Science & Industry

I've been bidding for teams since the launch of Crius. My major interest is ship manufacturing teams.

I remember that when the expansion was launched, many good teams were auctioned for 250-500M. (One particular team went above 1B.) In order to get a team, I had to settle for inferior quality.

The 1st team I won costs me 80M, with only one 1% ME bonus, The 2nd team costs me 61M and it's a completely TE team.

However, things started to change recently. I've noticed 500M bids have become less common and some teams didn't even get one offer.

Yesterday I won another TWO teams. The 1st team costs me 20M, with expected benefit of 6M material savings per ship. The 2nd one costs me 15M and are expected to save my cost for 11M per ship. This confirmed my belief that the inital bidding craze has dissipated and now is a good time to find a bargain.

What's more interesting is what will happen when the teams start to retire in two weeks. Will these big players re-join the auctions to replace their teams and bid up the price? Will they conclude that teams are not worth their bucks and limit their bids or withdraw from auctions completely? Or maybe some of them will join the bidding earlier (well, I DID) or later to avoid another bidding frenzy?

Only time will tell.

I'm curious to hear from people who have put together successful groups ("alliances", not just your own alts) in any given system to bid on and have won any teams... I successfully moved on Team for 7.5mil to a system recently, and the cost savings just aren't there without MASSIVE production on my part. More from curiosity to play with the numbers than any real push to begin producing a single type of product, this experiment confirmed my initial conclusions about Teams for those that aren't massive producers.

Yeah, 1% mat saving doesn't do a whole lot of good on anything smaller than a BC, and even then, does it really outweigh the 13% salary you pay them (the bigger the ship, the larger the cost, the more they take)

I only really build T2 ships or T2 modules, and the ships are getting some steep 'job costs'....teams only add more costs in most cases.

nice try ...

You missed the part where i qualify it by saying that 2% from regular T2 modules (9 units per material at most) doesn't really do much. 9 x .98 = 8.82 which gets rounded back up to 9. It only does any good on full run T2 bpc's for modules where the materials are greater than 50 units total. (or is my math wrong?) So, saying a 1% ME team doesn't do much good for anything other than ships is fairly accurate.

For ships and other items that do have hundreds of units of each material, yes, it does help. However, i refuse to play the material tetris needed to build every single thing from all sorts of different arrays at a tower. Until they fix the entire tower structure to have a central storage that is.