Science & Industry

if your meaning how to incorporate economy of scale into the game it already kind of, in a weird kind of way, already is in the game sort of maybe. In BP ME research. I know it's not really economy of scale (IE the bigger something is the more 'free' space you have in it be it physical size or other medium).

People form corps with others more for the social and military uses sure, however there are a fair few of alliances composed of single person run indi corps with 1-4 alts in them making their own profits away from everyone else in the alliance, but are together for the same reasons as before. Their relationship seems to be more of a sub contractor I guess? And the 'alliance' is more of a large company and the corps are it's subsidiaries as there are no other corporate direct translation to an alliance in eve that I can think of, except maybe multi-national but that doesn't work in my mind.

Yes I rambled there, I'm tired but was interested enough to put a reply down.

Pretty simple, actually, and can be done at a whole lot of levels, but the question is, do we want to do it ?

For instance, you can start even as low as the mining bottom level - having each additional mining laser on a single rock improve yield on all mining lasers on that particular rock proportional to the individual yield (with a small but significant constant multiplier).

Let's pause for a second and think about this first simple possible change.

For starters, you need to consider that this means mining solo just got relatively worse, and you just gave incentives for a mining blob (whereas before the only useful blob was one of combat ships).
You also need to decide which should be at the same level as the current baseline - that is, if you should nerf solo mining and have it balanced at the current yields for a certain new base yield total, or if you should leave solo mining as is and just let it go up from there ; also, you need to determine whether to cap the bonus at some value or just let it rise freely with more people added (i.e. only have it self-limit via size of mining ship cargohold size).
Either way, you are noticeably altering the rate at which minerals enter the economy, it just depends how much and in which direction. And the knock-on effect if you alter it towards an increase is that minerals get cheaper, maintaining overall miner income somewhat the same regardless of increased yields... until we reach the IER breakeven and blowing up manufactured ships for insurance instead of bothering to sell them becomes all the rage again... at which point CCP might re-adjust the insurances and miner income would keep on re-approaching pre-change levels, but only while in a larger group.
The end effect of adding economies of scale to mining at least doesn't do all that much good in the end, while complicating things. On the other hand, it does promote (or rather, borderline forces) mining blobbing, which could be a boon for the typical miner suicide-gankers.
Meh.

...

Let's just jump to the last step where you can add economies of scale, the final item manufacture.
In case of T1 items, yes, that's only the second and final step, but there's also T2/T3 items, and there you can add economies of scale at each manufacture step, in reactions, in invention and reverse engineering and so on and so forth. But let's just consider the final manufacture process.
How to easily implement economies of scale into this ?
Quite simple, actually, but not easy.
First, have the initial setup time of a manufacture line be well in excess of manufacturing of a single unit, and make ISK costs of the manufacture line matter more too.
On top of that, you can have the overall manufacture time not be linear with amounts of runs produced, but have a more pronounced sub-linear progression than just what's given by the newly added initial setup time.
Add to this a reduction in setup time per line and in overall manufacture time for each ADDITIONAL line at the same location manufacturing the same product, both at the same time AND in the immediate future. In fact, make it so that the line maintains the "memory" of the last manufactured item, and if you select to manufacture a new batch of the item it's already setup for, the initial setup time is reduced to zero (since it's already configured for that item type).
Heck, maybe even add a hefty ISK cost for retooling the line on top of the rest of the current costs.
The final touch could be a (slight) discount in manufacture material needs beyond what's possible with a single line the more lines in the same location work on a particular type of item.

All in all, this would make producing any particular item the cheapest (by far) by having all 50 manufacture lines in a particular station constantly churning out the exact same item.
But again, do we really want that ?
On one hand, a single station could very well fulfill the needs of some particular class of items on a game-wide level to such a degree that even after taking into account likely hauling costs, it's still cheaper to manufacture it in the "bulk station" and ship it everywhere rather than manufacture it locally in sputtering batches... which is sort of weird and bad for people that want to be self-sufficient. Also, it reduces mineral needs overall, so it hurts miners (and component producers) slightly.
On the other hand, that gives a spectacular boost to the hauling profession, by making it far more needed. Also, suicide-gankers get a glut of potentially viable targets as the total volume of goods moved spikes in volume.
On the gripping hand, it reduces the total amount of needed manufacturers by boosting individual manufacturer yields AND places the advantage on those with huge amounts of capital, which means that manufacturing ceases to be an even remotely valid occupation for newbies and becomes the almost sole domain of "old (and plentiful) ISK".


In the end, overall, while the concept of economies of scale being applied to EVE sounds like a good idea at the start, once you dig around into the possible consequences, it doesn't look all that hot anymore.
It could still be an option, but quite a bit of work would be needed to make it happen, and the benefits (if any) are questionable.

Mining already gets benefits of Scale. Orca + multiple hulks beats single hulk on per hulk load.

Also shows up in research, as you really need a POS to get anything done. which doesn't scale down gracefully to a single slot.

Less so on manufacturing, as you can find open slots without too much trouble in empire space. Even within a few jumps of the trade hubs.

Then there's transports. huge up front cost, but the sheer volume you can move is massive compared to an indy.

Economies of scale do exist, just not as dramatically as in the real world. And not always in ISK.

It's cheaper in time and effort to queue up 500 of something, rather than 10 of them 50 times.

I find it takes me far less effort per item to manufacture a large amount of something rather than a small amount.

Spend an evening (or two or three) setting-up manufacturing lines for the next week (or two or three).

At last tally I had about 27 billion ISK currently building. I'd never be able to do that much if I had to babysit it all.

Corps could be a lot more organized when it comes to specialization (of players), management etc and probably make a lot more money. Most corps are run more like gangs, clubs, or tribal communities than real world corporations.

Trouble is, who needs that sh*t in a game? And who would want to be Mitten's PA?

well ok, but the install cost of a factory is pathetic . . . most factories its like 1,000 isk; if thats not within your profit margin youre probably doing something wrong. . . I was thinking up to a 15% discount in time for a max run of any given blueprint; something significant