Science & Industry

You must not approach the EC from the POS point of view, as those will be removed from the game probably early next year. What I understand is, that CCP wants to make production more complicated and costly and also foster group play. I'm not a fan of this approach, because I think this will not work well in the current ecosystem. Personally I'm fine as my NPC station production lines are not harmed (yet), and maybe there are some niche cases where using a public EC actually makes sense.

But why would you even need optimal bonuses for every item in the game? Surely you have a plan to do something more specific and can rig for that.

You can still build anything else and you even get the -15-30% time required from the structure itself.

EC's will work well for larger organizations: the convenience of working in a station with the bonuses of working in a POS and much simplified management. Add in asset safety and it looks like a pretty good deal.

On the flip side, they are more expensive than a POS, consume more fuel and are easier to kill. For a large organization this is an acceptable tradeoff - they may have dozens or even hundreds of players using the facility.

For a small organization, the benefit of a POS is the TE bonus - for me, the ME bonus basically pays the fuel bill. It also gives a sense of ownership - I've added something to the sandbox. POS also allows a small organization to "win" an asymmetric conflict by denying the aggressor their victory condition - I can take my POS down and store it in a station in half an hour. Not without cost - I lose all my jobs but I can carry on working in the station and the attacker gets nothing.

EC's don't work that way and that's the main reason I don't expect to build one. It leaves me vulnerable to extortion "protection racketeering" and I have no reasonable counter. I'm surprised CODE aren't already selling permits!

I have to agree that I am disappointed in the engineering structures. This clearly will be the end of the small corp/alliance doing any serious capital manufacturing. If moon mining follows the trend, then it will be the same for that.

Today you can deploy a well fit/Well defended Large POS for under 1b that can manufacture capitals, with good reductions in time and cost.

It takes a 10b hull (large) complex to even begin to do the same, and then it can't defend itself to anywhere near the same degree.

This drives all the smaller groups right out of EVE. Many either don't want to be part of a massive organization, or are not welcome in such because of their style of play. If moon harvesting goes the same way, this will be the death of the small independents.

A small group won't be able to defend these weaker but massively more expensive structures, and at the cost, they won't deploy them, driving out of market, and potentially out of EVE.

I really think that CCP needs to rethink what they are doing.

Assuming the owning corp has the ability, and will, to defend it.

Heck, just hope they remember to keep it fueled.

When either trust is lost or index rises, what's stopping you from moving to another public EC?

I fail to see a scenario where you incorrectly placing your trust in an EC owner ends up with the EC being destroyed. The owner can certainly annoy you by making the structure private without asking you, but it doesn't benefit them (directly), so i doubt it'll be frequent. And it doesn't necessarly mean you'll lose the job's BPC and resources.

All this new stuff really doesn't bode well for the 1-3 hr tops play time 3 man corps. I was really hoping coming back it would be easier to jump into industry with just a couple busy working fool friends. I guess not :(

If CCP changes XL EC rig granularity to large and then large to medium with noticeable fuel block reductions, ECs will make a lot of sense.

So you're saying they won't be successful because too many people will use them?