EVE General Discussion

With being in the dark about the industry structures to come and their mechanics, my concern becomes stronger, that CCP may overlook or underestimate a principle incompatibility of today's Citadels with industry mechanics.

Industry uses system indexes to encourage decentralized and "roaming" production. Hence the goal for an industrialist is to find a quiet system with low industry competition, to settle down for some time. If the index raises too much, you can pack up and move to the next system. Centralization and collaboration with other industrialists are actively discouraged. Both is easy and quite cheap to achieve with NPC stations and POSes.

Citadels, and if constructed similar also the new Industrial Complexes, encourage to choose once, settle down and hold the line defending your investment. Also standing and fuel mechanics encourage renting out services to cover costs, fascilitating group play and collaboration. The hull price, rigs, fuel and (un)anchor mechanics pin you down to the spot.

Those two systems just do not fit together as of now.

There really needs to be an equivalent of a small tower.

Inexpensive, fast to anchor & online, reasonably secure.

Everything I've seen indicates the Engineering Complexes will be medium, large and XL - same as Citadels. They will be less expensive and less defensible.

I think CCP was thinking destructible Outpost replacement when they designed these things - they have a place in Nullsec. For a small highsec industrialist - I haven't been able to come up with a compelling business case but there are still a lot of question marks.

I would also like to see a replacement for the small POS - cheap, portable, deploy or recover in less than half an hour.

We'll see when the devblog is published.

Yeah, no one actually does this unless we're talking about a 100m+ difference in build cost. And that only really starts happening when building capitals, and I can tell you they don't move around their production all the time either.

Umm ... we do this.

It makes a huge difference for BPO research.

Example: one BPO to ME10 was 3.5 billion in one system, and 85 million in another with a low index.

I get that some people are concerned and fearful of change, but as you say we are in the dark on much of the details. Perhaps it would be worth waiting the week or two before starting a discussion with no real facts at hand.

But from what we know I don't see an incompatibility. Unless you are building caps, you can deploy a relatively cheap Medium Engineering Complex in multiple systems if you are worried about industry indices, which seems to be the whole point of the index in the first place. Choosing a system to build/research in is indeed important, but it's not something that changes on the time scale of hours or anything. I see no reason how a week delay would be crippling if you have/want to move, given the amount of effort and time scale it takes to set an industrial operation up and running. Sure, there is the rig cost, but that gives you a reason to defend that system.

If anything, it might actually stimulate conflict between industrial operations in a particular system as there is now a target you can try to remove and evict your competitors who are increasing your indices. Given how few conflict drivers are left in this game, I see that only as a good thing.

Citadels don't work that way. The magnitude of the bonus is a function of the tech level of the rig and security level, with larger rigs granting a bonus to a greater breadth of stats in a single slot.

What little they said in the CSM minutes indicated that the engineering complexes will follow this model.



I do wish they would hurry-up-and-dev-blog-already.

Unlikely, production POSes are already an easy to evict target, Citadels are more difficult to remove and drop less loot. But my point regarding incompatibility is the fact, that engineering complexes will require much higher base costs than current solutions (if the service modules follow the established rules) which require scale (industry as a "job") or cooperation of players and share resources which is penalized by the index system.

IDK, indices in practice don't seem to encourage roaming as much as they encourage spreading out. You can find stations with relatively stable indexes, and if you're building a ton of stuff its generally more efficient to just spread the production and research rather than constantly pick up all your stuff. it basically keeps you from putting all your eggs in one basket by making production cost scale upward by volume. If you have a pretty solid setup where you run say 40 lines, you can pretty easily bring costs down with less logistical headaches by spreading your production to multiple systems. It encourages people to occupy and put up infrastructure in more places, which results in a less clumpy overall player activity map, and encourages import/export play as a viable alternative to making your own components and sourcing your own raw materials.

Assuming industry structures are a straight upgrade in ISK/hour efficiency, then the offset of indices seems pretty clear. You're still not intended to put all your eggs in one basket, but the flip side is that you can own other people's baskets. Kinda like POCOs that way. Either you invest muscle and ISK in to wide coverage with relatively low use and rely on the income of people paying to use your superior facilities, or you gain an ability to use more liquid capital in place of raw materials, which significantly improves your logistics despite maintaining a higher system index.

The priamry difference being that if you wanna chase competition out of a system you aren't limited to also sabotaging your own operation by driving up the index, but in stead can just, like, blow up their facility and ban them from yours.

Uhm. You know citadels automatically repair you, for free, while you're tethered?