Science & Industry

Industry

p58, “Trebor said that what you needed in the simple case was a good view into the materials requirement pipeline (for example, in 36 hours you will be blocked because you are out of some material) and suggested that then there could be prioritization applied if there are multiple jobs” — this would be good for a real life UI where you want the computer pointing out the optimisations for the humans. In the game, you want this kind of attention to detail to be the competitive advantage of the spreadsheet wrangler over the “just dump this stuff in the station and see what happens” style industrialist.

You don't want the UI stepping into the zone of explicit instruction (as pointed out by Elise on p83).

I like the idea of being able to use assembly lines in a station or POS the same way as processors in PI. Now you just need to have NPCs raise their prices as demand for their assembly lines increases: all lines full for two weeks? Double the per-hour costs. POS industry needs to be used more, and this can be achieved by reducing NPC supply, raising the cost of NPC supply, and lowering the click-intensive nature of POS assembly lines before altering the UI of NPC assembly lines. POS assembly lines already have their own "bins", so converting POS assembly lines to PI-style factories with links should be relatively simple. Just allow assembly to be set as a process rather than a project, and allow assembly lines to fetch/dump their output in a different POS structure such as another assembly array or a corporate hangar array. These changes would be most welcome if they can be squeezed into current POSes.

Fix POS refineries please? While you're at it, nerf NPC refineries please?

On p60, “Two Step suggested it should cost less to build farther from Jita by adjusting NPC build costs”. I heartily agree: but I would do this by having NPC assembly line costs rise with demand. Any economist or capitalist will tell you that this is the way things should work. You don't have to fiddle things manually this way.

Oh, and place a limit on the number of market orders that can be sustained by any one station. An Assembly Plant shouldn't have as many available market slots as a Logistics Support station, for example. An administration office shoudln't have anywhere near as much market support or hangar space as a Logistics Support station. Build NPC stations the same way as player stations. If I want to set up a POS in nullsec with a market hangar, that should allow me to compete for business with local NPC stations.

Starbases

Modular starbases FTW!

I would love CCP to start releasing modular starbases as soon as a minimum viable product is available: that is, the basic anchoring module, a power supply, a supercomputer, an ME research lab. Ideally this could be dynamically scalable: want more ME labs? Add another power supply and super computer to support a few more labs. Not using your labs? Turn them off and power down a couple of power supplies and computers.

This is enough to get hisec industrialists to use the star base. ME research can be done using blueprints that are stored in a NPC station in the same solar system. In incremental releases you can push out PE labs and offensive/defensive batteries, followed by storage & invention labs. Other modules that require storage can follow: assembly arrays, corporate hangars, silos, reactors.

The minimum viable product will mean you have something in use as quickly as possible: the minimal amount of art required to get this product into Tranquility would be some bland grey boxes to concretely illustrate the grid-based design principle. I'm sure industrialists will forgive you for boring grey boxes that work, if you promise some art time to revisit the boxes and make them interesting later. Sure, add some really basic texture to make the boring grey box look like a Gallente research lab versus an Amarr research lab (the difference being a trade off in CPU usage for research multiplier time), or a Caldari lab (which reduces research time to trade for shield capacity) or a Minmatar lab (which uses more CPU, less PG, has less EHP, but a faster research time), but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

POSes and modular starbases run by appropriately skilled characters played by appropriately skilled players should be more efficient than NPC provided services.

Factional Warfare & Industry

I am dead set against giving FW specific bonuses in terms of faster jobs times in NPC stations (Two Step, bottom of p59).

A better option would be a job-time multiplier that is impacted by IHUB upgrades. This translates better for sov nullsec (and the FW occupation mechanic could also extend to NPC nullsec). This puts industry into destructible POSes. You want the gains from Faction Warfare? You have to face the personal risk.

i.e.: Farms & Fields. Do not allow "industry by shooting stuff"

High Meta Industry

p61: I thoroughly support the idea of allowing miners & explorers to discover "unicorn manure" and "space whale oil" (and perhaps PvPers could discover "carebear tears", and PVEers could discover "dutch courage") to contribute to the manufacture of high-meta items. I'll also note that there are no (or very few) high-meta variants of T1 ships. Imagine a meta-4 Merlin that gets a 6% bonus instead of a 5% bonus, for example. OR the ability for industrialists to invent a T1 meta-4 item such as 1400mm 'Scout' Artillery I.

… and this is the S&I thread, not the official thread.

/facepalm

Modular POS etc: The Corporation & POS roles & permissions HAVE TO be fixed/amended to make them more user-friendly and better in terms of security of assets BEFORE modular eye-candy POS are introduced as a matter of extreme priority. I realise the years of coding in this part of the client is a complete mess and it's not a 'sexy' task but it is probably the number one aspect of EVE Online that needs fixing. Please don't introduce modular POS without doing the roles & permissions first.

Mining: To my mind mining was not broken and did not need fixing even before the mining ship balancing on August 8th. Anyone who finds mining 'boring' doesn't have to do it. There are plenty of other careers they can do within New Eden. But I guess we will have to see how it pans out.

PI & DUST 514: The additional tax that Dust mercs will be able to charge EVE pilots for doing PI on 'their' Dust planets worries me regarding high sec PI. PI tax in high sec is arguably high enough and I would not like to see this additional tax introduced there. If it was introduced in low & nul-sec that might be more economically manageable.

When you can sift out the content from the noise, looks like some interesting changes coming up!

Love the modular POS ideas.

I couldn't disagree with this more.
This is what contributes to what many people point out about manufacturing in null sec. It's cheaper to import some things from high sec than it is to make them yourself. As one CSM pointed out, CCP should make it cheaper to produce goods in null. Having cost scale based on sec status would help manufacturing in null a lot, and would encourage people to put up PoS's in low sec systems.

The first bonus of building in your own station or PoS should be that it's cheaper than an NPC station, the second bonus should come from sec status of were you're building in all stations, NPC and PC.

I really hope that the starbase feature they discussed would allow me to build in.
Ideally I'd like to see starbases also work as personal assembly stations that players could build and work out of, making it the cheapest way to build goods. With a limitted amount of room to store on the station, players can build there, but would have to ship the goods out to keep production running smoothly and prevent a bottleneck as an assembly line has nowhere to unload to. Even allow my assembly line to deliver to a freighter moored to the station, whether my own freighter or someone who has a contract with me to haul my goods to a specific market.



I kind of agree with this.

I know some people really like the idea of mini games, but I'm sorry, they suck. Very few games have "good" mini games in them for doing things, and I have yet to play any game that had a mini game that made it fun to do something for hours on end.

ACTIVE, does not mean mini game. The impression I got was they want mining to be more active, not really a game within a game. Sort of the way that mining seems to have gotten a little more active with the current ship balances. Selecting a new roid every few minutes is better than having players able to sit in a belt and mine for long periods of time without doing anything, and it's a long shot better then making us play a mini game in order to mine.

My hope is that ring mining will be kind of like exploration. You'll have to travel through the ring, scanning down rocks that contain the ore you're looking for; once that's accomplished it should just be like mining anything else, except that you would be using specialized lasers to extract the proper ore or mineral from the rock and leaving behind what you didn't want.

Hopefully it'll have a kind of overview similliar to scanning down a particular component on a planet. Instead of just rocks littered about that require you to scan each rock to find the proper mineral, you'll scan the ring to narrow down the concentration of rocks that have what you're looking for. Depending on your skill the better your scan, just like with PI. Once you find the concentration you can head to that area of the ring, and then scan down that area to get a better bead on the mineral, then each miner in the fleet can scanning individual rocks to determine their concentrations, and then mine away.

On the contrary Mr Abdiel, Lowsec and Nulsec is where you get your minerals 20-50% under market price, hence the Capitals on the market are a right on Par with current mineral prices in Jita.

Another Note to the CSM, can you guys please make Capital ships, all of them refine to no more then 80% of what it costs to make them? highsec is at a loss with Freighter construction.

One solution would be to nerf the Jump Freighter. Then the road between Jita and null-sec becomes a very different proposition.

Just reading through this one again as it has risen to the top of the pile again.

'Fantasy Fitting' : I personally would like to see this officially in the actual game client. I haven't downloaded any of the third party programs and it would be nice have this ability within the client.
Having said that I would still like to see a full overhaul of the Corporation/POS Roles & Permissions BEFORE any new stuff is added to EVE such as ring mining,modular POS etc. If 'Roles & Permissions' were fixed to make them user friendly and to enable security and corporation member ease of use of POS modules it would put an enormous smile on many pilots faces I'm sure.