Science & Industry

Sorry, no tl:dr

After building an outpost, and then upgrading it, I have noticed that it is just one of many areas that CCP really need to add more depth. Well, actually just give it some depth, because right now it has none. It is one of the least thought about processes and requires downtime to implement due to (assuming here) the nature of adding these structures to the game.

Outposts come in four racial flavours, each providing a different focus for the outpost. Once deployed, and outpost can then be upgraded to either expand on the already focussed role, or add some additional functionality at a reduced ability to the focussed one.

The initial outpost has bpo’s seeded on the market and is built from outpost construction parts which are made from P4 PI products as well as considerable amounts of tritanium, nocxium and zydrine. The parts take considerable time to build, roughly 12 hours in an amarr outpost so if building from one BPO, it will take more than a month to produce certain parts required. These component bpo’s take a long time to research, and are 200mil each.

Currently the entire process, if buying your own component bpo’s and an egg bpc will cost roughly 15 – 18bil depending on the outpost, thanks to the high mineral prices.

Once built, the resultant egg can only be moved by freighter, and is one of the only things that a freighter can deploy from its cargo bay.

This isn’t the end of the process though. Once deployed, it takes 1 hour to anchor. The timer isn’t visible, but can be checked by trying to anchor the already anchoring egg which will give you the remaining time in seconds.

“You thought you were done?” Well you’re wrong. Once deployed you need to fill the egg up with random amounts of stuff. Mostly minerals and PI items, but also some trade goods and possibly some slaves (for the amarr one).

You then need to wait until after the next downtime for the outpost to deploy.

Oh, something I forgot to mention is that you need to anchor this egg at the warp in of a planet and can’t be within 100km of an already deployed structure. Got a POCO already there? It’s probably easiest to shoot it and then re-anchor it after the outpost is deployed.

So now we are done. You have a basic outpost that you can dock at, get an office, build stuff use the market, set clones, repair your ship and maybe do some research. So we want to upgrade this to get a better base refine as 35% is a bit sub optimal.

Well, the process is……..

Buy a foundation upgrade platform off an npc sell order. Move it with a freighter to your outpost system, anchor it more than 5km off your outpost, wait an hour, fill it with PI goods and minerals and wait until after the next downtime. The egg sitting outside the outpost will attach itself to the outpost during the downtime somehow.

“Are we done?”

“Of course not, this is CCP we are talking about”

You need to buy the basic upgrade you want from another NPC seller. You then need to use a freighter to bring it out to your outpost, you need to anchor it more than 5km from the outpost, wait an hour, fill it with Minerals, PI goods and a janitor and wait until the next downtime. After which this new egg will attach itself to the outpost and give you some more stuff.

Oh, the foundation upgrade costs 3.6bil, the basic upgrade costs 900mil and both use about a bil worth of stuff to stick into it. So roughly 6.5bil in total to give an extra 5% base refining increase, 3 offices or an extra 3 manufacturing slots. Let’s not talk about the next level upgrade which costs 7.2bil for the platform plus more for the upgrade and stuff to go inside of them that will give you another 5% to the base refine, or 5 more offices. Oh, the largest upgrade will cost you 14.4bil plus extras totalling more than the original outpost.

What can CCP do to fix this process? Well firstly fix the outpost deployment so it doesn’t need a downtime to actually appear as an outpost. Fix the upgrade process, it is dumb to anchor stuff outside that then appears part of the station. And thirdly make the upgrades more attractive. 85% of the upgrades are pointless. Most often, you are better off building a new outpost except for upgrading the refining ability, or adding offices.

Thanks for taking the time to not read my post.

Well building outpost is not supposed to be easy, thats the whole challenge of it. Bad alliances cant organise enought to build one. Its crown jewel of alliance archievements to built its first outpost. Tells something about alliance leadership if one can pull off something like this.

And even if outpost construction is not easy, theres tons of them in 0.0 space. Too bad theyre not destructable. Would rise outpost defence in new importance if you would literally loose it

what exactly were you hoping for?

Out of the list of issues i have with the game, Outpost construction isn't even on it.

Seriously, there are thousands of other things to suggest changing before this.