Science & Industry

Greetings and salutation.
Short story even shorter : I own 4 acounts each with at least 1 slot available.

My goal is to establish a mini isk printing empire to sustain me and another 5 friends of mine who i finally convinced to join EVE. I intend to spare them of any wealth grinding as much as possible and use a network of 4-6 alts to sustain all our pvp activities and maybe, why not, put some isk aside for darker days.

I'm asking YOU esperienced industrialist, how would you set this up and what should be manufactured, how would YOU ideally use those 4-6 chars for wealth acumulation?

Please note that I am clueless about anything related to industry, did my share of mining in the days of the old using a cruiser but that's pretty much it. Also, if training time is to long for some of these toons I will just buy it/them off the bazaar. Aside from purchasing whatever char, if it comes to that, my initial budget for this project will be no less than 10b.

Ideally, this will not be a huge sink of my play time, but I will do whatever is needed to meet my goals :
- have smallish pvp corp leach of this mini empire
- profit ?

Also can you please point me in the direction of a worth industry / manufacture guide worthy for a ignorant as I in this field.
Cheers

Thank you for the fast reply. I was afraid about industrialists being secretive about their industrial deeds but I'm keeping my hopes high. Thing with me is that my knowledge in the area is so low that the only times I opened industry tab was by mistake trying to click something else, that's where I'm at at this moment.

Thank you for the advices, some of the things you mention are new to me and make no sense but I will start documenting on this area and check that misterious blue (I think?!) industry tab. more often.

I've done my share of PVE to sustain myself and would not go back to that at this moment. I would rather dedicate my time learning something new in EVE.

Don't be shy people any kind of insight will be of use to me.


Cheers

Edit : PI is not something I want to do
Edit#2 : I have 0-0 sov access if that matters

A fuel block BPO costs 11m from NPC sell orders if you are willing to AFK to a Thukker station in hisec. Players sell the BPO in Jita for about 13m.

It takes about 5 days to research to ME 40 (no waste) and about another 5 to research to PE 60. Most hisec ME lab slots have a queue of at least 9 days, but there are tons of empty PE lab slots.

Researched fuel block BPO are available on contracts for about 25m.

Personally, I'd recommend ammo, rigs, and scripts for industry newcomers.

Uh, you just BUY and then SELL PLEX, just like CCP wants you to do.

It is even better if you pew-pew it all away.

oh my jesus...she just asked me to write her a 10,000 page text book...


I is tired...will write endless novel laters...

Hello all, i find this topic very helpfull, thank you all for the replies to the OP. Hope to see some more tips :-)

ok real advice (without writing the pages and pages a real guide would require)

no idea what other people have said, i dont want to read it all.

things to remember
-do alot of research before you start doing anything, figure out how much your costs are and exactly what your profits are
-the ISK guide (Inter-stellar knowledgebase) is a good place to start getting basic info on all things industry
-you can make decent money on T2 items, but its more difficult and requires alot more calculating (remember the cost of making the BPCs, the cost of invention and the fact that invention will fail a certain amount of the time)
-having a POS is a very good idea, so you can buy BPOs and do research on them, a base level BPO or BPC (ME of 0) is likely to not be profitable


and having read what you said about not spending alot of time...

be forewarned...this is probably going to take alot of time! I do alot of industry, research etc. but it eats up alot of time. grinding standing to reduce refining taxes, putting in tons and tons of tiny jobs, moving items to market, doing research, LOTS of training time.

its not a, throw it in the oven and out comes money kind of thing. maybe some people can do it without spending much time but my experience has been that there is a significant time investment. (personally i enjoy it, but it has eaten alot of my time).

good luck!

EDIT:

If you have a specific question, feel free to send me a question in game over mail. If you ask me "what is invention" im going to point you to google. learn the basics first, that much is simple (the ISK guide is a good place to start), but the specifics can be very complicated and Im willing to help people with that.

I've been looking at T2, but it seems a lot of the BPCs just make really low ISK per hour compared to stuff you can just make. Sometimes you find an item that's profitable, but so do other people, except with the invention time and production time you don't realize this until after you've sunk a week into making stuff, then all of a sudden you're sitting on 60 Tachyon Beam IIs that are now worth a lot less than you were planning. Also, you have BPCs to make 400 more, but the profit just doesn't seem worth the manufacturing time.

/Mavnas

Yes that happens to me too from time to time. Between invention and production time market can change quite a bit. Thats why I havent gone to full T2 production yet as I find that some of the T1 BPOs i hold give more reliable and stable profit. I have characters that do full time T1 stuff with just PE V trained, and less number of characters that do T2. I am hoping my T2 options would get better as I train more skills to produce more diverse range of T2 goods depending on market situations.

As you may be picking up from the many and varied responses in this thread, there is no "easy answer" to be had. There are myriad ways to make money that fall under the broad heading of "industry," each with it's own upsides and downsides, and each have their own pitfalls. You said that you have access to 0.0 space, and that you are essentially looking for the most isk for least effort, which narrows down the field considerably. People have been suggesting fuel blocks and ammo, and those are terrible suggestions for what you're looking for. Sure they will make money, but they can and should be done in highsec, and require a LOT of hauling due to the high volume that you need to produce.

As an extremely general statement, the following trends hold more or less true (profit margin refers to percentages) :
- The higher the demand on a product, the lower the profit margin will be (yeah, yeah, it has more to do with supply, but it's easier to measure demand with the ingame marketing tools)
- The longer the manufacturing cycle for a product, the lower the profit margin will be
- The more expensive the up-front costs of a product, the higher the margin will be

These forces can counter each other, so if you have a very high demand item that has a very low manufacturing cycle, such as ammo, your profit margin can be decent. However, as you make the manufacturing cycle faster and faster, the effort it takes on your part to extract that profit increases rapidly. For example, manufacturing ammo can be very profitable, but you will be hauling so much volume at such short intervals that you are working extremely hard for that money. On the other hand, most basic capital ships have less effort required since the cycle times are longer (only have to haul components every few days), but the margins aren't that great because the cycle time is long and demand is reasonably high. Contrast that with, say, a Jump Freighter, that has an extremely long cycle time but the profit is good because the costs are high and demand isn't particularly high.

GIven what you are looking for, and your large amount of available isk to devote to it, I'd say look at some of the more obscure corners of the market. Capital manufacturing can be good if you do it right, you could run a PoS reaction chain, or look at the higher end T2 producs, such as Jump Freighters. Basically, you want to have as much of your money working for you at a given time as possible. Money sitting in your wallet does nothing, get it in a slot. Beyond that generality, it unfortunately will take a good amount of research on your part to really find that path forward, since only you know your situation and logistics capabilities. I will point out that even if you have access to 0.0, I would not really consider that a bonus unless you have either a Rorqual or a Jump Freighter. Hauling large volumes without one of those is a royal pain.

As a final note, if anyone ever says something to you that sounds like this :
"You should mine/produce/farm component X yourself, since that will result in you making more money from product Y"
You should immediately disregard anything else they have told you. This statement, such as the one earlier in this thread about producing the robotics yourself since it will increase your profits from fuel blocks, reveals a woeful lack of understanding of how economics and business works, and throws anything else that person may tell you into question. More often than not if you follow the advice of a person like this, you will end up losing money. At the very least, you will be making far less than you should be.