Science & Industry

As you can see by the subject i have a few questions about a small manufacturing corp.

Me and my friend have been playing for a short time, our trial is over and we want to have a long term plan for playing the game. We a hoping to have enough ISK in 3-4 months to pay for to PLEX'es. So we want a quick way to reach that goal.

We are thinking that we should go the manufacturing route, as neither of us have several hours a day to do missions, so we can have some passive income.

We have 2 accounts each through the sidekick offer.
He's miner on the main and im manufacture.

Im going research/invertor on second account.
And we are thinking about training his second account to set up a POS for research and PI for fuel.
I wonder if its worth the extra cash to set up a dedicated trader to handle our sales, money is no big issue atm as long as it helps us reach the goal stated.

I hope you see where im going with this and have some tips constructive criticism and comments on the feasibility of our plan.

keep one thing in mind: the materials you can gather yourself (mining, PI, ...) are not enough to sustain a big industry empire. they are there to kickstart your adventure. the stuff a single PI toon creates in a month is less than what i need in a day to keep the fuel block production running and i am far from being a big player in that business. it is fine for your start but it won't be enough once you start doing serious business. keep that in mind before you start building an army of miners or PI toons.

the trade toon should not be "blocked" by another one. if you really want to become a big industrialist you need to update your orders. a lot. i would suggest to make your friends miner into the trader. it is easy to update your orders while you are chilling in an ice belt. it is hard to update your orders if you are in a freighter a region away. you don't need a lot of skills to start and you will make more money from your orders than from mining.

everything else you have planned sounds solid. once you found your business you will quickly realize where your bottlenecks are. don't forget: industry is a bottleneck business. if you make T2 ammo your bottleneck will be manufacturing slots, if you make T2 modules your bottleneck will be copy slots. if you do some simple T1 manufacturing you want as many manufacturing slots (and freighter pilots) as you can get. from there, it's an alts game. it makes MUCH (!) more sense to train an alt for 10 slots than to train your main for an 11th

oh, and one more thing: don't fall for the popular traps: The T1 Ship market is utter crap for almost every single ship out there (as of today there are literally 10 ships that are really profitable and the market fluctuates like hell, so tomorrow there will be 10 different) IF, and only IF you want to get into it look for cheap BPC, the ROI on BPOs is absolutely terrible)

i make much better money from small T1 rigs and fuel blocks than i could ever make from ships. i bought another small rig BPO yesterday that was MASSIVELY overpriced (2000% over NPC price with very little research done). it paid for itself in less than 15 hours. most battleship BPOs need YEARS with current prices)

Thanks for the replyes so far, gave me something to think about.

Regarding PI it sounds like its somethink that can come along the way.

We are not that interested in all out trading even if its the best way to make ISK, it sounds like a lot of work babysitting the orders all day. I think we would only need him to sell our own wares, be it items or what we get from science.

Regarding the POS it will be set up a research POS only and we will be training as many alt in research as it can handle, to get researched bpos, manufactoring will be handled in npc stations in a backwater system so we wont be attacked so much, i would guess ot would be fairly yeasy to find lots of manufactoring slots in such a system.

A quick ? about the pos,i'we been looking at skill to train to be able to set it up, but it look like i only need achoring to be able to do it. That sounds to easy so what am i missing?

Well for one standings, you have to have a character who has high enough faction standings to influence the corp's standings high enough to anchor in highsec, otherwise you are doomed to lowsec and nullsec.

Another thing is you will need to be able to fuel it, and that requires the capital to do so.

I found it easier to buy BPO's and research them in stations while i trained the skills. especially as you have several chars who can quickly train basic research skills. I do all my copying and invention in stations and no longer need ME research. This saved the POS hassle.
Mining is dull and their are better ways to make isk even for new players (manufacturing is indeed one) . it is better to spend your playtime doing something fun and then buy mats than something dull (mining).
You will quickly end up with billions/ day in buy and sell orders so have a char sitting in the trade hub trained in trading and with decent rep towards the corp/faction that owns the station you trade from is useful. I did dual account training to get enough skills and then stopped leaving that char almost entirely in station.
Do not underestimate how often you will need to adjust buy/sell orders and how u will have to learn the local market for your goods.

I wouldn't go quite that far. My blueprint portfolio, with minor exceptions, turns over in profit the original BPO cost about 4x a year. The interesting thing is that when salvage prices are on the decline, magically, the T1 ship line steps in to fill the gaps. I wish I could quite put my finger on why... oh wait, I did. (See tagline).

Don't put off PI, train it first as the outputs are used in multiple profitable products and it is a passive income whilst you manage the other more intensive stuff. Whilst the amount you produce between 2 chars with 2 alts each won't be enough for a major industrial venture they will certainly help to bring in profit that allows you to invest further in more feed stacks for your ventures.

This.

Very well-stated and mirrored my experience exactly. Burnout resulted in my leaving EVE for two years. To be balanced, we were making a lot of ISK doing T2 manufacture, but the *daily* effort required across 6 characters/two accounts was a complete time suck and in the end we had ISK...and nothing we wanted to do in EVE because of burnout.

I'm sure some will disagree, but from my experience there's no such thing as "casual" manufacturing in EVE. Either you hit it hard and smart - and it's something you enjoy doing - or best to give it a miss and look for other revenue streams.

Now...many hands make light work, and I have no doubt that spread across more people it's a lot more viable. I've often wondered if a small corp with totally open books as a "player-owned" corp could work - payout proportional to what's contributed. But I suspect the devil is in the details in that business model, especially in recognizing the contribution of intangibles (changing slots, etc.) and not getting brutalized because of the limitations of POS permissions.

Some good replies here, but some overall negativity towards the venture.

You sound like myself and a buddy who both have industry alts. This is what we did and continue to do:

1) Each have pretty much identical industry alts on separate accounts from our main
2) Each have a trade alt on that account also that live in two of the trade hubs (I did dual character training for one month to get this alt to Broker Relations V and Accounting V, as well as some other trade related skills... if they're just sitting in a station they really don't need much more than those two skills though - maybe Margin Trading if you plan on doing buy orders for materials)
3) We purchased a corp with standings to avoid the grind - can easily find people selling these corps in I believe the Market sub forum, or just do a search. Several threads have been doing this for literally years and are pretty reputable.
4) Setup a Medium POS for our industry activities (is plenty of capacity for two toons - for more, look at large)
5) Buy mats, produce stuffs, haul to hubs, and sell.

The benefit to me having the trade alt and industry alt on a separate account from my main is that I can be playing my main (or doing various other things) and just have the second account up to check in on the sell orders every 15 minutes or so. I don't do this all day, but while playing in the evenings it does help with sales volumes for sure.

EDIT: Want to add that this is not "easy" money, as others have said. It does take time to keep everything running smoothly, and it's definitely a case of "the more you put in the more you get out". We don't kill ourselves doing it, but still clear a nice chunk of ISK, so we've found a decent balance.

I run a manufacturing/research POS sometimes as a solo player. It's not really worth it but I do it anyway because I think its fun.

You can play for fun, not for profit, if you so desire. It's just a game.