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faction towers are a solved problem, you multiply the output blocks by 10x or 100x and you have sufficent granularity to do sov and faction towers, presto, no coding changes

Wow... I am actually posting on the EVE-o forums!

Dear CCP,

Awesome purposed changes!

Positive feedback-

1. JB passwords have for a long time been a pain in the ass.


2. Changes to Anchor/unanchor times are very appreciated. I found that setting up a pos was a 3-4 hour endeavor for me. That is a long time to sit and watch timers! Thank you for this change as well.


3. Full Cells are an amazing concept as well! I have three different spreadsheets for poses + a DB or two that keeps track of fuel consumption and timers. Having all of this simplified is a HUGE relief to me! Drop in 672 Fuel Cells a week per tower. (yes that is 34k M3) Move on to the next tower and repeat. For the record I am alright with having a full use of PG/CPU to get the pleasure of not having to worry about those details!

Suggestions for improvement before release-

1. Perhaps adding access to the PoS Shields by standing should be an option as well? We already Have the box for allow corp/alliance use. Why not one for use by standing? I know this would make a lot of NullSec people happy as safe poses would be that much safer.


2. Fuel Cell production is going to take a vast amount of timers in its current iteration. I realize that you want to make the batches in a small denomination so folks don't feel forced to buy a larger quantity of fuel then they feel they need. However basic math lets us know for each large tower you are running you will be using 1/6th of that time on timers producing the fuel.

30 days of fuel for 1 large tower takes 5 days to produce with one Manu slot. There fore a single char5acter can at max produce fuel for 11 towers every 5 days. Meaning 66 towers over the course of a month. (of course you wont have much lee time in doing this)

Now building in an ammo array the numbers look slightly better 3.75 days per batch. So in theory using 3 ammo arrays you can run timers for 88 towers a month with a single character. That said this is a huge sink of time for industrial characters and their timers.

Increasing the batch size is one option for making things go faster but then you run into forcing players to buy larger amounts
of fuel to make a single batch. The other option is to decrease the build time to something that feels significant, but also doesn't prevent them from using their timers for other production. Halving the current proposed time to 5 minutes would mean making fuel for one tower would take about 2 an a half days. Dropping it to 2minutes per batch would mean it would take 1 day to build 30days of fuel.

That number feels right to me personally, I don't know about you at CCP. but 2Minutes a batch meaning 1 day of production per tower per manu slot. When you get to alliance level you are still talking a huge investment of time from someone, but at the same time it is manageable. At the individual level you are more than capable of devoting 1 day per tower as well.


3. Compression! Alright, so at every stage of production in EVE compression is a big issue.
In PI-
T0 PI items are huge. T1 are smaller, but not small. T2/T3 pos fuel are small respectively.
In Minerals-
Ore is huge! Minerals are 1/0th the size on average. T1 Modules increase the compression even more so.

I ran the math and these blocks also get the benefits of a compression as well. 217.6 m3 in Items = 200m3 in 4 blocks. Okay so thats not really a compression, you get 1.088 compression :D

My suggestion is that these fuel blocks are going through a manufacturing process as well. In a game continuity sense they should also be capable of compression. Looking at the more commonly used items for compression you get a range of compression from 12-40.

(Edited the compression numbers due to me failing at math)
A Compression of 1.34 (got this buy assuming a half load of CPU/HW and calcing block size based on that instead)
This goes from hauling 34k a week to a mere 25k Per week per large tower. This gives a reason and assigns VALUE to the manufacturing time. I am sure many folks out there know how much of a pain it is to haul fuel around. Compressing it is something they would indeed have no qualms about paying a markup for! In addition the fuel bay's would not have to be changed at all if I did my math correctly. 25k * 4 = 100k so 1 month fuel would fit in a large tower.

This doesn't help WH corps with their now inherent need to move large amounts of Isos/HW/LO into the WH. That said they have had to do this anyway. So I imagine they will continue to do so and instead just make the blocks inside WH-Space


4. In regards to Sov bonuses and Faction tower bonuses all I have to say is I think it was already hit perfectly on the head previously in this thread. Change the batch size from 4 to 400 and you get granularity in 1% increments.

All in all I love how much more focused yall at CCP are at FiS aspects. Just wanted to give some feedback.



*Edited Compression numbers because I fail at math

sov system and faction towers are an easily solved problem that I have faith has been explained well enough in this thread to allow greyscale to make the needed tweak (400 blocks per run, large tower uses 400, faction and sov can be done with proper granularity here)

there is less work involved because you can pay some worthless empire peon pennies to make the blocks and get them in jita

This is the simplest answer. As for the comment about keeping numbers small, in terms of manufacturing, or even invention for that matter (hello datacores), 100 *IS* small. You get the advantage of still handling the reduced fuel for faction towers (which is the primary draw, not the fuel bay size. I had looked into upgrading to a faction tower for the savings. Since I need to do other tower interactions more often than 29 days anyway, the expanded fuel bay is to me pretty meaningless.) and the process is simplified, without having to balance fuel levels, etc.

Good change indeed, however I have a suggestion regarding the faction towers (it may have been suggested already, but not reading through 20+ pages of posts to check)

As mentioned before the lower fuel consumption of faction towers is an important factor in why people use them. And I fully understand that you can't consume less then whole units of fuel per cycle...

However, wouldn't it be possible to give the faction towers a bonus to fuel cycle time instead of only bonus to fuel bay?

Proposal:

- Standard POS has capacity for 700 fuel cycles and has standard fuel cycle of 60 min like before, getting just over 29 days worth of fuel.

- Tier 1 faction POS has capacity for 750 cycles of fuel and has has fuel cycle of 70 min, getting close to 36,5 days worth of fuel.

- Tier 2 faction POS has capacity for 800 cycles of fuel and has fuel cycle of 80 min, getting almost 44,5 days worth of fuel.

[Edit] Fuel cycle time can also be used for the sov related fuel bonuses [/Edit]

i understand that its easily fixed. i just wish greyscale had put his stamp on it. until then its just words from players than mean nothing.
i have many doubts in ccp's and personnaly i have no faith in them. i do hope your right and im wrong on this though.

For Faction towers why not just increase the time it takes for it to take in the block instead of having to deal with 2/3 a block?

so the block of a normal one would take an hour to be consumed, and a block of a tier 1 would be a an hour 10 minutes? and a tier 2 an hour 20?

Just the general Idea.

this is what needs to happen. its very simple and sorts out the sov/faction tower issue nice and simply

Killing off sovereignty fuel savings is not doing null sec industry any favours. Rather than scrapping fuel savings, swap it for increased period of consumption (e.g.: with an active Sov claim, multiply the consumption period by 2). The utility of faction towers in the past wasn't the length of time between refuels, it was the lower cost of operation, to the point that it was worth spending ten times as much on a tower for w-space simply because you wouldn't have to haul in as much fuel.

Have to agree that this appears to be a simplier solution than what I had proposed. I think 10x or 40 blocks per batch would make sense under this approach.

Only changes that apparently will need to be made would be in how many blocks are pulled per hour by tower type (and the application of sov bonuses).

Of course, the devil is in the code.