EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello, and welcome back to Eve Online

I'm a Planetary Interaction junkie mostly I don't consider myself an expert but I've done plenty of E-P1 worlds and I've also experimented with P1-P3's. (I hope I haven't lost you in the jargon.) You are asking advanced questions and are basically asking industrial corporations to share their secrets

a) Well honestly I've never done PI in highsec, but I have used other corporation's POCO's before. That's usually how I do it. So I am not sure if what I've done will work or be profitable with what you've got in mind in highsec.

b) You will be taxed on both import and export. I'm not sure how it drums up a value it must be something like an estimated item value like you see in the bottom of your inventory window. Honestly not sure though.

c) Your infrastructure is 100% safe. Noone can bomb it from orbit or send in mercenaries from Dust514 (rip) However, the POCO itself is not safe. If someone else owns the POCO you are sort of at the prerogative of the owner, they might screw with your taxes/standings and suddenly you can't export your stuff. Or someone else blows the POCO up.

d) I have Command Upgrades at IV so that's what I do. They are setup to do a specific thing like Extract - Refine to P1 for export. And I'll just sell that. Just before I quit this game 3 months ago I had noticed a wild spike in Neocoms prices and so it was worth it for me to buy P1 materials that go into making the P3 product Neocoms. (I think Citadels were pushing PI prices up I might be wrong)

Some pictures:

Extraction to P1 - This is traditionally what I do. Really easy to setup. I don't think this is any good in highsec or lowsec, this is basically a null or wormhole endeavor. Strip everything

P1 to P3 - this picture. lol. I made this for a corpmate in Savage Moon Society. You probably won't be able to drum up your own extraction materials so this picture is probably more like what a highsec operation would be like?

Youtube is great, that's how I learned some of it, and the rest I learned through a corpmate when I was in AIA Pharmaceuticals.

Some people will horde all the P1 materials they make, maybe until there's nothing left of the system they are in. Then refine it beyond that as high as they can get.

I think 10% taxes is fairly reasonable, I've always had to put up with some sort of tax myself. There are corporations out there you can join that may have POCO assets and will have tax free benefits to it's membership.

BOOKMARK THIS

Well I hope I haven't made you more confused!

The skill you are thinking of is Customs Code Expertise. In highsec the POCO tax has 2 components - an NPC tax of 10% export and 5% import. The skill reduces this component of the tax by 10% per level. There is also a player component which can be whatever the owner wants and can vary depending on your standings with the corp that owns the POCO. If you see a 15% tax it means 10% NPC + 5% player. You can dodge the player component of the tax by launching from the Command Center but this has a capacity limit of 500M3.

In highsec I set my planets up to make P2. This requires Command Center Upgrades at 4 to be practical. I use my harvest for T2 manufacturing and rarely have surplus to sell on the market but PI prices have gone up a lot because Citadels use large quantities.

Edit: The tax is collected in ISK - you won't be able to launch unless you have sufficient funds in your wallet.

If you want to tinker without spending much isk you can have a go on the test server, the command centres should be about 100 isk a pop there as the market is seeded by CCP and it won't affect your wallet on the main server; you can fiddle to your hearts content with setups etc and not worry about screwing up.

a. The tax is an ISK cost. With a player-owned customs office (POCO), you get the NPC tax + the player tax that they've set. So the skill only reduces the NPC tax. The point of a POCO is to discourage others from using the same planet, so taxes will be high, and when you're trying to sell on the market you'll be competing with the owners who get the mats at low / no tax. Typically, player taxes above 10% will mean no profits on the market.

aa. The lauch-into-orbit option is very cumbersome because it's small volume and you have to wait between launches, but it's also a way to dodge high taxes, because you pay 1.5x the NPC tax when you launch. So if player tax + npc tax > 1.5x npc tax, use the launcher.

b. Tax is applied when you import stuff and when you export stuff. You can only import (bring materials down to the planet) through the customs office, thus paying the npc+player taxes.

c. Once you have your infrastructure on the planet, no one can disrupt it. But, they can see it, and they can place their own material extractors on the same high-density areas that you're using, to reduce your inputs. However, people usually don't bother with this; they just set high taxes or use different planets.

d. You can have a planet do whatever you want, but you're limited by power grid and CPU. It's similar to fitting modules on a ship. You're installing extractors, connecting roads, and factories, and there's only so much power and CPU available from your command center. The skill to upgrade the command center is critical, train it to at least 4. You are also limited to a maximum of 6 planets per character; you have to train the skill that lets you do more than 1 planet and it only goes to 5.

So, given the game mechanics, there are typically only a few viable setups:

1. P1 harvest planet - you have one extractor head, with up to 10 extractors, getting some resource from the planet that's in demand, and you have 6-8 factories converting this P0 raw resource into a P1 resource that you can sell. The hotspots typically move daily, so you chase them with the extractor head but otherwise don't move your factories. Initial cost to set up the factories = up to 10 million ISK, cost to move the extractor head daily = approx 50k. Export taxes - depends on the POCO.

2. P2 harvest planet - you have 2 extractors, typically with 4-6 heads each, gathering 2 P0 resources, and you have factories converting each P0 into P1, then one advanced factory using the two P1's to produce a P2 material. This reduces your taxes more, but you typically only have 1 production line, unlike the previous setup where you're producing with 6-8 factories.

3. Production planet - pick a rocky planet with low taxes, somewhere far, and set up just factories. Bring in P3 advanced materials, and use storage silos linked to factories to basically produce higher-end P4 materials. You pay import and export taxes, but the profits at the high end can be pretty good.

Otherwise, a daily cycle is probably the best; set it for 23 hrs and check it at about the same time each day. This way you can move your extractor heads to chase the resource hot spots, or you can refill your storage bins using full transporter loads.

Keep in mind that PI materials have value, and you're trying to transport bulk, so you will be suicide-ganked as the value of what you're transporting is much bigger than the value of the ships required to kill your transport. The basic T1 industrials, and the transports dedicated to PI, are extremely fragile. It's recommended you train to fly a T2 transport so you can use its covert ops cloak to move around, and its better defenses to dissuade suicide attacks. Also scout your routes and don't go to the customs offices to grab your stuff without thinking about possible attacks.