Missions & Complexes

Wow, that's excellent standing increase.

Good to hear 'The Plan' is helping. Thanks for posting the update.



DMC

Sentenced 1989,

That's excellent. Training Connections level 5 won't take very long at all to raise those standings even more.

Looks like I'm gonna have to run some more Epic Arcs before I get left behind.



Thanks for posting.



DMC

You can solve that problem by doing Gallente distribution missions. That means boring missions to transport small stuff between stations. A fast destroyer would be enough (relating to cargo hold requirements) for the level 1 missions to ease on the time it takes for jumping gates.
After every 16 or so regular missions a special mission will be offered that will give a lot of standing. Basically it boils down to getting those special missions while the other ones are quite insignificant.
In my case I had -5.64 standing with Amarr including level 4 diplomacy. After doing one special (distribution) level 1 mission it changed to -5.55 :-)
Still have to work my way to above -5.00 in order to fly safely in space pockets to do more exciting security missions.

Have fun :-)

Awesome. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I'm going to try to follow it to the letter, and if there's any areas of confusion, I'll let you know. I love awesome docs.

So your still only able to do this once in a characters life time? Currently i hit my standings hard with amarr being in the minmatar faction warfare. But honestly i like to hop between the two or having options because atm i don't have a corp and don't really know in what space i will be flying in 3 months or even a half a year from now. This just seems so tedious and will be worse later on if i decide to waste it this time around with a standing. Am i missing something? does CCP plan on changing something in this area? i enjoy making the decision important but idk making it an one in a life time kind of thing seems a little harsh to me.

Whew! Finished all of the career agents. Mind-numbing indeed! I would like to add some valuable advice that hopefully you might consider adding as side-notes to your guide?

[Part 1]
The Larold's tips for running Career Agents while working The Plan

1. -- Time Investment is Large --

Allow for a lot of time. Possibly weeks.

You will be completing 540 career agent missions in total. (12 stations * 45 missions at each station). Even if every mission was simply undock -> fly somewhere in system -> click something -> re-dock -> turn in mission, you are talking 2-3 minutes * 540. This is 17-27 hours of playing time MINIMUM.

In reality, it's more like 36-40 hours, if you account for industry jobs, traveling to the next agent, multi-system-hop missions, interruptions, and managing all of the items you build up along the way.

Depending on how long you are able to play in one session, I recommend working in increments of either 35 minutes (if you are busy like me), or 3 hours if you have a chunk of spare time.

30-35 minutes is enough time to complete any given agent. (For the Industry and Business agents, this should be enough time to get their final mission started; the rest is just waiting.)

3 hours (2+ of which must be uninterrupted by real-life) is enough time to complete all 5 Career Agents at a given station, if you do them in the proper order. (More on this below.)

2. -- Do the five agents in a specific order --

For any given station, here is the order I strongly recommend:

Business -> Industry -> Exploration -> Military -> Advanced Military

Always do the Business agent first and Industry second if your goal is to get through this tedious process as quickly as possible. The reason is that for all Business and Industry agents, the final mission (10 of 10) requires you to undergo a long production job. (The final Business mission will be roughly 3 hours, the final Industry mission roughly 1 hour.)

While you are running the Industry missions, you will run into 2-3 missions that require you to start and wait for a 3-6 minute production job. These gaps are the perfect opportunity to get a jump start on the Exploration missions.

Once you have the mission 10 jobs underway for Business and Industry, you can complete any unfinished Exploration missions, then move onto Military and finally Advanced Military. If you have done all of this in one sitting without interruption, you may still have 1+ hour to wait on your Business job. At that point you kind of just wait around.

3. -- Buy and keep a combat frigate you know well when a specific ship isn't required --

You will want a combat frigate you know well to keep on you for the duration of running this phase of The Plan. They are essential for killing all of the tiny NPCs, and they travel quickly with sufficient cargo space for all of the 3 to 6-hop courier missions you'll be running. They also help for fast travel when the time comes for you to pack up from one career station and move to the next.

Personally, I bought a kestrel and fitted it with 4 meta missile launchers and a nice AB. I don't recommend you wait until you are at a career station to buy a frigate; the one you want may not be available, or may be hideously expensive. I picked up my kestrel in Jita and brought it with me to all 12 career stations.

4. -- 6 million ISK for free! Don't pass up the chance! --

I discovered a great little insurance trick you can use to make a total of roughly 6 million isk for free.

During the Advanced Military agent, there are two missions you will be sent on that require you to lose your ship. The ships are given to you as part of the mission.

Always buy the most expensive insurance option for these ships before you undock!

Since we know with absolutely certainty these ships are going to get destroyed, we want to maximize our profit. The platinum insurance option is the one that will yield the most raw ISK profit. In general, I was making about 150k profit on the ship loss in mission 2, and another 350k on the ship loss in mission 5.

5. -- Auto-pilot will slow you down --

Running the Career agents got so boring I couldn't stand it. I started putting on auto-pilot for the courier and 3-system hop combat missions, then alt-tabbing out to wikipedia. Try not to do this if your goal is speed.

6. -- Keeping your inventory clean --

After running all 5 agents at a career station, you will have accrued a significant amount of junk, including 5-6 ships and a whole bunch of small items. Unless you want a bunch of stations cluttering up your 'Personal Assets' view, you'll want to handle all of this clutter. As a whole, it's worth a decent sum of money. Here's a fast way to de-clutter your inventory while cashing in on most of the overall value. Believe me, after 6-7 career stations, you'll be looking for a procedure like this!

1. Repackage all ships and reprocess them (If you like, sell the ones worth more than the reprocessing value. This is rare.)
2. For skillbooks and cheap implants, sell or trash them. Or, move them into your frigate's cargo
3. Glance through your station items, move anything useful you want to keep into your frigate's cargo
4. Sell the minerals currently there
5. Shift-select EVERYTHING in your station items list and reprocess them in bulk
6. Sell remaining minerals
7. Trash the few items that can't be reprocessed.

Your goal, if you're like me, is that when you undock to leave for the last time, you want there to be no entry for this station in your Personal Assets window.

Couple of quick questions.

I started doing Level 1 Data Center missions for Gallente, including turning in tags for the level 1 agents. While the faction standing gain is nice, for each agent, the drop in enemy faction standings is almost equivalent. (Dropped 0.11 for Caldari as I gained 0.13 for Gallente.) While this is a net 0.02 faction win - are the Data Centers worth the time and expense hassle if my goal is to raise all 4 faction standings as much as possible?

Next question - assuming I continue through the Data Center missions, can we deviate slightly from the order mentioned in the Plan? The Plan says that for a faction, one should do Level 1 data centers and then level 1 cosmos, then back to level 2 data center, etc. Is there anything stopping me from trying to save a lot of flying around, and just turning in 20 of each kind of tag for all agents levels 1 through 4 at a given data center?

Thanks! Loving the plan!

hmm I see he hasnt posted for awhile, hopefully hes still around

Hello Capsuleers,

Sorry for my absence, I was 'Lost In Space' for a while but luckily communication with Mission Control allowed me to find my way back.

As for following 'The Plan', the steps laid out in it are merely guidelines which can be customized to fit each capsuleers situation. In other words, if you wanna just do all of the Data Center Agents then by all means do it. I don't know if you'll be able to gain sufficient standing from each Data Center Agent to access the next Agent in line.

If so, please post that info here.

Just a word of advice though, the low level agents (Career, Circle, Data Center, Cosmos) all give a small amount of Faction Standing increase. If you have low standings with their Faction they actually give you a rather large increase. If you decide to do them later and don't do them first as advised in 'The Plan', their standing increase will seem like a waste of time.

Now about asking for screen shots, I don't actually recall doing that. Maybe it was for the Cosmos Agents Mission Briefing. Guess I'll have to re-read the thread.

Hope that helps and thanks to all for posting.


DMC

Cai Shen,

Thanks for the reply. Obviously all of the Guides currently available for Cosmos are old and need to be updated with current info, especially since some of the missions have been changed by CCP over the past few years.

If anyone is currently working on documenting and creating a new Cosmos Guide, when completed it would be an immense help for all Capsuleers to present it as a guide link here in 'The Plan'.


DMC