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Yes, the new structures do give you choices, unfortunately almost all of them are complete shite. The only wining move is not to use the new structures, becasue they are either to granular, too expensive or to costly to fuel. No good options.a

I consider myself a small, bordering on medium sized producer. I have about 4b in production, with about 2b used for assets (bpos, pos) and 2b in materials. There's absolutely no way in hell I can cycle through that 2b enough times to reach anywhere close to 16-17b throughput. Anyone without 6+ billion in mats will never come anywhere close. That does not count as a small producer. You will either have to have 10b+ to make it worthwhile or be forced to work within a group. Anybody who doesn't want to be part of a group will lose a fair amount of competitive advantage.

Why not be part of a group? Well, being part of a group can be useful. But it also restricts you- you don't get to decide what the array is bonused to, you don't get to make the decisions, and if the corp decides to deny you access to the array, or it gets attacked while you have a 7+ day long job going, you're going to lose a fair amount of isk. Plus, despite the fact that Eve is a team game, sometimes it's no fun getting help. Part of the fun is owning your own things, for instance even a small producer with 700m can set up his own small pos and crank out t2 frigates. But with these changes, owning and making it worthwhile is only possible on a large scale- beyond what a small producer could hope to accomplish.

If you think the numbers are good as they stand now, good luck to you. I shall enjoy watching you go bankrupt trying to leverage low bonuses against high fuel costs.

Yeah, I suppose there is some wiggle room in the definition of "small". I come down on the isk-positive side of the threshold (at least when I'm being a bit of a tryhard), but I would certainly consider my operation small relative to others I'm aware of.

One advantage of ECs for small players is that you can actually start small and increase your production capacity over time. Select a public EC that is useful to you, be prepared to show up during vulnerability windows, and engage in the ages old game of hoping your side shows up with more firepower than the other side.

NB: your side can win if you have enough logistics and ECM on field to stop every ship in the attacker's fleet from shooting the EC. So fitting the EC with shield transfer and fielding a fleet of basilisks and rooks might work.


update:

1. Standup Research Lab I consumes 20 blocks/hr.
2. EC provides 25% reduction in fuel consumption, so 15 blocks/hr.
3. Fuel blocks ~25k ISK each, so 375,000 ISK/hr
4. NPC ME research costs about 2% of base cost of produced item, per hour
5. Assumption: capsuleer labs will have a variable cost determined by the owner, but still a percentage of base otem cost for research, percentage of input cost for invention
6. Therefore, require approx 375k/0.02 ISK (18.7M ISK) base-item-worth of research jobs per standup lab for breakeven assuming owner charges close to nearby NPCs

Conclusion: get your ME/PE/copy research done now, before CCP hikes the prices up to make ECs look economically viable.

Also, each lab will be profitable assuming there is a steady presence of invention, ME/PE/copy research for ships and valuable modules.

I would not look to drop multiple ECs to accomplish all of the bonuses you are seeking. All activities can be performed in the ECs, the difference is that the rigs will provide benefits to their particular industrial activity.

If I were manufacturing the type of things you are, I would rig for T2 manufacturing as that cost vastly outweighs T1 manufacturing. I would not rig for copying bonuses. Invention is a possibility if I can extract better ME/TE on the T2 BPC based on similar inputs to current game mechanics.

So, based on your original paragraph, I would rig as follows:

T2 Component ME
T2 Medium Ship ME
T1 Small Ship ME

Last two rigs can be alternated based on the volume of your manufacturing between the two classes.

They already did that in crius by adding install fees (or something along that line) to begin with.

And considering almost all of these items are bought and sold at numerous points in the process, I think the extra brokers fee has covered up on it already.

I guess this will be lost in a sea of "go join a large corp" or "use someone elses" comments but everyone is entitled to an opinion right?

I think we need some definitive comments from CCP on the direction that has been made with these "proposed" changes to structures and industry in general and what the intended outcome of these changes is to be.

I have several accounts and like to mix it up with different play-styles however one thing I always return to as a constant is manufacturing and research / invention. Call me a spreadsheet warrior and I will take it as a compliment, yes I spend many hours plugging figures into google sheets so I can make a bit of ISK to help fund other play-styles and sometimes if I'm lucky plex an account or add an additional skill training queue.

I've been running a medium faction POS for around a year and offering its services free of charge to my small corporation. We have enough fitting room to run manufacturing, research, invention and refining or compresssion. Also we can quickly power down modules and swap production say from T2 ships to freighters. Also if war-decced the industry modules can be off-lined and defenses on-lined.

We / I also have control over when modules are off-lined or important decisions that can be made during a war-dec of whether to stop a job and lose materials or risk continuing. I understand that there is asset safety but if you are invested in building a freighter for example and for whatever reason that job is running in a public facility and is stopped then going by current mechanics you would lose you (expensive) materials.

My fuel cost is currently 18 fuel blocks per hour for all of this which equates to something in the region of 200-300M isk per month (I also manufacture my own fuel in the POS). The fuel cost of the new medium engineering complex is more than twice this amount, in the region of 700M isk per month I would guess, so verging on unreasonable for the smaller independent guy (or gal).

I have limited time available as I work full-time and also play other games, so my I play solo in Eve quite a bit. I'd love to be the "Chief Builder" for some big alliance but with the time I have to invest and my other interests I don't believe that would ever be possible.

I've read all the comments thus far in the thread and so far there appears three main opinions.

1. Those who believe my play style and that of lots of others is invalid and we should either join a bigger org or get stuffed...
2. Those who believe their play style is being nerfed by CCP in favour of larger orgs / meddling with the economy
3. Those who are ready to embrace the changes as a small industrialist and either use a public facility or NPC stations

For me the flexibility of having my own facility which I could swap modules on or power down for short game breaks / war decs was the attraction of having my POS. Also the bonuses which made it more profitable to use than an NPC station.

I was pretty hyped about new structures until I've actually digested the information and let it sink in and now it seems like a huge nerf to industry when POS structures are finally removed from the game. Maybe buidling in an NPC will become more profitable somewhere down the line when the changes finally kick into the economy.

For me there is good and bad with this and I feel maybe too much is being changed in one sweep where smaller iterative changes might work for the better.

o7 to my fellow solo / small industrialists.

It's almost as if your isolation bubble has a door.

You can come into the out now. If it doesn't make sense for your operation to put up research and invention facilities, keep the BPO's safe in stations for those tasks. Or at a public facility suitable for those tasks. Periodically import the copies you need.

CCP has no choice but to go slow - Forcing players to pay more than double what they do now for less functionality, more risk and less return - How fast do you want to see the next drop in numbers playing eve?

Most games aim for highest number of logins - CCP decided, going for lowest amount we can make the most out of, was a far better idea. So, cost to do anything in the game keeps going up in stupid increments, more players lose interest (or just find they can't compete anymore) - And quit.


CCP needs to start looking after its PAYING customers, or keep losing them.

This plus the Orca changes, could see another 15 accounts unsubbed by Xmas. I'll give it a couple of months to see how badly my operation is affected.
I'm not threatening CCP, 15 subs is nothing to them in the scheme of things (but it is to me, it means even less reason to login my other characters)
No you can'y have my stuff - I'll trash it all and biomass the characters before I'll give a lazy selfish nerd my stuff.