I have often wondered how to make PI a bit more interesting, more engaging and most importantly, less tedious. I believe I have an answer. I remember some time ago playing a game called Spore and I really liked the way it dealt with Planetary Colonies in the Space stage. Anyone who remembers it will know what this is: -
I would like to suggest that our Command Centres become something like this. The command centre would become a structure which is fittable with Highs, Mids, Lows and Rigs. Similar to how we fit things already so familiar to everyone.
The current line up of planetary buildings would become modules that go into these fitting slots along with other new modules. As far as reducing the tedium of PI which is all the clicking I would suggest that processors pull the materials they need from storage like our guns pull ammo instead of needing the many, many clicks to route materials.
As for the more engaging and interesting part. Make these structures scannable so that they can be blown up and give them guns so they can fire back if needed. Here are the other modules I mentioned, big missile launchers, railguns, lasers and drone launchers which can fire up into orbit. All of which are high slots on our fitting screen so take up valuable space when we would rather have processors making us money.
Oh yes, I mentioned scanning. Lets have a new set of skills and modules for scanning planets to find pesky Command Centres that we want to remove. Which would also mean that if a command centre is in a certain location on a planet then another one couldn’t be placed in the same spot.
So, without further ado I would like to introduce the Wandering Star Corporation (Wandering Star is a phrase occasionally used as a synonym for a Planet). This corporation is the producer of the new series of planet based structures and has decided to start selling BPOs of them to capsuleers.
I might go as far as to suggest that all planetary buildings have their own BPOs to increase the value of having them down on a planet.
Anyway, that is my idea. Feel free to tear it to pieces
There has also been discussion around a structure service module for advanced and hi-tech processing so only extraction and basic processing take place on the planet surface.
Another option would be moving the entire operation into orbit similar to moon mining to encourage player interaction.
There needs to be a balance between the effort invested in an activity and the reward for doing the activity - ISK/hour if you like. There also needs to be a correlation between ISK/hour and risk.
Right now, the market is well supplied with PI commodities at below average prices in spite of all the tedium so there isn’t much urgency to look at revamping PI unless there is a mechanism to use it as a conflict driver instead of low risk farming income.
Would be nice to get a big revamp of PI. I’m not sold on the modules idea because i can’t imagine there being the same number of combinations for a colony as their is a ship, and separating things into high, med and low would strongly encourage homogenous lay outs unless you’ve got a lot of choices.
I definitely agree that risk/pvp needs to become a bigger part of PI. I’ve been maintaining 20 low sec colonies for several years, made stupid isk out of them, and only lost a single blockade runner to a well prepared hunter. And now that the demand for structures is reduced, the value of PI goods is falling quite sharply.
Taking production off of planets and into space sounds like a good idea because the mechanics of finding and shooting colonies on the planets surface will likely be clumsy. I may even say that there should be no command centres, but instead expand custom offices, or replace them with upwell structures, to take on that role. Has anyone ever seen a structure that has been anchored above a planet? Or star? It’s quite a sight.
And I’d prefer if only corp and alliance members were able to set-up colonies by renting their own personal ‘office’ at the customs office or take away personal colonies altogether and only have corp operated colonies. No access lists for colony management. This makes PI, at minimum, a corporation affair.
As hinted at above, a revamp of PI could introduce mining ‘colonies’ for stars. The request comes up every now and then and this seems a practical way to do it.
I’d like PI to produce people. Either incorporating people into construction, fuel or industry jobs. Like a metallurgist (or eve’s equivalent) being part of the fuel for an manufacturing plant or material for engineering rig or a consumable for industry jobs.
