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[LordBucket]

Okay guys, let me explain the logic behind http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74234 and how to get 6.2 million free SP. It's the equivalent of over 3-4 months of free experience/leveling.

TL;DR: If you ever want a character to branch out into different races, do this:

Get
Minmatar frigate
Amarr frigate
Caldari frigate
Gallente frigate
to 4

Max Destroyers to 5

Get
Minmatar cruiser
Amarr cruiser
Caldari cruiser
Gallente cruiser
to 3

Max Battlecruisers to 5

"But what will this do?" you ask. CCP says that anything you'll be able to fly now, you'll be able to fly later - as this Summer they're splitting up the destroyer and battlecruiser skills. This means that getting the prerequisites for Destroyer 5 and Battlecruiser 5 will give you free destroyer/battlecruiser 5 SP for every race you have the requirements for.

"But that's a shitton of time to get Destroyer/Battlecruiser 5!" you say. Yes, it takes a bit less than 2 months and you have until summer. However, each Battlecruiser 5 takes about 1 MONTH each to train. So getting the BC prereqs saves you 3 months alone for the other 3 races.

So basically, if you have any interest whatsoever in flying a certain race's ships, get their racial frigate to 4, their cruiser to 3, and max out destroyers and battlecruisers.

FREE SP. DO IT.

Important note:

After reading through the fine print, it seems that there are a few other implications to the change beyond the above summary. The prerequisites for many ship skills are being changed, and in some cases multiple level 5 skills are being added to ship skills that didn't require any levels of those skills at all.

The way this is being done is by allowing you to fly ships that you have the basic ship skill (frigate skill, cruiser skill, destroyer skill, etc) for even if you lack the prerequisites to train that ship skill. That way they can add months worth of prerequisites without (one minor exception) booting anyone from ships they can already fly. Which is fine if you're already flying those ships, but if you're presently training to fly those ships or someday want to train to fly those ships, in many cases it will be easier to do it now than it will be after the change.

A few examples:

 * Electronic Attack ships are going from have no Long Range targeting skill requirement at all to requirement it at level 5.
 * Interdictors are going from having no Propulsion Jamming requirement at all to requiring it at 5.
 * Carriers are going from requiring Jump Drive Operation 1, and no Jump Fuel Conservation skill at all, to requiring Jump Drive Operation at 5 and Jump Fuel Conservation at 4.
 * Dreadnoughts are going from having no Weapons Upgrades requirement at all, to requiring both Weapons Upgrades and Advanced Weapons Upgrades at 5.

Here's an especially nasty one:

 * Command ships are going from requiring no warfare skills at all to requiring all four of Armored, Information, Siege and Skirmish Warfare skills at five. That's two million skillpoints being added as a prerequisite to train command ships.

Note that nothing I'm saying here contradicts the above quoted post. Everything in the quote is still valid. There are simply more things being changed than the summary states. For example, if you do what the quote says and train battlecruisers to 5, you may as well also train command ships to 1, because if you do it now after training BCs to 5, it will only take a few extra hours. If you wait until after the change, it will take ~40 extra days.

So yes, if you can already fly these ships you'll still be able to fly them even if you lack the requirements that are being added, but if you want to be able to fly these ships it will be vastly easier to train to fly them now than it will be after all the requirements are added.

The above list is not complete. I advise anyone who has long term ship plans to read through the change blog and see how any specific ships you care about are being affected. There are many changes planned beyond those summarized above. You don't want to be the guy who spends the next few months training prerequisites only to find that those prerequisites are no longer required once you get there and months worth of totally other skills that you never even considered training suddenly are required.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

LordBucket, good pickup on the racial piloting skill revamp. I was already considering to train Command Ship to level 1 because of all these changes. This really pushed the training of other skills to the backburner and it's hurting my one month old character because I simply can't do much other than piloting a cruiser now--the divergent from my original training plan adds up to an extra 60 days worth of training, but heck this will be good in the long run so might as well do it!

[sluissa]

Command ships already have pretty steep skill requirements, I'd not suggest that anyone push for that unless they were already on their way there. Odds are anyway that if someone wants to fly a command ship effectively, the new prerequisites will end up being a good thing to have anyway. Skill bonuses are often very beneficial either for the ship itself or the equipment you're likely to stick on it. (Or in the case of a command ship, the leadership position it's designed to take in a fleet)

[SirHoder]

Dang, had a big long reply to LordBucket on my results with PI and then the forum decided to 504 last night..  let's see what I remember...

Item #1, Damn you all for getting me interested in this game again.  Luckily an buddy still had my old main on ice and I was able to get him transferred back to me.

Item #2, My results with PI are generating much better numbers than LB described.  For the TLDR folk, It looks like I can expect to pull about 2Mill per planet, daily.

I suspect you are setting up planets in "high" high sec,  the amount of return you are describing is far less than I'm seeing.  I've just started a series of 5 planets in .1-.2 lowsec, they're just hitting pretty solid production on a range of P1 and P2 products.

First off, I determined some viable clusters of systems to scan.  I chose an area of high sec with .5-.6 systems that was in a dead end constellation, and a similar low sec .1-.2 constellation.  With Remote Sensing at 3, I could sit in my normal high sec mission/trading systems and scan into lowsec without exposing myself to any danger besides the normal moron chatter in local.  Using the F11 Universe Mapbrowser (as opposed to the Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator), I selected the interesting systems and screen-shot the individual planet views.  I then dumped the screenshots into Gimp and set up a translucent overlay with a rough percentage grid so that I could perform some data analysis.  Then, being an Eve player, I opened up a spreadsheet and got to work. 

Using the numbers generated from the screen shots, I multiplied in the current market values for the planetary resources to generate some arbitrary "Planet Values".  The results for the .5-.6 systems ranged from "1"-"2.5", while the low sec systems got values of "3.5"-"6.5".  Null sec supposedly blows this off the board, but I'm a cuddly cuddly carebear and don't plan on sticking my nose into that bit of Lord of the Flies politics.  So, I then headed off to low-sec to check out the area in person.

Local player owned customs offices seem to use the same 10% tax bracket that the NPCs have in high sec (there are some occasional differences though).  I spent a bit of time scouting around and luckily my designated "high value" systems were very quiet, often times with less than 3 people in local.

Using Command Center 4 upgrades, I can have 9 processors+storage+landing pad+extractor.  I guestimate the initial outlay at around 10Mill setup cost. 
P1 planets have the extractor spitting raw materials into the storage facility, which then routes the raw material to the basic processors.  The basic processors then route the resulting P1 product to the landing pad for pickup. 
A P2 planet has 6 basic processors (3 per P1 intermediate product) and 3 advanced processors.  The extractor spits raw material into the storage facility which routes raw materials to the basic processors and P1 material to the advanced processors.  The basic processors route back to the storage facility, the advanced processors route to the landing pad for pickup.  The extractor gets assigned to alternate resources as required for the P2 planets. 
This generates (maximum theoretical) 8640 units of P1 material or 360 units of P2 material, daily per planet.  The extractor runs full bore and is assigned to alternate resources as required to keep raw resources stocked up in the storage unit.

My cleanest P2 planet, all the rest should probably be rebuilt...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Doing short extraction runs, I can mine raw material faster than than the processors can create the finished products, extending the extractor runs to 2-3 days puts the raw material output closer to what the processors can match.  This is good, since I'd like this to be pretty hands off.  I'm planning on eventually doing extractor updates every 2-3 days, and a weekly processed product run to high sec.

I will most likely be dropping the P1 planets and go with the P2 planet setups just to reduce the volume of product I'll need to shlep back to the highsec markets. 3000m3 daily of P1 * 15 planets (once I get my alts trained up) is way to much too run through gate camps while still having fun.  Going with P2 gets the volume down to around 550m3 per planet (still a lot, but much better)

Both P1 and P2 produce similar anticipated profits (going for the T2 production and POS fuel materials), roughly 2.75Mill for the the P1, and 2.5Mill for a P2 planet.

My PI alts have a bit less than a 20 day skill plan, ultimately they will have Command Center Upgrades 4, Interplanetary Consolidation 4, Planetology 4, Advanced Planetology 3, Remote Sensing 3, plus misc ship skills to run a mid level indy with a cloak, t1 shield buffer and warp scrams/cargo expanders as needed.  Skills plus a ship will run around 15-20Mill.  Note the cloak, dropping your initial command centers and performing any resource transfers to the customs offices require you to be in system and undocked.  So head to a safe spot and cloak up.

[ScriptWolf]

So I have decided to do what nilik suggested.

I have a clean hurricane fit and was wondering if someone could suggest fitting for it to go sleeper drone salvaging.

I also am a armour tank and have all the energised plating skills upto level 4 so I get about %80 damage type resistance along with the other armour stuff as well.

[LordBucket]

Command ships already have pretty steep skill requirements, I'd not suggest that
anyone push for that unless they were already on their way there.

Leadership 5 and Spaceship Command 5 take a week each, and a lot of people probably alredy have Spaceship Command. The biggest requirement is Battlecruisers 5, which takes 3-4 weeks, but everyone should be training that anyway because of the changes. If you have BC 5 plus all racial cruisers 3, come this summer, you're basically going to be handed 4.5 million skillpoints. And if you do that, plus train command ships now before the change, not only do you get handed 4.5 million skillpoints, you also have 2 million less required training if you want to fly command ships later.

Odds are anyway that if someone wants to fly a command ship effectively, the new prerequisites will end up being a good thing to have anyway

Maybe. And granted it's not a role that everyone is likely to find useful. But if you ever want to fly one...training it now might cut months off your overall training time. I'd rather be able to fly a ship and then spend months chasing down those last few +2%s from level 5 skills if I want them than to have to train up four level 5 skills just to be able to fly.

[ScriptWolf]

When you say 4.5 mil skill points handed to you does this mean you could spend them on what ever and instantly skill for something?

[Comp112]

When you say 4.5 mil skill points handed to you does this mean you could spend them on what ever and instantly skill for something?

As amazing as that would be, no it does not work like that. What it does, is takes, lets say, cruiser level four. It then splits it into Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, and Minmatar Cruiser level four. Which gives you free SP do to you receiving a bunch of skills.

[LordBucket]

When you say 4.5 mil skill points handed to you does this mean you could spend them on what ever and instantly skill for something?

No.

(Note that the specific change being discussed in this post is not the only change. Don't read this and think this is all you need to know.)

"Battlecruisers" skill is going to be removed and replaced with four racial skills:

 * Amarr Battlecruiser
 * Caldari Battlecruiser
 * Gallente Battlecruiser
 * Minmatr Battlecruiser

With the matching skill required to fly the battlecruisers of each race. Players with the battlecruiser skill are going to have their old battlecruiser points traded in for racial battlecruiser skills when the change happens. But what happens if you have a player who flies other races battlecruisers? For example, I'm Amarr, but I have both an Amarr and Caldari battlecruiser. It would be awful if they only gave me Amarr battlecruiser and I suddenly wasn't able to fly my Cldari Drake anymore.

So...when the change happens, anyone who has battlecruiser skill...AND the matching racial cruiser skill of at least 3, will be given racial battlecruiser skills for ALL races they have the cruiser skill.

For example, if you have:

 * Battlecruiser 2
 * Amarr Cruiser 3

After the change you will have:

 * Amarr Battlecruiser 2
 * Amarr Cruiser 3

In this case, you didn't really gain anything. Basically just the name of your skill changed. But...if you have:

 * Battlecruiser 5
 * Ammar Cruiser 3
 * Caldari Cruiser 3
 * Gallente Cruiser 3
 * Minmatar Cruiser 3

Then after the change you'll have:

 * Amarr Battlecruiser 5
 * Caldari Battlecruiser 5
 * Gallente Battlecruiser 5
 * Minmatar Battlecruiser 5
 * Amarr Cruiser 3
 * Caldari Cruiser 3
 * Gallente Cruiser 3
 * Minmatar Cruiser 3


You received three racial battlecruisers at skill level 5 for free. That's 4.5 million skillpoints. Granted those skillpoints will only useful if you fly other races battlecruisers. But:

 * If someday you want to fly them, you'll save months by training it now rather than after the change
 * A similar change is happening with destroyers that also allows you to get free skill points for racial destroyers
 * There are other changes being planned, and it looks like in the future other ship skills might also be divided in a similar manner. In particular, interdictors and interceptors seem like a likely candidate for this treatment. If six months from now CCP decides to do the same with those ship classes, it's possible that destroyers or battlecruiser might, maybe, possibly be used as requirements to determine who gets free skillpoints, just like cruiser skills are required above, or like frigate skills are required to get the free destroyer points.

So if you do this, not only do you get several million "free" skillpoints, it's conceivably possible that by doing so you might be setting yourself up for more free skillpoints later on when other ship skills are being divided into racial types too.

[sluissa]

Command ships already have pretty steep skill requirements, I'd not suggest that
anyone push for that unless they were already on their way there.

Leadership 5 and Spaceship Command 5 take a week each, and a lot of people probably alredy have Spaceship Command. The biggest requirement is Battlecruisers 5, which takes 3-4 weeks, but everyone should be training that anyway because of the changes. If you have BC 5 plus all racial cruisers 3, come this summer, you're basically going to be handed 4.5 million skillpoints. And if you do that, plus train command ships now before the change, not only do you get handed 4.5 million skillpoints, you also have 2 million less required training if you want to fly command ships later.

Odds are anyway that if someone wants to fly a command ship effectively, the new prerequisites will end up being a good thing to have anyway

Maybe. And granted it's not a role that everyone is likely to find useful. But if you ever want to fly one...training it now might cut months off your overall training time. I'd rather be able to fly a ship and then spend months chasing down those last few +2%s from level 5 skills if I want them than to have to train up four level 5 skills just to be able to fly.

Am I wrong that secondary and tertiary skills are required just as much as the primary skills to fly something? Because I'm seeing a lot of skills under those two headings that would take a while to train up.

Warfare Link Specialist 4
Heavy Assault Ships 4
Assault Ships 4
Engineering 5
Mechanic 5
Weapon Upgrades 5

Not that any of those would be particularly bad to have, but those are a lot of level 4 and 5 skills that a lot of people would need to train up. I personally don't have any of those at 5 and I only have engineering and mechanic at 3, I believe. None of the other are even injected.

[LordBucket]

Am I wrong that secondary and tertiary skills are required just as much as the primary skills to fly something?

Prerequisites are needed to inject a new skill, but after the change, they won't be required to use a skill you've already trained. That's one of the changes being made to assure that anyone who can fly something now will still be able to after the change. For example, if you take the whole extra few hours to train Command Ship skill to 1 after you train Battlecruiser to 5, you will be able to fly command ships, even if you don't have any of the prerequisites that are being added. Whereas if you don't, then from one day to the next you won't be able to train it all.

I personally don't have any of those at 5 and I only have engineering and mechanic at 3

...it's possible you might not really be in a position to take advantage of the changes. This isn't supposed to happen until "summer" so you might consider not even worrying about it for a month or two, then re-evaluate whether it's worthwhile for you to pursue.

Free skillpoints sounds good, but not if it's free skillpoints in ships you're not going to fly that require you to spend a month or two training skills now that prevent you from training skills that you actually need now.

[sluissa]

But don't you need the CURRENT prerequisites for the new ones to be waived? I feel like that's just TOO exploitable if you have one skill you can skip ALL the rest.

I also feel like it works differently from how you explain it based on how I read the changes. But I admit to not fully understanding them myself so I could be wrong.

[LordBucket]

But don't you need the CURRENT prerequisites for the new ones to be waived?

I think we're having semantic issues.

At any given moment, to inject a skill you need whatever the "current as of time of injection" prerequisites are to train that skill. That is true now, and that will still be true after the change. However, to use a skill, you only have to have the skill, you don't have to have the prerequisites that are required to train it.

So, the literal answer to your question is, no. You don't have to have the current prerequisites for the new prerequites to be waived. You have to have the skill trained to waive its prerequisites. You only need the current prerequistes to train the skill now.

However, the answer to the question I think you intend to ask is, yes. You do need the current prerequisites in order to train a skill, and then after the change, those prerequisites that you needed previously to train it might no longer be prerequisites.

[sluissa]

I'm not talking about skill prerequisites, I'm talking about the ones on the ships.

But if you're saying I can just train command ships right now and even though I wouldn't be able to fly them right now, I could fly them after the change, that just seems idiotic on CCP's part. It's one thing to say "If you can fly them now, you'll be able to fly them after." But that just seems like a huge oversight.


Okay, I was misunderstanding a very basic feature of reading the skill prerequisite window... sorry, I believe you're right now.

[Aavak]

Magma Forge - PoS Talky Stuff:

Following a conversation highlighting some of the ongoing concerns for anchoring a PoS, namely that while the vast majority of the money donated for the PoS purchase had come from people who were less likely to be using it heavily, expecting those same people to support the PoS ongoing running costs was less realistic, we have received a very generous donation from one of the corp members who is interested in making use of the PoS research facilities.

The corp wallet now sits at 363,000,000 ISK.

This is more than enough to afford a large PoS control tower, though as has been mentioned by others (and I'm sure most were already thinking it) a large PoS requires a larger upkeep. LordBucket has supplied a rough figure of 12,000,000 ISK per day. If we were to purchase fuel blocks, it would realistically require one level 4 mission a day just to cover running costs. However, as there is an Ice belt in Ordion (this would only apply to an Amarr control tower) and there are at least two people who've mentioned they could re-tool their planets to help with fuel costs (and I have some near perfectly researched PoS fuel block blueprints I've been cooking for a while) the actual impact on the corp wallet may be far less intimidating.

Still, now that we have the money to consider a wider range of options, it's time we settle down and agree as a corp what we want to do with a PoS. As LordBucket has mentioned, a lot of the services a PoS offers can be gained from an NPC station, so it's only really those with an interest in Research and Industrial manufacture who'll really have a use for a PoS. And because the number of people interested will inevitably affect the number of Labs/Factories we will want to have active, which in turn will effect the amount of CPU and Powergrid we'll need available (thus which size of Control Tower we need) I think the first and most important step will be to get a show of hands by those who actually want to make use of the PoS.

By use, I mean those who would like to do something at the PoS that would require certain modules be installed and anchored there, such as laboratories, factories, silos, etc. Just docking your ship there can just as easily be done at an NPC station (and probably should be, unless you just want to keep your mining ship close to where you mine, for example)

Once we have some solid numbers on how many people want to do stuff at the PoS, we can work out what we'd need to set up to facilitate it all, and following on from that, as the combined value of the PoS modules increases, possibly how much protection we'd need to install there to dissuade any casual PoS bashing.