXs at some point Monday morning. 

Upon buying them, via a Buy Order, I was smiling. When I started this operation, back in august, I had only 25m ISK, and PLEXing the account was a long time dream. But now, at the end on the 3rd month, I already bought 2 PLEX, I have 3.6 B isk in Sell Order (2,9 B with a 20% loss), 1.8 B isk in Buy Order (full escrow), close to 3 B isk in un-sold items in stations or in transit and a 200m wallet. That's around 10 B isk in about 3 months, that's pretty insane IMHO.

Now, let's see how things will go on December for that character.

Time to move on.

For the last 2 years and a half, I have been playing in High Sec, doing some mining, a few weeks of missionning, lots of industry, PI, explorations, etc. I've been playing for a couple of months in low sec while I was trying to get closer to Jita for my industry activities, before retreating back to High Sec a few weeks before World War Bee really kicks in. Lonetrek was already a nightmare by that time.

Some months ago, Delonewolf (a youtuber that have a similar play style to mine, https://www.youtube.com/user/delonewolf) did a couple of videos about Providence, and how enjoyable it could be to play in a NDRS environment (NDRS, Not Red, Don't Shoot.) Since those videos, I always had that idea in the back of my head. Moving to a Null-Sec system, with people who would have a similar philosophy to mine: Do your own stuff, help the ones in trouble and stay clear of drama.

When I connect to the game, I'm there to have fun. For me, it means doing my industry activities, plan my next batch, space trucking stuffs (my own logistics), answering in the help channel, even getting ganked if I'm careless,  killing a bunch of rats in a belt if I have nothing else to do while chatting in local. 

I spent already a couple of hours in Providence, in a mining op, with 2 ventures LOL !  That was quite enjoyable. I've started to move hundreds of BPCs, a couple of BPOs, some ships and I plan to move all my characters down there by mid December. My alpha character is already there, in his pod. I will have to create another alpha to set in Jita, to keep an eye on the market, and let my trader do her own business in her trade bub. 

Before moving, I want to consume all my stocked minerals, refine most of my PI materials and then selling them. I will let most of my costly BPOs, ships and items in High Sec, and start almost from scratch in Providence. I think that it will be fun. I will give news here, as always.

Until then, fly safe.

o7