Science & Industry

to put it straight im a miner/researcher and honestly combat/pvp is more fun.

However i like that i am part of the "backbone" of eve that puts everything together and helps stuff happen ( as in people go blow themselves up in the ships i helped make -_- )

it's also more relaxing..combat u usually gotta be at the computer focused, mining bleh sit back drink a beer and talk.

i'd not pick a main as a production/science char not cause the profit isnt there but because simply there isnt enough to do for make it a mail you can keep a production char busy for a day for logging in for 20-30 minutes, deliver stock, move stock to hub, sell stock, buy mats.

for the profit side of things , Ersteen is right on one sense it does scale very well, but to say 1 char wont turn much profit is silly, even working of low ball numbers of 100k isk an hour profit from each production line thats still 720 mil a month for 1 char running 10 lines.

and i've got a production char making 300k an hour per line so yeah even 1 char can turn a good profit.

so i'd say make 1 or 2 as alts and use them to fund some pvp.

You are going to have a high SP count regardless of whether you train for PVP skills or Indy skills.

The real main reason people say its a bad idea is because in their minds dedicating all that training into an activity they deem to be boring.

For a pvp toon to work you dont neccesarily need to be isk rich, but for an industry toon to work you need plenty of liquid isk just to operate. This is why most mains are PVP (who have the skills to PVE) and most Indy/Market toons are alts.

Plus the simple fact thats its much more fun to blow up spaceships than make them

Yep.

Your main should be a mission/complex runner capable of PVP. Because the main should be strong with PVE the main is your science guy as well as it will have the faction/corp standings your indy alt will need to use.

In other words, main is PVP/PVE, ALT should be a neutral to all indy/miner/leader/command type thing useful in PVP.

..........

I'll register a dissenting opinion to the majority in the thread, and say your "main" should be the character dedicated to what you like to do. I played for two years before I quit for a while, and I had two characters, one pvp and one industry. After a while the industry character was the one I spent by far the most time on, since that's what I liked, and because I pretty much ended up owning the entire corporation anyway. Keeping it running took most of my playtime.

As for skills, my industry guy never trained any pvp skills whatsoever. He had the basic frig skills he started with and that was it. In two years I never felt like I was wasting any training time, OTHER than the mining skills I trained and almost never used. There is TONS of stuff to keep you training for years. Some are :

Basic Manufacturing skills - PE5, the other basic requirements to 5, 10x production slots, or all the way to 11 if you feel like like it
Invention/T2 skills - there are a TON of these, and if you want to diversify your line, you'll spend a lot of time training various ones. 5's don't improve the odds that much, but they do improve them some, and every little bit of profit margin helps
Freighter skills - indispensable. You'll rip your eyeballs out if you're doing any serious industry and don't have a freighter
Jump Freighter skills - took a long time, also indispensable (IMO), unless you never do anything outside highsec

Those alone take a long, long time. Then there's POS skills if you want to get into pos based stuff, though those don't take that long to train. PI skills can be good, and is another way to up your profits without making another character. You could also do mining skills if your industry line ventures that way, though as I said I trained them and never used them.

The figures people have been putting out here for 10 slots are grossly underestimated. A few hundred million is something that a poorly trained alt can pull in when you're only playing him every couple of days and you didn't do any real market research. With scant effort you can have your slots making your 400k an hour, which for 10 slots is 2.88 billion a month. 400k is peanuts, there are lots of products that can make you double that or more, especially when you get your research slots working for you.

As a final thought, when you're doing T2 production, your bottleneck will be the research, and more specifically will be the copy times. However, even if you have enough copy alts that it's raining blueprints, the research time still takes longer than the production for nearly all products. Your lines should not be sitting idle while you wait for your researches to finish, keep them working.

Very much agreed. I'm a big proponent of the "do what makes you happy" school of thought. For me, since I gave my characters to a friend when I left, I'm starting from scratch again. So, I'm making it a challenge. See how long it takes me to build up an industry empire, with as little help as possible (though I'm giving serious consideration to accepting the offer of a freighter from said friend).

Eve's what you make of it, and you don't have to feel like if you don't PvP you're not playing the game. Some of the greatest unsung heroes of the nullsec powerblocs are the dedicated few that keep the networks running, build the ships, and keep people flying. You could be one of those people, or something similar, and have a big impact without ever firing a weapon.

It is a matter of opinion. If you want to do it, then go ahead. Nobody can stop you.

All my industry alts tend to become combat alts eventually, because there are a finite number of skills used by industry.

I try to be a jack-of-all-trades. Having fun is more important to me than impressing people with my skills.

A few things to consider:
* Most industry is done in hisec.
* Wrecking your player faction standing or security rating makes hisec industry difficult.
* The more skill points you have, the more expensive your medical clone.