Planetary Interaction is very tedious when you need to make multiple materials. I would love to see added to Eve, the ability to process the base materials acquired from the planets in station to alleviate some of the hassle of constantly moving items around to different customs offices and to and from planet surfaces. It would be so much easier on our time if we could just go to the planets to collect the base materials and return to station and make what we need from them there as we do with ore.
This would reduce the tax take on POCO’s, reduce the time you are in space (the only time you and your PI goods are at risk), and increase the amount of PI produced (thus reducing profit as prices drop).
Better just to rework the whole thing properly.
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It’s pretty much pointless to export Raw Resources (R0), not only do they have the “biggest” volume per ISK value but also to manage the materials outside of planets undermines the entire Planetary Interaction mechanic’s system. The PI system works on a simple principal, the more time you spend managing your colonies the greater the payoff will be.
@Brenden_Stark I presume that you’re playing on an Omega account, based on the fact that Alpha accounts can’t export from planets anyway which makes it kinda pointless of you to ask such a question, nonetheless you have.
While I can not tell you how things work best for you, I can tell you how I’ve setup my PI productions; first of all, I have skills to have 6 colonies, with max upgrades for Command Center, on both my main and my alt characters so that makes 12 colonies I have to manage. With that many colonies I have a wide range of production I can produce but at the moment they are set up to produce 2 types of P4 commodities, extractors at a 24 hour cycle:
- 9 Planets to produce the needed P2 commodities (9 x single planet “P2 production”*).
- 1 Planet to produce 2 types of P1 commodies which is required as part of the P4 production.
- 1 Planet to produce both the P2
P3, and P3 P4
- 1 Utility Planet, which I have yet to make use of but will probably use it to do the P2 P3, instead of doing P2 P4 on the same planet
- Exporting products once every 1-2 weeks
- Time spend managing colonies each day amounts to 20-30min on average.
NB: All this is best done in Null, WH or Lowsec space, mostly because of near 0% tax you can get.
*) meaning that the planet handles everything from; Extractor (R0 output) Warehouse Basic Production facility (P1 output) Warehouse Advanced Production Facility (P2 output) Launchpad.
The most profitable setups for me have been:
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10 extractors collecting a resource that’s plentiful on that planet, piped into 8x basic processors to convert the raw material (P0 mat) to P1. This reduces the volume that has to go through the customs office, and thus reduces taxes. The advantage of this is that you basically extract 8 in parallel; fills up a storage in about 24 hours. A lot of people try to collect 2 resources (P0 mats), upgrade each to P1, then combine them to P2, but because of the powergrid limits on the planet, you end up with the equivalent of processing 1, maybe 2 parallel lines. Basically not as much product as just extracting P0 to P1.
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Find a barren planet with no tax, or extremely low tax, and just put down storage and processors. Buy P3 from the market in the quantities you need, and make P4 (end product) out of it on the planet, with, again, 4-6 parallel assembly lines. Sell the results. Profits depend on the tax rate at the POCO, because you have to pay import AND export taxes (you’re bringing materials down to the planet, AND up from the planet).
Otherwise, I can tell you that CCP designed industry in general, and PI in particular, to be impossible to fully do, from raw materials (P0) all the way to end product (P4), by a single character or even account (3 characters). 6 max planets per character, and randomly mis-matched raw materials on each planet, make it basically a nightmare to solo PI. You need to first find planets with low tax, then figure out what materials are profitable to step up (from P3 to P4, or from P2 to P3), and just focus on doing that. Or collect raw mats (P0) and upgrade them to P1 for bulk sale, from as many planets as you can manage, and rely on the “bulk” part to make your profits.
I’ve never understood why people hate how PI currently operates. It is a bit tedious to set up initially, but after that, you literally just have to wait. The T1 ship to haul everything is dirt cheap and almost immediately paid for by almost anything you can make with PI (not sure if they ever fixed the DST problem [if you don’t know what I’m talking about, do not attempt to pick up PI in a DST]).
Don’t like the tax? Blow the POCO up and put your own down. Can’t blow it up because the corp is part of the alliance you’re in? Blow it up anyways.
After rereading the OP a couple times now I’m not sure this is relevant, but still posting.
PI is just too tedious, I agree. Even for those that only have a few PI alts. now if you just have one it is balanced.
But lots of us have made the other two alts on our accounts a PI alt so at the very least most of us have 3 PI alts now times that b how many accounts we have. I spend over an hour tuning each alt and over 3 hours setting up a PI alt.
This is too much. make it simpler to set up. Keep all the you can only get this stuff on this planet and there only so much of it. you can do more with command center upgrade.
But make it easier to say make this from this planet.
My suggestion:
Get ride of everything but the command center and make it to where you just tell the command center Make this product, extract this raw material.
Keep the ability to move raw material or combinations of products down (pure production planet).
Basically this gets ride of the routing of stuff from here to there and expedite transfers. The command center should just hold everything and be a launch pad and be able to hold the same amount as a POCO. I also think we should increase how much the POCO can hold.
What is time consuming and tedious is setting up all the processors and making sure they are feed properly, only to come back and see it is not working. no it is not hard but at the same time it very easy, TOO EASY to miss something.
At the very least get ride of Processors, Storage, and spaceports put all that into the command center. Increase the cost of putting that down and upgrading (to cover cost of making the items it replaces) make a cost to start a job even.
take away or leave the Extractors (prefer take away, add cost to start an extraction job).
Yes I rather pay to start an automated make me this , than sit here for hours each PI ALT I have and get cross eyed looking at my screen.
Oh last thought, T2 or T3 command centers that have this functionality. You get to keep the current way but this new upgraded command center has the easy way.
I was doing PI 7 years ago. Not much has changed. It’s always been a choir to set up. But once it’s set, it’s very easy to maintain, with VERY minor adjustments.
If I’m doing high sec pi and if I’m very lazy. I monitor my silos and spaceport. If I’m making too much of one, take one head off and add to the other.
If not any of that let me name the structures so I can tell by the name what I wanted them to do and store
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