Tuesday, 8 February 2011

PI : week 1

As mentioned I've been experimenting with PI. I've been in high sec space only with two characters (both 5/5 in Interplanetary Consolidation and Command Center Upgrades). PI was only being done for 6 of the 7 days though, since I ended up spending a day moving my operations for reasons I won't bore you with.

So far, I calculated I've produced 80.7m isk worth of materials from PI in the first week. I know I can improve on that.
  • That's an average of 1.1m isk per planet per day
  • That's low. It took me some time to get exactly the right setup on a planet and get a good balance of materials coming into factories. Now that they are optimized, my planets vary from 1.2m/day to 2.8m/day.
  • The worst planet I set up was producing Robotics. I calculated that planet made nearly a loss of 1.5m isk per day compared to selling the Mechanical Parts and Consumer Electronics that I was feeding it. Without that planet I would have an average of 1.3m per planet per day.
So that's the results, what have I learnt (and what can you learn) and what's the next steps in the experiment?
  • P1 products seem to be the best so far, better than P0 or P2 (although I have not experimented with P3 or P4). "Optimized" planets producing P1 vary from 1.5m/day to 2.8m/day
  • Variation in the "isk per day" amount comes not only from what is being produced but also the individual planets can vary quite a lot in terms. For example, I have 2 planets producing the same P1 but one makes about 300 units/day and one makes only around 220/day.
  • So the next challenge is to replace the low value planets by a combination of moving planets and/or changing what is produced.
  • This means a bit of market research on the items (always a good thing to do before you start, I would have avoided the costly Robotics mistake). This looks like a very interesting tool produced by player Wyke Mossari.
  • However, there seems to be no easy way to determine "better" planets. The planets I mentioned (one producing 300 and one only producing 220) seem almost identical in terms of concentration of minerals. Competition may be a factor, I may just be in a bad spot, planet size may play a role... naturally I'll blog about it once I do a bit more research on this.
If each planet was making 2m isk/day, that would be enough on its own to pay for PLEX for both characters and play the game without real life cash. I'm going to make this the objective of my experiment.
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4 comments:

  1. Saikron8 February 2011 at 20:21

    I read that as of the latest PI changes, other people's extractors no longer affect your extraction rates. Also, in my personal experience, variances in planets are sometimes so great that lowsec planets will produce less than seemingly similar hisec planets. My PI SP is low, so I'm not sure if the p0 material amounts in the scan tab are inaccurate because of my low scan skills or because CCP loves it when we pull our hair out.

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  2. Princess Strawberry8 February 2011 at 21:35

    Thanks for the comment!

    To clarify on the extratcor issue here's the relevant dev blog:
    http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=851

    The important part is:
    - Networks belonging to different players does not affect each other directly
    - The only way two players affect each other is indirectly via the depletion layer

    So if someone else is extracting in the same area, you can put your extractor heads on top of theirs, but the two of you will deplete the resource more quickly so there is some impact (it's just indirect).

    Definitely agree that there are some really big variances on planets. Just as an illustration, I have 2 planets of the same type in the same system producing the same P2. The amounts of each resource look very similar on the scan, but one planet produces about 20-30% more than the other. I am definitely monitoring the performance of each planet and moving on if it seems too low. Would not be surprised if there are some high sec planets that can outperform some low sec ones... trick is finding them :-)

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  3. Unknown10 February 2011 at 00:05

    Are you using the (from what I see "common") strategy of quickly extracting a hot spot into nothing, then rebuilding your extractors and launcher in a different part of the planet?

    This seems like a long-term waste to me as it's about 1m to rebuild an extraction node (including all sub-components).

    Or, are you setting long program times in hopes of conserving the resources and not taking as often a hit on rebuilding your colonies?

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  4. Princess Strawberry10 February 2011 at 22:07

    I'll post some setups and some analysis tomorrow. I'm experimenting with both types.

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