Science & Industry

The problem is that storage is neither a consumer nor a producer (there is no way to indicate material movement direction), so material will not flow unless you manually move it.

It does nothing with the things so it does not consume nor produce.

Receiving is not consuming, sending is not producing. That is the logic of a dictionnary, even if I don't know which level it is.

Connect two silos. Which way does the material flow and how much?

There is no way to automatically determine this.

But a silo is neither, hence you have to manually move the material.

Example:

Consumer ← Silo1 - Silo3 - Silo2 → Producer

What is the material flow for Silo3? It can't be determined, because PI silos do not work on a cycle basis (reaction silos do: every hour they move all available material from their input to their output, storing the difference).

But why not just route from your processors direct to the launch pad?

No need for expedited transfer then.

Raw materials into storage and then all processed materials to the launch pad, even those that are intermediates towards the final product.

That's what I do on my extractor planets, but on my factory planet I have 3 sets of 6 factories. I need one launch pad per set and that takes up quite a lot more CPU. Expedited transfers also have a cooldown, which is kind-of inexplicable to me but there you go.

CCP always go most of the way to make something that's really fun to play with and then seem to screw it up or make it annoying in the home straight.

There are maybe three different reasons for this:


1) Way PI is coded - when a planetary structure cycles, stuff moves.

So for instance, I have an extractor. When it finishes it cycle it pushes the material to wherever it needs to go. A basic production facility cycles - it pulls materials it needs and pushes materials out when it cycles. i.e. cycling is the trigger that makes things move around.

Since none of the three storage buildings cycle (storage facility, launchpad or command centre) there is no "trigger" to move stuff between them.

2) Gameplay balance

There are actually a few ways how you could use extensive storage-to-storage transfer to build up a kind of material battery which would allow you to do all sorts of weird things with PI - the most obvious one is simply stocking up on materials then re-purposing production facilities to produce higher and higher PI stuff without having to move it from planet to planet. Though of course you can already do this, if you implement a battery of storage facilities you could literally run an extraction planet for months remotely without having to visit it to do anything with it. This is kinda contrary to the design concept where you are supposed to you know, move stuff around, get shot at, pay taxes etc. Then of course there is the question of building up launchpads vs storage facilities (in production planets not an issue really you have plenty of CPU, not so much in high end production planets)

3) Evil loops that break the game....

Consider:

PI stuff goes from storage 1 to storage 2 to storage 3 back to storage 1. Congratulations on producing an infinity loop and making the server very very very unhappy.

Though I don't think any of the above are insurmountable, put all those things together and basically moving stuff from storage to storage - some poor dev must have just thought - Meh...

The storage is indeed by design, so you cannot set your planets to crunch on for weeks unless you don't mind slower production speed. The idea is to balance between micromanagement and profit. Extracting and shipping off P0 stuff is indeed a big hit on the micromanagement level. As a rule of thumb I try to make efficient setups that will allow me to export P2 at least. An alternative setup I use is basicly the factory planet which doesn't extract, but converts P2+ materials into even smaller stuff.

That being said I am not dependent on PI, I just have the skills and it would be a waste to not utilize them. Hence my cycles are usually set to 2 days, 3 at most. If I don't alternate extraction (switching the resource mined) before the 4th day I usually get into storage trouble. Then I prefer to let the planet not mine for a while, it can usually convert for a few hours untill P2 production itself is actually halted. I prefer missing a few hours of production over micromanaging transfers.

Also, do the actual math. At some point you get a natural feel for how much of resource A you need to have in stock to keep producing after extraction of resource B stops. I just eyeball this a bit, but you could calculate that using a spreadsheet.

A lot less hauling if you go P0->P2. In fact you cut down hauling to a quarter of what you would have if you were working from P0->P1.

Depending on your logistics situation this can make it much more efficient to convert all the way to P2 on a single planet.

You can't just come here and make a broad sweeping statement without any explanation and then leave. These are the Eve forums. You have to provide us with a deep, meaningful treatise on why.