Science & Industry

Hello All

I've recently returned after a multi year absence so I missed out on the whole PI thing. Since I came back I have concentrated mainly on manufacturing and a bit of trading. I'm doing OK at that but wanted to branch out into more areas.

I created an alt to do some PI and started training him up. I mentioned this to a corp mate and he very kindly game me three PI toons he had sitting around for nothing. I only had to pay the PLEX to move them between accounts.

So now, I have three fully trained PI toons at my disposal and I've been playing around with them for a couple of months trying to work out how to use them best. In addition to PI skills they can fly Gallente T1 & T2 Transports and use covert cloak. I've also trained one of them up with some trade skills and Broker 5 and Accounting 5 so that I can buy and sell without having to use my other alts or main.

Everything I do is in hisec at the moment. I have no experience of losec or null and WH was another thing I missed out on so I'm even sure what that's all about yet.

Anyway, for the first month or so I set up colonies on multiple planets and extracted resources and refined to P2 on planet to supply my mfg requirements. This sort of worked OK but involved a lot of messing around and the output was low (due to hisec I imagine) and it slowed my mfg considerably, even at 6 planets per toon.

So I had a rethink and viewed a few topics etc and then tried extracting to P1 on each planet then haul to factory planet to process to P2 and/or P3. This worked a bit better but still required a lot flying around and messing around with extractor heads etc and still the output was slowing my mfg down. (I have this toon and an alt the does mfg so I have 20 slots of mfg and science available)

By this time I worked out that 3 toons just wasn't enough to keep up with my production demands I altered tack and looked at PI as an mfg function rather than harvesting and just picked some profitable items, bought the lower tiers on the market - shipped to a factory planet and then sold the output using that money to buy my production materials.

That seems to be working OK but I don't really know if I'm getting the best out of these toons. I'm a bit wary about losec and WH as I have no experience of them really but is that something I definitely be looking at? Or should I double down on my current strategy and just set up 18 factory planets and produce profitable items from buying the lower tiers on the market?

I don't have huge amounts of isk at the moment (a few billion) but wouldn't be against buying plex to help fund a better set up.

Obviously, I'm not expecting people to walk me through what to do but if you have any suggestions as to things I should think about or point me in the direction of further information I would be very grateful.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far and sorry for the long post!

Grond

Thank you, that's very generous.

Can you hit me up in game to discuss further?


Grond

Extraction in hisec is a path down which madness lies. it's just flat out not worth the effort, imho.

So, either head to 0.0 or J-Space for all your extraction activities, OR, build a heap of factory planets near a major trade hub with low'ish POCO tax rates, do the math and decide if it's worth just refining P1s sourced on the market into more profitable products.

Personally, I'm running 23 planets over three pilots in 0.0 and that's more than enough FarmVille In SPAAAAAAAACE for me.

For me, PI really comes down to how much effort you're willing to put in.

I started off making single planet P2 in high-sec and low-sec. With level 5 command center skills it is viable. Then I switched to P1 planets + factory planet as I got more slots available in order to make P3 materials. I setup one single planet P3.

I gave up on the low sec planets because it wasn't worth the extra hauling effort for the small gain over high sec extraction.

I've let my PI slide lately as I contemplate changing to the lowest effort PI I can think of: single planet P2 using only planets in a single system. Resetting extractors is trivial, it's the hauling stuff around that get tedious if you have a lot of planets over a number of systems.


PI in WH and Null might be a completely different story.