Science & Industry

I just finished building my PI spreadsheet and it looks like almost all the P3 items are selling at or below the cost of their component P2 items. It looks like almost all the value is in the P4 item. Comments, thoughts?

Your spreadsheet is wrong.

If you don't count import/export taxes, something like 15 of the p3 materials are profitable. If you factor in highsec taxes, the number profitable shrink, but there still are some. I suggest you review the functioning of your spreadsheet.

Mostly true, with hi-sec tariffs involved. The exceptions are possibly:

Biotech Research Reports, Camera Drones, Data Chips, Gel-Matrix Biopaste, Hazmat Detection Systems, Neocoms, Synthetic Synapses

The rest of them, you'll probably have to go from P1 to P3 on a single planet in order to make more then 3-5% profit. Whether that earns you more ISK/week in profit then making P2->P3 is an exercise for your spreadsheet-fu.

Robotics are about 3.5% margin if made from P2, but 19.7% if made from P1. The downside is that a P1->P3 (2+20) factory planet makes about 1/5 the robotics per day as a 2+20 P2->P3 factory planet. On the upside, since your margins are better, you don't have to be quite as careful about your input vs output costs.

There's a lot of excess on the market right now from pre-patch speculators who were betting that POCOs would be needed in massive volumes on day 1, instead of the gradual roll-out that we ended up with. Plus the slower changeover to POS fuels.

Exactly as it should be.

"Invest ISK in space hardware, put hardware in harms way, profit from keeping the hardware intact".

You may do this with either the theory that if you just quietly go and do it, it'll most likely be left alone ("ninja style") and prepare for any losses in your business plan or you can do it with the expectation that it will generate fights and plan to defend it, investing time and more hardware (ships) and reaping the rewards when you succeed.

0.0 alliances do the exact same thing, setting up moon POSes on valuable moons and CSAAs to crap out supercaps knowing full well that in order to make ISK, some ISK has to be put at risk and some ISK may have to be risked in defending it. In some cases a lot of ISK.

EVE needs more of this and I hope Dust link thingy will add more aspects like this.

Additionally PI allows high sec dwellers to invest a lot less with virtually no risk, but the rewards are also a lot smaller. Enough to get something going and to get an idea how everything works but probably not a long-term ISK printer of gigantic proportions. Again, as it should be.

Lowsec Interbus tax is punitive but that too seems to be working as intended - you probably can't make the math work very well under 17% taxes so if you want to do lowsec stuff, you probably bulldoze the Interbus thing as your first task - it was just a band aid to get over the transition period.

Perhaps you should look around to find POCOs owned by players. Then look up who owns them and ask a deal on a tax on those planets.

Or perhaps if you find one that owns many of them, ask them to set up one on your planet(s) for agreed-upon tax and tell that you will use those planets and pay those taxes. Poof, lower tax. I'm sure you'll find someone who is happy to let you PI all you want for a lot less than 17% tax. Probably less than 10% tax.

It's simple economics - as the price of running a large, non-faction, non-sov, tower gets higher, more people get into mining ice & harvesting PI to save on outlay of ISK for fuel. As prices of running a tower drop, people stop doing PI / ice mining.

And the devs need to always be thinking "what else can we work PI materials into" as they roll out new items. Maybe even leavening in some additional PI materials into existing T2/T3 recipes (a little would go a long way).

I don't see the PI push in big alliances to be much different then what came before. Those who found PI rewarding enough to do, keep doing it, those who don't, stop eventually.

And while the fuel blocks will be cheaper per month, I think that's a minor effect.

It will all reach a new equilibrium by March/April, unless CCP jostles the kettle again. At which point we'll have a better feel for long-term health of the market and where prices are going to stabilize at.

A big war with lots of POS towers / modules / POCOs destroyed would be a good driver of demand.