Science & Industry

I've been looking at the potential profits of inventing and building T2 ships, namely cruisers, and it looks like you lose huge amounts of money building them, upwards of 30mil per ship. I've tried looking at using decryptors on BPCs but those don't seem to help cut the losses down much.

So why is this? Why are T2 cruisers selling for so much less than their components? Is there some guy controlling the entire T2 market with old T2 cruiser BPO's?

Ships in general are rather iffy for making a profit. It seems to be a psychological thing, the majority of people who go into manufacturing try to start with ships, and they get overproduced. There seems to be a significant number of industry newbs who think they can pick up a random ship blueprint and build them at a profit. Eventually they figure out they are losing money and dump what they've made at a loss. There are also a significant number of miners who can't shake the notion that "minerals I mine myself are free" and make ships for less than they could sell the minerals for.

With T2 production you have the additional complication of T2 BPOs to worry about. Invented blueprints generally can't be produced as cheaply as T2 BPOs because invented blueprints have a lot more waste built in. However, there are a finite number of T2 BPOs in the game, and some of them aren't being actively used. For any given item, if the full production of existing T2 BPOs is sufficient to fulfill market demand, inventors generally won't be able to compete on price. When demand exceeds what can be produced on BPOs, market price rises to something inventors can make a profit on.

I make several billion isk a month in T2 production via invention, and haven't made a ship in over a year. The blueprints cost too much, they take too long to copy and research, there is too much competition. Ships just aren't worth the hassle. Modules, drones and rigs are the money makers for invention.

Depends on the ship and the demand to use it.

I'm looking at a list of several T2 ships that are profitable. Several cruisers, mostly HACs.

Thats not true to the extent that every t2 ship also requires a t1 hull. therefore it affected all t2 subsequent hulls as well when you change something to the t1 version.

Blindly building will only lead to failure. Do your math before considering T2 hull production. The calculations are not easy to do if you want to consider all the moving parts.

The component and advanced moon material market can be volitile. Lead times must be considered, and depending on how vertically integrated you are, there is significant time dependent risk.

T2 production is dominated by players that know the market well and respond quickly, so if you do not do your homework you will lose money.

However late game industrialists tend to gravitate into T2 production. It can soak up a lot of capital while returing good profts and turnover if done right.

Yeah the ones I was looking at were caldari, namely the basilisk, cerberus and falcon.

You need to watch for announcements and respond quickly to changes.

For example, following the recently announced buffs to Marauders that are coming in the Winter Expansion people are buying maruaders.

e.g. Using Jita sell prices, inventing and building a

- Kronos using an Incognito Process will net about 340 million profit.
- Paladin using Occult Process will net about 180 million profit.
- Vargur using Cryptic Process will net about 180 million profit.
- Golem using Esoteric Process will net about 100 million profit.

Battleship BPOs are expensive, so you might want something cheaper. HAC have just been buffed, so they are also profitable.

Try:

- Ishtar using an Incognito Process will net about 80 million profit.
- Cerberus with Esoteric Process - about 70 million profit each
- Sacrilege using Occult Process will net about 50 million profit.

If you want even cheaper investment (i.e. Frigates), try Stealth Bombers:

- Purifier using Occult Parity is on about 9.5 million profit each.

Note that these are just the good profits not the best per hour of effort. If you do these you could be making more per hour.

Yeah T2BPO's, CCP have given an unlimited BPO that produces T2 items to selected players, they can produce T2 at a fraction of the cost that you as a pleb/scrub can. It pretty much killed T2 production for a massive part of the game population in most T2 lines, there are still a handful of T2 lines that you can invent and make profits and a tea spoon full where invention is the only way to produce.

If you are buying the sub-components to make the ships, yes, very few T2 ships are profitable. But if you have all the component BPO's well researched, and buy the moon materials to build them, then build the ships with that, the profits can be huge.

I have all the component BPO's for the races ships I build, and I can tell you the profits are great, especially with the increased use of HAC's since they were rebalanced. I buy the moon materials, the fullerides, sylramic fibers, nanotransistors, etc. and build the sub components. I have all the sub-component BPOs research to ME 100. I could make a huge profit just off selling those, but they do not sell near as fast as the finished ships. However producing the sub-components gives me very nice profits on all the T2 ships I build. Buying the T2 sub-components off Jita market, they have about a 50% mark up on them, you will never make good isk building T2 ships that way.

T2 ship manufacturing is complex, if you are doing it right. for each ship you make you should have 2 BPO's of the T1 hull. One well researched to build the T1 hulls from, and one for churning out copies. make only 1 run copies as the decriptors you should be using will not give you multi run copies, even with max run BPC's.

Invent your T2 BPC's yourself, the mark up on these is crazy. And for gods sake, max out your needed research skills. Inventing T2 BPC's with poor skills is like building T1 ships without production efficiency 5, it just cuts into your profits way to much.

Then you need a full set of the T2 sub-component BPO's. The armor plates, reactors, thrusters, micro processors, shield emitters, ect. And research them well. I have all mine to ME 100. It didn't take very long.

You then buy the moon materials and build the sub-components. If you are doing it right, you will find the sub-components are costing you way less than their market value. There is good isk to be made at this stage, and is where I started. Even if you buy the component BPO's one at a time and research them, you can sell the sub-components for a nice profit while you are building up your BPO collection and getting them researched.

Once you have a full set of component BPO's, these components will be used in different numbers for all the T2 ships of that race. So it is not a waste to have them, they will only restrict you buy race, not by the individual ships you will make.

Once you know which T2 ships of your chosen race are the most popular get 2 of the T1 BPO's for those hulls. Get one in the cooker churning out single run BPC's, and the other researching for producing your T1 hulls, unless you plan on buying the T1 hulls, but I recommend building them.

Next step is to get your invention cycles going. Decriptors can be expensive, but if you have good luck with your invention jobs, they can give you a decent boost to the profits of the ships you produce. For frigate and destroyer hulls I find them a waste of isk, but if you plan to build Marauders they are a must.

Just keep building and selling the sub-components until you have a decent stock of T2 ship BPC,s, then you can start stock piling subs and churning out ships. It is at this point you become a T2 ship producer, and will be making very good isk doing it, because you will be doing it right.

If the ships your are making every drop in popularity, and become less profitable to make, you can easily flop back to selling the sub-components while you get the BPO's and invention cycles in place for another hull of the same race. There are always several T2 hulls for each race well worth building. Personally I build Gallente as the subs can also be used for ORE ships (exhummers) giving you more options for what hulls you can produce.

Where 'most' actually means 'a very small portion of', 'handful' means 'most' and 'tea spoon full' means anything added in the last 6 years (including all rigs)