Science & Industry

Planetary Interaction was a "Jesus Feature". Though adding to it was promised (no racing stripes, i.e. real substantial game-play additions only), ECUs, storage facilities, and POCOs were the extent of it.

Scroll to the end of Dev Blog - Planetary Interaction: Impossible is our middle name and read that. CCP Soundwave left CCP.


I don't think Team PI survived the massive CCP layoffs of post-Incarna.

Planetary Interaction changes brought with Incursion 1.1.0, dated 2011-01-28, was the ECU change. POCOs followed in that same year, and were enabled in hisec in 2013.

Be careful here though...

I like the difficulty of the interaction and the endless clicking for one reason above all, it makes the number of PI toons at a reasonable level. If PI was made too easy more people would jump in and depress the price of materials to such an extent that time/value would not be worth it any longer. We that have solved the PI user interface and come to terms with a method for ourselves should closely guard our secret passive income!

Something I would like to see implemented is a change to having a multi-hour cool-down for expedited transfers from a launchpad to a silo. I literally have 2-4 hour cool-downs when moving my PI around from orbit to my production farms PER SILO. I have 5 silos on one setup. There is a way around the cool-down currently but at the cost of almost 1m ISK at a time to destroy a launchpad and build a new one. At my current rate of building, that is going to cost me over 150m ISK a month just to avoid the cool-down of moving PI into different silos.

What I propose would be the ability to route materials from a launchpad into different silos, working similar to the resource extractors. Say every 15-30 minutes a set amount of m3 is moved from the LP to designated silos, allowing the player to just drop from the POCO to the planet, and let the worker bees move all the materials around without having to come back every 4 hours just to move stuff into ONE silo at a time. Option 2 would be to just do away with the expedited transfer cool-down entirely. It really doesn't seem to serve much purpose that I can understand and is frustrating and a time/money sink that doesn't really need to be there.

As a POCO owner.... Yes they do generate conflict. The problem is knowing what planets are worth fighting for. A temperate planet near Jita is a gold mine. A random gas planet in nul, not worth it. When RvB lost a portion of POCOs to break-a-wish, 10 POCOs made the majority of our income and losing those hurt. The remaining ones don't make a 10th as much. Some way of seeing the profitability of a hi sec POCO may help drive conflict which would be nice.

Other thoughts... Fuel is a scary idea for 2 reasons... One you are making eve more job like which burns people out. We in RvB were given some random POCOs. Having to fuel the ones in nul would suck. Granted they make no real income anyways but they would suck. The second reason, I dislike punishing random players for the laziness of others. Sure in say a nul alliance you can get mad at some guy for not fueling the jump bridge. But hi sec POCO fuel? It would punish random people just because I was lazy and didn't fuel it. This would have to be something carefully balanced to work (like my Corp makes no tax of the POCO is not fueled, but tax rates don't change and an unfueled POCO doesn't hurt the guy running pi.)

Also... Please can we get a better way to transfer POCOs? I have to transfer each one individually and that can only be done in system where the POCO is located. Plus when looking at assets in space, it tells you how many POCOs you have in a system but it never tells you what planet specifically. So if you have 2 in a system with 12 planets, you have to right click and check each planet to see which has the transfer option.

The biggest thing I would like to see is the ability to OFFLINE infrastructure so that I can retain that infrastructure and then online say, a p0 extraction setup. Then when I want to go back to a production planet setup, I offline my extractors n stuff and then online all the labs. And thanks for the link upgrade tip. Transfer times were making manu-planets an exercise in babysitting.

Being able to OFFLINE a structure (and disable a link) would be AMAZING. Great point!

I also think that the expedited transfer function is unnecessarily cumbersome in it's current form. I'd like to see an automated process where you can route a product from one storage unit to another (CC and LP as well). The size and frequency of the transfers are based on the upgrade level of the links over which the transfer must travel. If a more substantial skill tree were implemented for PI, then other skills would affect it as well.

@OP, every point you made is dead on center, and as an indy/explorer I too find some of the things you high lighted to be true and really just repetitionous in its own right. I too would just love to see PI overhauled to where those of us that do "enjoy" doing PI, to see a better quality of life in the way we work our colonies.

I do have one question tho, how many colonies can you have on one character? I thought it was six (6), but you said 36???

LOL No. 6 is current max. I suggested 36 as an extension with "Advanced Interplanetary Consolidation" with +5 colonies per level. But Looking back at it, I think that number looks a little high... LOL Maybe +2 or +3...

I was suggesting an advanced skill that would allow more dedicated users to have more colonies. But I have heard of people allocating multiple toons for PI. I don't think it's a matter of laziness (in most cases), I think it's a matter of gameplay style. Not everyone is into PvP as dominant mode of play. Some people seek other methods of enjoying the game. I'm not much into PvP (seems like a waste of ISK), but I do enjoy the thrill of danger while lurking about in nullsec and kspace.

And I've never seen anyone use that word, so you are the first!