I’m a returning player and I was wondering if it is worth the time to have an industrial alt.
My idea is to be able to manufacture ammo and drones for my main when I’m missioning as I tend to forget to buy enough ammo.
Therefore I see 3 paths
Train my main for it (she’s able to manufacture a bit)
Train an alt on my account to benefit from omega status using MCT for a month roughly (I can’t pay for 2 accounts all the time)
Make a new account, change to omega for a month for quicker initial training and then back to alpha.
Or maybe it’s not worth it to have an alt for ammo and drones only.
Thanks for your help
A dedicated industry alt is worth it only if you can do more stuff on it that generates your income than just manufacturing drones and ammo, like trading, blueprint research, invention and PI. If you’re building just T1 stuff, then option 1 is OK. But you probably want to build T2 drones at least, which requires few million SP of Science skills. And since you can’t build T2 stuff as an Alpha, then option 3 is out of the question. I would go with option 2, but first check with EVEMon how many SP you require to do invention and manufacturing you want - you might be having enough SP in redeeming queue after the latest event so you could apply them to the second character and there might not be a need to buy a MCT.
I did something similar (on my Omega account) to your second suggestion for an alt I use for wormhole-scanning - a month’s MCT trained the necessary skills to fly an Imicus and scan-down signatures, and the recent million skill-point bonus got him further trained to fly an Astero and hack relic and data sites.
It just depend what you want to build… If it is only for T1 Ammo and T1 drones, I’m not sure it is really worth it econimically…
Let me explain:
First you will need minerals to build your stuffs. And then, researched BPO (which require some skills for the researches.) But you might try to buy the researched BPO directly in contracts.
Then, be sure to do your maths before starting. Concerning T1 drones, for most of them, if not all, buying them directly on the market will, most of the time, cost you less that the value of the minerals (Jita Sell price) needed to build them. So if you want to build them cheaper, either you will have to buy your minerals at Jita buy price or mine some ore and reprocess it to get the minerals… Even if you mine them, the minerals are not free because the time you will spend to mine is some game time not available for others activities (pve).
It might be the same for T1 Ammo as the market is really competitive on those items because many players start their industry career with T1 Ammo and saturate the market….
So as you might now understand, it might be a lot of hassle, just for producing T1 Ammo & T1 drones.
But of course, you might want to build the stuffs you use just for the fun of it, and it is a valid option. In that case the conomically parameter is out of the equation.
It’s absolutely, unquestionably not even in the same zipcode as “worth it” if all you want to do is make your own ammo and drones.
For T1 Ammo/Drones, you can make those things on your main with almost zero SP investment. They’re both dirt cheap and it sounds like convenience, not cost, is the motivating factor here, anyway, so I don’t think there’s any need to worry about the efficiency of doing so. It’s chump change no matter what. Buy some ammo and drone BPOs (cheap) and off you go. Research them, or don’t, because 10% on nothin’ is… nothin’.
For T2 ammo/drones, you’ll likely need to go to a trade hub anyway for the T2 components, at which point, you may as well just buy yourself a stock of ammo and drones. Both are typically pretty thin margins on manufacturing, so you’re not even going to save much while adding a ton of logistics and management hassle.
If you only care to manufacture ammo for yourself and don’t want to bother buying a BPO or BPCs for it you can consider my blueprint giveaway, from which you can get blueprints each calendar month both for many types of ships, ammo and more, depending on what ammo you use it might suit you and depending on how much you use could provide enough for you or could cover at least some of your ammo needs.
You can look up my threads if you open my profile here by clicking my avatar and see the details in the related thread of mine in case you are interested.
Not really. Certain T1 ammo items have good margins. Is not much of profit but I consider finding these items a good practice for budding industrialists.
Make a new account, refer a friend yourself.
Take advantage of the both the refer rewards and the DLC packs ie 1,000,000 Skill points inside the starter pack.
Once the Meteor Pack is complete, think about transferring that character over to your main account before purchasing the Star pack if you are thinking of that path.
Or leave the character on it’s own account and do what you do normally.
The same way you consider buying a ‘mining permit’ from code to be good practice?
Probably the most straightforward way for a budding industrialist to begin making ISK while learning something along the way is salvaging and relic loot, then manufacturing rigs partially from own salvage.
You’ve got exploration, ninja salvaging, marketing and market research, a number of entry level activities some of which is actually somewhat fun.
I would say stay away from drones and ships in the beggining, y can make nice profit with t1 modules like shield extenders, damage controls, some weapons, missiles are a good go too.
I think I’ll stick with my main and save the money of MCT.