When it comes to doing things near the end-game for optimal performance, do I need alts for the activities of manufacturing, PI, hauling, trading, and general industry stuff? I’m not interested in PVP and once I can do these activities well, I want to quit mining as well.
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This will be very subjective. Alts scale well on certain activities, like for PI for example, you could have the extra character slots for their planet slots - even with maximum skills, your character manages 6 planets at most, ideal training you would have 5 planets per character, and if you’ve got that kind of patience for it then yes alts are good.
Hauling alts were great in my previous lives in this game, like when I was a lowsec pirate, it was great to have a character that could come and go without any troubles in highsec and bring me the Frigates and modules I would need for my roams and alliance ops.
Industry would be another one that would scale well like PI does. Characters can only manage so many jobs at once. I guess really the question becomes about what you like doing and buying into more characters as you need them.
I know people that have spreadsheets to keep track of accounts and what’s on them 
That is well beyond what I would be interested in doing. To each their own.
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Pretty much.
Maybe not with trading or hauling, but generally industry scales far too well with more characters to be competitive if you limit yourself to a single account. I mean, I’m sure there are niches where more characters aren’t the bottleneck and you could do well, but usually more character is better so the pressure will always be there to scale up your accounts.
Trading however is usually bottlenecked by capital and slots aren’t that limiting for many types of trading. Hauling can be done with one of two accounts pretty efficiently. That would be where I would focus if I didn’t want multiple accounts.
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You don’t need alts. They only scale up income. If you are satisfied with what you get from one character, then you don’t need anything more.
Ps. friend might be better option than alt. It’s MMO after and you cant chat with isk. Well, if you can you probable need to se a doctor
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I don’t use any alts anymore. I do everything I enjoy just fine on this one character. However when I played years ago, I was a criminal in lowsec, having that extra character was for hauling initially. Then I taught her to probe which really opened up what I could do with my PVP main. I bought a second monitor and I would log into both of them everyday playing them at the same time!
After I had a great hauler and then she was a great prober, I started to train her on trading skills. Now she was my wallet.
Then I decided to try… carebearing. I started to train her into a Stratios, and then a Gila and before you know it she was casually doing highsec anomalies while I did my lowsec thing. She pretty much was her own character after a while.
I never got into industrial-scale ‘alting.’ But my second character really grew on me and I thought of my second account more like having a second main. I let my wife design her too in the character editor so it was kind of fun to tell her about what she was up to and doing in game to support my character.
I could ramble on, but that is what it was like when I was keeping an alt for me personally.
Edit: reminiscing more here and I used to drop her into bad highsec corporations. The kind that would recruit you with zero background check out of local 
I would do the obvious afk alt things like leave her logged in cloaked but after a while she would have her own history of corporations, highsec losses sometimes so she actually looked like a legit character rather than an obvious prober. She was a great combat probing and hauling alt. I miss the olden days
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No. You can be ok with just the 3 characters on one account.
I‘m doing everything with this character in game. I have a second slot char to hold my funds, so I‘m safe from expensive mis-clicks. That’s it. I could scale with more, but why? My time and attention capacity is limited, and when I‘m playing I only play because I like what I‘m doing so I focus on it.
So in short the answer is: no. But with alts you can scale almost everything in EvE.
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With SI, it doesn’t even take any time to skill up the other 2 slots. Their there! Use them.
I found that using alts is useful for some stuff as you can be in different locations whenever you want to. Your PP, trading or industry character is probably going to be doing his stuff in a different location from your PVE combat character so you could do it all on one character but then you’d have to travel back and forth the whole time but that is wasted time and gets annoying quickly.
In my case I have a combat character, a trading one and an industry character and they’re all in (very) different locations.
You don’t need alts really or other accounts. However with activities like manufacturing having alts gives more slots. Trading alts give access to more orders, etc. Pi alts give access to more planets. If you aren’t using all those slots then it’s kindof pointless to have an alt trained for it. If you are then these slots are doing their thing even when you aren’t logged in so you just scale up.
Hauling alts in different corps can help avoid wardecs or allow hauling in different coalition’s space. Imagine one alt blue to one coalition and another blue to their enemies. You can then trade in both group’s citadels. But again all that isn’t needed to just play the game. If you use jump freighters then a cyno alt is useful so you can light for yourself. If your in a trustworthy corp you can get your corp mates to light cynos as well.
Play the game to have fun not to have a 2nd job. You can make tons of ISK and do everything with one toon if you want.
With coming mobile cyno beacons, you don’t need a second char anymore for jump freighters, just a good clone management and timing.
Maybe, but you would have a clone timer so it would be much more painful to do multiple jumps in succession. Also someone would see the beacon in the time you are jumping back, getting in your freighter, etc. which can add to the danger factor. I frequently jump through very dangerous areas. When I light a cyno I light and immediately jump so there is no time for hostiles to react except to kill my cyno ship after I have already jumped and docked.
Burn to mid point, deploy, death clone, jump, move home station, burn to next mid point, …
I know it’s a kind of “I can” thing, and probably not very practical, because you need clone bays, and carry a few a bit bulky mobile cynos with you.
I don’t think a cyno alt is among the first things a Newbro should deploy 
OP, if you feel the need, get an alt char, if you are happy without, don’t. It’s a game, just try when you feel confident enough to manage two alts simultaneaously.
It’s handy, but also expensive, because all alts running at the same time have to be omega.
Yeah, you don’t need any alts. They are useful, and can increase your ability to make money, but they are not needed. Thus, it all boils down to preference.
Don’t need it but using the other character slots are handy for industrial, pi, and research.
For hauling it depends on how much you need something and how quickly. I’m a mission runner so my needs are not urgent like trying to take advantage of a volatile market so I can haul to a local trade hub and set up a courier contract to Jita to sell where another character resides to buy/sell/setup courier contracts back. Quite often you can piggyback on other people running between trade hubs cheaply, just set up your collateral properly and expect some shipments to not go through, like one of mine did earlier today. Its a good way to source materials in advance too.
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