Science & Industry

PI items really need to be added to the manuf needs of any newly introduced T2 & above item. And ideally with a broader selection then the handful which are used currently in T2 production.

I wouldn't be too shocked if CCP plan is to use P4s for Dust-related stuff. Planets need to be valuable to be cared about (currently they are not) and one way could be to make P4s very much in demand. Well, that and otherwise modify PI in some way that causes you to care on which planet you do PI (customs offices are, I guess, a start)

However, risk is that such changes could drive up POS running costs to the moon unless a lot of tweaks are made. Possible, but this being CCP I'm always bit wary of anything like this.

Unless I am mistaken, as a high security planet farmer, haven't you noticed that all the floating containers are owned by Concord and no corporations?

Feedback from low sec militia pilot:

1. Interbus customs offices are an annoying time sink to kill. No pvp has really been generated killing them other than perhaps on day 1 or 2 after the patch.

2. PI is much less efficient/profitable without using a POCO which is annoying to all PI users since now unless you're operating from a POCO your end price is not competitive.

3. I'm glad I had friends to help me take one down over the space of a few hours. No pvp came of it, it was just another more boring structure shooting slog THAT WE TOLD YOU WE HATE ABOUT POS. So thanks!

4. In militia if the enemy militia attacks/reinforces your POCO you can just transfer it to an alt corp in the enemy militia to stop them destroying it (without receiving a standing hit)....Which is really lame.

5. Alterable tax levels work surprisingly well I've noticed as some random red box took up PI at my POCO and it nets me a few mil each big export every few days. I was very surprised they used it, but I guess it is still cheaper than Interbus.

6. They badly need a corporate hangar, or the ability to host corporate contracts from peoples personal hangars at the POCO. I can only imagine the lack of this was a ******** oversight since they are CORPORATE structures.

Yes, yes and more yes on this.

The current taxes on exportation is killing my early profits in PI. I am a new player so I basically have my entire forture in PI ( mainly because with a family, a 1 year old and a job, i do not have much time for anything too time consuming ) and manufactoring. PI could be a good profit maker but I recently moved 365 biocells out of my PI and it cost me 650k just to export the material. Add to that the other material I exported, it was ridiculous.

Better standing with the faction would be great if it helped with Taxes. Maybe not to 0% but perhaps at the highest standing you get a 5% tax break or something. Good thought anyway.

I'm a fairly new player, I enjoy exploration and I'm interested in trying PI aswell.

I was entering a wormhole one day and I was thinking to myself that now I'm somewhere very far away from all the discovered / civilized world. And then I saw that at each single one of these barren, unforsaken planets, there is already a fully fitted customs office :)

Maybe it would be possible that you have to contact/ask Interbus to set these up, rather then putting them there by default? (If you don't want to / cannot build one yourself) This would increase the 'emptiness' of space and would be a bit more... realistic, if you understand what I mean.

In the meanwhile, we can be sure that even in outer space, you can always be sure about 2 things: death and proper customs administration.

I dont want repeat all what has been already said, most of that was good for me, too.

IMHO what is crippled is that PI is an individual game, it should be a corp or alliance game.
There should be a market ON the planet where you can sell and buy stuff from other players and you should have a storage for your PI which you want to give to your corp mates WITHOUT exporting it up.
So this would decrease the costs of Importing and Exporting plus would make PI a Team Game.

I also would like to setup a mail once extractors are depleted or storage is full. Forwarding mails to your PI Leader Officer would be awsome.
At least in 0.0 space it would make sense to fortify Pocos so that they arent that easy to kill. Let us be able to anchor some guns or hardeners plus a shield, something like Pos have, and of course this then should need some fuel, too.

I am also really curious about what DUST will do with PI.

My two cents as a carebear who risked being destroyed daily to operate PI in nullsec before the addition of POCOs is this:

The changes have pretty much forced me to choose to join a large alliance. To join a small alliance is to place your PI assets into a setup where they really cannot be defended. So now all of nullsec basically belongs to whichever large alliance puts up their POCOs first.

If the POCO were easier to destroy, then no one would want to put them up.
But by making the POCO too hard to destroy, then only a large alliance can cause the possession of planets to essentially change hands.

So now we have a situation where only large alliances control everything in nullsec (including unclaimable nullsec). This hardly seems the right way to encourage more small operators to move into nullsec. The net effect of adding POCOs in their present form has been to eliminate the remaining unclaimed nullsec, and effectively make it claimable; since only large alliances and corps can put up and defend POCOs.

I'd like to form up my own corp and put up my own POCO, but I know it would be just a matter of time before some large alliance stomps on my POCO and my large investment was wasted.

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Two things could improve this situation.
1) Make POCO a lot cheaper to produce, and a lot easier to destroy.
2) Make it a lot easier to use launches to get products from planet surfaces (and avoid paying taxes) by putting a bigger flat fee on launches to account for costs of launch, and make those launches carry much larger payloads. Then the small operators could still operate PI where ever they wished, without having to belong to a giant alliance.

This is a great thing.
Some notes:
An elite Command Center can have 20 Advanced Industrial Facility, 3 space ports, and 3 Storage pins. However, that leaves 7 AIFs per port/storage pair except one.
Could it be adjusted so that 21 AIFs could fit and have a balanced burn? (94 hours between fill-ups)
My current setup is 20 AIFs and 4 space ports. (65 hours between fill-ups)

The Expedited transfer cool-down is oppressive enough that for a factory planet, you cannot have more storage pins than space ports. If you do, you have to schedule fill-ups for the various storage pins at very odd intervals. The expedited transfer limit will also prevent filling the full 12k at once. (But the size is a boon to extraction planets.)

Could automatic expedited transfers be set up, so I can drop the contents of a storage pin into a space port and have it just move on its own? With the 4 space-port configuration, I don't have to visit the planet mode at all to get my production going, I just fill each up with the correct 26k p1 material and move on.

Could we rename spaceports, I'd love to label them like "Silicon 1" instead of XY-123?

The utility of the Command Center PIN itself is generally ignored.
Consider helping by increasing their storage capacity and allowing greater export quantities:
Basic Command Center: 500 m3 (same)
Limited Command Center: 1,000 m3
Standard Command Center: 5,000 m3
Improved Command Center: 7,500 m3
Advanced Command Center: 10,000 m3
Elite Command Center: 12,500 m3

Consider boosting the Storage pin from the proposed 12,000 to 12,500 to make it an even 2.5 times bigger than it was.

Allowing larger capacities at the Command Center would allow you to evacuate a planet that has lost its POCO or possibly a lower "Tax" rate if the POCO is too high. (I don't know if the launch cost rate is based off of the POCO tax rate or the INTERBUS rate or completely independent.)