Cerrydwin
Voroi Holdings
0
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Posted - 2014.05.06 06:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
Apologies if this has been covered somewhere in the 30+ pages before.
"and the highest current rank is Titans at 3414 (good luck maxing that out!)"
Why would we be proud of that? Why intentionally make something so unattainable? 28 years* for rank 10? really?
Let's assume that an Archon at ME 0 today costs 1,045 million isk to build. At ME 2 it costs 960 mil and at ME 8 (perfect) it costs 954 mil. There's little point to going past 2, as 93% (85 of the 91 mil) of waste is eliminated at that point. So, an equivalent conversion of capital ship BPOs would look at the actual waste in terms of capital components and convert that to the closest real waste in the new system. That ME 2 Archon would become an ME 9 Archon with 3% higher waste, though in reality you would still only be wasting one drone bay (the same one from ME 6 through ME 10, in fact). If you were to look at effective waste then the new ME would be 6. New Archon BPO owners would be able to research 9 ME levels in 12 weeks (8.5 using a POS). Using the dev-blog-proposed value of rank 853 results in a time to research of 2.3 years* for this same ME9. Who in their right mind wants to wait over two YEARS to see a return on their industrial investment? On the other hand, if the target is ME 6 that would take a base time of 71 days, not too far off from the 88 station / 66 POS research times for old ME 2.
Near the end of last year as my dwindling $ income saw me faced with the prospect of quitting eve or getting serious about plex, I decided to sell off some characters and invest in capital ship production. Planning all of this took a few months (including grinding standings for reprocessing), then getting and researching the blueprints took a few months. Now I'm six months into my investment of 30+ billion isk in what had been a (relatively) stable market since before I joined the game lo these seven years past. Sure profits, right?
No. Now I need to completely rework how I need to haul inputs, most likely adding 6bil to my costs for a jump freighter and removing the ability to use minerals. Ouch. Hope the ore market stabilizes someday.
Now I don't know what the material costs of my hulls will be next month. Will they be profitable? Who knows?
Is my research on the BPO's worth anything now? What good is ME 2 on a capital hull in the new world of simple research? Is it still as lumpy as the existing method, or do I need to invest another EIGHT MONTHS of research before my hulls are competitive? I can't afford another eight months of game time and I really want to keep playing, so I sure hope there's another way forward.
Now for something positive, I hope. Clearly the capital hulls do not fit easily into the nice, neat 10-level box. They didn't fit into the old efficiency curve idea either; the payoff from capital ship research is lumpy. Since we're already modifying every value known to man, why not add a zero to capital components? What was once one component at 10,000m-¦ is now ten components at 1,000m-¦ each. Component material costs are divided by 10 per run. All existing BPCs have runs multiplied by 10 and all existing components are multiplied by 10. The component cost for all capital hulls goes up tenfold. Net change: nothing so far, everything is exactly as it was before except for bigger numbers floating around.
Now you have some power, some flexibility. Let's look at an Archon before and after. Before, you need 11 armor plates. ME 2 eliminates that one extra armor plate (and all other wasted components except one drone bay) after around two months of research, so now you need 10. Further research will do nothing until ME 8 (where you save that last wasted drone bay), not cost effective. After, you need 110 armor plates. Each level of research removes one extra plate (or four extra drone bays); each step yields a definite and fairly smooth improvement in the cost of production. All ten steps of ME will save you isk in production, though only the first six or seven will actually be worth researching.
* quoted times to research assume the time is rank * (time value from the dev blog for each ME)
Also, thanks for taking hundreds of hours of work in over a dozen spreadsheets and rendering them absolutely meaningless. Depressing. |