Science & Industry

Depends, smaller objects like some rigs, fuel block prints, etc are often worth researching to peak efficiency where no further research will yield improvements. Larger objects it becomes a case of balancing cost (including lost opportunity cost where the print could be manufacturing rather than researching) versus future benefit of high research.

http://games.chruker.dk/eve_online/item.php?type_id=24699

That site nicely approximates end cost of an item at various research levels. Bear in mind that research has ever decreasing benefits - the gap between ME1 and ME2 is often quite significant, the gap between ME20 and ME21 often insignificant.

From the Drake example linked above one can see the following:

ME0, material cost 41.800.054,00, research time 0 seconds.
ME1, material cost 39.899.952,00, research time 4 days 4 hours.
ME5, material cost 38.633.326,00, research time 20 days, 20 hours.
ME20, material cost 38.180.712,00, research time 2 months, 23 days, 8 hours.
ME500, material cost 38.006.496,00, research time 5 years, 9 months, 13 days, 8 hours.

Now, take the material costs and research times with a pinch of salt in so far as they'll change with market conditions and skills/setups, but the ratios between them are valid indicators - is it really worth spending 5 years and 7 months more in research to take your Drake print from ME20 to ME500 just to save 180k ISK on every manufacture run?

Whilst every print has different research times and peak efficiency levels it's always worth researching (no pun intended) what levels are best for you beforehand; as a very very rough rule of thumb I typically find that a couple of months of research for any given print is way more than enough.


EDIT: also bear in mind that when inventing the input research levels of the copies have no bearing whatsoever on the resultant (if succesfully invented) T2 copies - a BPC with ME0/PE0 will produce the same T2 BPC as a highly researched input T1 BPC.

Created this to help myself work out an optimal point for researching something to.

http://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprints/

Stick in what you want to look at, then adjust the ME and PE with sliders, to see the projected costs (at jita sell prices. adjustment is easy) and time to create.

The prices are coming from the eve-marketdata prices, for a 5% buy of the market in jita as per http://eve-marketdata.com/developers/item_prices2.php

There may be a lag of a day or so, as the prices are updated on eve market data around downtime, and at some random point during the day for my cache of them. From the cron job mail, looks like mineral updated at 12:37 or so. (I don't precache the others. But everything uses minerals)

If you need/want to adjust the prices, just hit the edit link for the prices and you're in business. Just hit enter after filling a price in.