Theory of PvP for Pi

PvP Gameplay Center Warfare & Tactics
1

This is the theory post. I will now make a practice post for actual strategy recon and methods.

I don’t think it’d be very difficult to land a cc on enemy planets and mine the planets dry.

In low sec you can pretty much mine the planets dry by yourself just trying to keep your max production. Can’t be a lot more for Null and Wormhole planets.

Since not everyone wants to do the logistics of Pi maybe a whole segment of alliance players can be paid to put a few points in Pi. Park a few CCs on enemy planets. And just harvest max amount possible.

Let the resources go to waste.

Basic tactics.

  1. Target a wormhole corp.
  2. Target coolant
  3. Target mechanical parts etc.
    Goal to break their supply chain for fuel blocks.

Or if you think the Wormhole corp is making money off resource extraction then Target their most profitable planets and just hit the weak link there.

Like Chiral structures on a lava planet or hit a plasma planet hard.

2

Test 1: Using only one character on one hotspot, going to see how well I can deplete this without even routing the extractors (don’t know if it will refuse to change the resource value of the hotspot because there’s no where for extracted resources to go).

I hypothesize it will still drain the resource from the hotspot and waste it…but there’s a possibility in the coding it requires a target to send the resource to for that to work…I want to test that as well, not just the speed with which I can slam a hotspot.

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3

Very exciting! Within the 3rd cycle of the first hour, the hotspot greatly diminished.

This was a low-sec test. Because of this result I want to now move it to wormhole space and see how well I can drain hotspots there.

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My next test was to see how easy it would be to get behind enemy lines, very easy was the result.

I warped deep into TEST territory and wandered around a bit to see what their defenses were like. None existent.

So anyone using the wormhole network can just warp in command centers.

Now I just need to know what the strategy is of them taxing Pi 100% at the customs offices I saw. I don’t know if that was to discourage Pi on those planets or they have some kind of price control and expect you to be paid for delivering product that is needed, not for retail.

Not sure, but if they are discouraging the use of SOME planets with 100% tax, then it would be very easy to know WHICH planets they are using exactly.

But it’s also irrelevant, if you want to commit enough resources to it, you would hit:

  1. Lava Planet (Felsic Magma)
  2. Barren Planet (Noble Metals)
  3. Gas Planet (Reactive Gas).

This by itself would shut down almost the entire Pi-product industry. And those T0 items are rare enough that, from my TESTING, one Command Center is sufficient to demolish that resource for at least a day or more. (In less than 2 hours I was able to wipe out critical resources of low-sec planets in the ~15% range. Same tier of resource is in the ~30% to 40% range in Null, Tests on same % range on more accessible planets show about a linear amount of effort to crush production. So ~4hours of extraction for one Command Center would be enough per planet. If you get a team of ~30 players or so to do nothing but planet their 18 per-omega colonies into enemy territory that = 540 Pi-assassins hammering the production of your enemy. That is a substantial number and actually probably over-kill considering you’re really only interested in a few planets. See Above).

So with a nice hit-squad of infiltrators, you can clandestinely begin to crater the opponents fuel/structure production.

You’ll nail especially any fuel blocks (Pi = about 30% of the cost of Fuel blocks), you’ll nail structures with Integrity Response Drones and SPHC.

They’ll have to import from presumably you, the seller, in other markets.

4

AFAIK the PI system is based on generation spots. Someone should correct me on this though.

You have constantly several spots that are expanding. They are at depth D so without enough skills you may not even notice them.
The more they are mined, the more depleted they become.
Expanding means, pushing the density away as much as creating units in the center. Basically a centered wave of production, but actually it’s more like a sphere of resources that becomes available by rising to a depth you can reach.

So at best you can remove all the existing resources and mine as much as the spot is producing.
Now if overmining means the spot will become dry faster, then it will also mean the new spot will respawn faster so in the end, unless you are very active to change your miners you will end up missing new hotspots.
Also, if you are several people mining in the same place, you are not taking the production from the other ; you are actually spreading the production.
Finally, it’s important to note that when you do such a thing, you also waste your own production. In the end, instead of producing the same quantity as they do, you produce nothing but they produce half as much (assuming you are the only one doing aggressive technique) Therefore you are wasting X to make them lose at most X/2. it’s an economically loss for you.

5

Andersen you wrote a lot so I’ll answer more in depth later but the most important thing is the Hotspot.

Hot spots are actually misleading, you can pull a lot more real Pi from one area versus another, but they are generally close.

However the planet operates on a regeneration layer that’s been a mystery to all Pi enthusiasts. From my experience it’s more like drinking from a glass than mining an ore. The Hotspot is more like how big your straw is, and the %percentage is more about how fast that glass is refilled than how much total resource there is to mine.

That being said, the expectation when I was doing resource extraction was that if I drained one area too much, I’d basically break the whole planet. And so you needed to balance your extraction rate with what the whole planet could support. This is because in a popular area, there are many others also doing extraction so the planet is sensitive.

Where the Hotspots happened to regenerate was less the issue than if you extracted too fast then the whole planet would be dry as a bone.

Ultimately you could get a feel for how many colonies were on which planets based on the reactivities of that regeneration layer in REAL resource extraction. Not in what the hotspots said.

6

Except if you are sitting on a pile of say…robotics.

And you are draining someone’s Barrens. Then you will be making money as the market increases by your “blockade” of the bottleneck in this case noble metals.

Also the other thing I noticed is you’re saying that the resource just disperses to wherever else someone is.

  1. the planet is one regeneration layer, so in practice draining from one spot will drain the whole planet. But the Hotspots drain faster so moving to a couple of them will be fastest

  2. most pi players do NOTHING. They set their extractors once every 2 weeks in Null where the hotspots are fat. Because of this most Pi extractors might not notice any damage to their extraction at all until many days later.

  3. it appears from my testing the impact is severe within 45 minutes on a 15% world. So I would say it is linear and be about 1.5hours to 3 hours at most on a 30-45% world.

  4. therefore for a little time (mere hours with no effort managing colonies) economic warfare you can devastate a passive industrialists productivity.

7

No, it does not change a thing. From an economical point of view, you are still losing more production than they are.

There could be an impact on the price, iff the production was very small.

Nope.

define devastate. How much are they actually losing? How much are YOU actually losing ?

8

I hope you are aware that owner of POCO sees your export activity in transaction log and POCOs can be completely locked out for you so you will be not able to use them at all and have to launch your PI from planet and collect in space?

9

No. Because the people doing this are people who otherwise wouldnt be doing Pi at all.

It’s 5 minutes of effort to reset extraction heads.

It’s hours of risk-heavy hauling to make decent money at Pi. So many people do NO Pi.

So you take those people. Tell them you’ll give them 5million isk per planet per month, and tell them what planets to hit.

And they go and diddle around with 9 to 15 colonies for 5 to 10 minutes a day. From ANYWHERE in New Eden. To execute the Alliance’s anti-Pi campaign.

10

Wtf does this matter?

This thread has nothing to do with collecting Pi.

11

They are losing everything and you are losing nothing.

Fully one half of all Pi is consumed by the manufacturers so they are not able to be blockaded or embargoed on fuel block imports, or on module/station inputs.

If you are severely hindering their ability to be autarkic you have effected a strategic gain for your Alliance.

12

And Andersen I’m not sure then what you’re saying about the resources of a Planet but in general the way they work is they are all ONE pool, and how hot the spot determines how fast you can drain that pool and the percentage of the resource determines how fast it can be regenerated.

The pool is not localized so you can drain other hotspots without being there.

But it’s a simple matter to just move the extractor heads

13

Then it changed. When I did some I noticed you could have several new hostposts at the same time.
Maybe “new” was too large (like 2days difference between cycle reset)

14

You will get new hotspots but they all belong to the same regeneration layer. So as your Hotspot diminishes this doesn’t mean the next Hotspot is worth “more” than yours. If you have 100 resource, both hotspots access the same 100 resources.

That 100 has to replenish for new hotspots to pop-up.

The only reason I’m mentioning this is it isn’t like starting over every time you see a new Hotspot.

After you grind a planet pretty hard, the hot spots become very weak and you can drain them very quickly. Which is why on my lowsec tests I could drain a hot spot in 45minutes and now the whole planet is ruined for a day.

And that’s not 45 minutes of activity. That’s 45 minutes of the extractor heads running.

So I put 5 minutes of effort in. And ruin a planet’s productivity.

15

Did you check how much another account did ?

Because to the extent of my understanding, THAT is what you want to do : impact other people activity.

16

There are Sooooo many planets this won’t make a difference, but if you really have this need to feel good about being a nuisance in your mind go for it.

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17

Yes in fact I first noticed this when doing harvest colonies on my 3 characters. If there were no hot spots for one there were none for any. With slight variation based on their different skills

18

You’re not right. For a variety of hypotheses I already KNOW from my clandestine activities that TEST Alliance does not Pi from Omist. This is further evidenced by their 100%tax.

Furthermore my activities have discovered most f their Delve operation deals in IRDs, SPHCs and Robotics.

Their critical industry is Water and Mechanical parts with Toxic metals being secondary.

There are fewer than 200 planets in Delve that can efficiently harvest these resources.

Completely manageable. That’s just 10-20 players coordinating an attack effort.

19

That’s not really what I wanted to know.
If your alt was doing X unit per day . And you start doing that. How much would your alt do when you do that to when you don’t ?

20

So the idea is just to block your own planetary colony slots just to harvest resources of some random planets and let it go waste. Lol. Good luck then. 65217 planets in EVE like this “pvp” concept…

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