The Increasingly poor decisions of an Eve Industrialist

The Increasingly poor decisions of an Eve Industrialist:

Product Selection:

   I recently moved my main into faction warfare.  This has been widely regarded as a bad idea.  So I become a war target, and in my noobish innocence I figured I would be safe in my miltias high-sec space... and I was forcefully corrected on this misconception by a war target Machariel sitting outside the dead end  system that I used to do invention out of... to the tune of 500 M isk.

https://zkillboard.com/detail/32099354/

   So Red Frog Freight and I have become very good friends.  For 4.5M I can have 800K m3 of freight moved 11 jumps.  I am sold.  Try to combine as much as possible into a single contract to make the most of it.

   So, my main is now in Black Rise doing Caldari faction warfare with several million skill points in industry just wasting away, so I decide to try some T1 industry.  I buy a Thrasher BPO (ME 10, PE 10) and a Moa BPO (ME 22, PE 15).  Both are doctrine ships in my alliance.  I build 30 Moas and 100 Thrashers and put them up for sale in Black Rise, and ~25 days later, 6 Moas and 5 Thrashers have sold.  FML.  There is 380M tied up for a month for no good reason.

  In this time I spent about a billion isk on PvP ships stocking up doctrine ships I have yet to really use.  I have lost a couple to frigate hot drops in plexes, but have yet to manage to kill anything.  A carebear in PvP is like a seal trying to play fight club in the shark tank, its going to have a bad time.

  I have been working on product selection programs for a while now, both for T1, which is much easier, and T2, which is complicated by meta items and decryptors in the invention process.  My tool told me to look a Covert Ops Cloaking Devices.  So I loaded them up in my tool, and they were showing 6 day build times and 400-500K isk/hour/manufacturing line and 50% profit.  That comes out to something in the neighborhood of 2.6B in profit/month.

   I bought a researched BPO (100,15) for 250M and a copy blank from NPC for 100M.  Then I spent over 500M to buy enough materials to invent 10 T2 BPCs and build an additional 100 units of Prototype Cloaking Device.  Then I went to install my blank to make invention copies, when I noticed the real problem.  Not only does it take 277.78 days to make 20 100 run copies needed for normal invention, but there are additional materials required to make those copies.  The above image shows the copy time, but includes the cost of copy materials.  So this caused me to add copy time to the display of my tool, and also to take the greater of the copy or build time to determine ISK / hour.

   Looking at it with copy time determining isk/hr, it now looks like a much worse product.  You still have > 50% profit, but now with only 100K isk/hr, which comes out to somewhere around 672M isk/month.  There are so many easier ways to make that kind of isk, this is only 200M isk above Scorch M, which has a negligible effort.  So what about using decoders?

  Just reducing the number of runs on the T1 copy to minimum almost doubles your isk/hr.

  Inventing on Augmentation decryptors brings your isk/hr sky rocketing back into an area that I am willing to work with.  You are still making 50% profit, or 100% Return on investment(ROI).  5 day copy time, ~70 copies to make 20 T2 BPCs assuming level 4 invention skills.  As it sits right now, I am sitting on this material, after making 200 units of Prototype Cloaking Device, trying to decide how far down the rabbit hole I want to go.

And then you add another inventor into the mix...

   So, after all of that fun, I have another inventor coming up on completing the invention training plan in less than 3 weeks.  With an 12-16 day lead time on high sec copy slots, its time to select the products for her.  So I spent some time in the last week working on my invention profiteer, see my previous post for more info.  I came up with 3 products, each with ~50% profit and a 1.5-2 day adjusted build time.  Those products I will keep to my self, as I do not want to encourage more competition.

   Below is a chart of the 90 day history of build cost (red) verses sell price (blue) for my 3 inventors.  It will probably take a couple of months to get this into full swing and find a good balance.  My main will have 6-7 day build times, my new inventor will have 1.5 -2 day build times, and my old inventor has 1-2 day build times.  I spent an additional 30 million on BPO blanks for copying for my main and new inventor.

Plans:

    I know in the early posts of this blog, I talked about doing a high-sec T2 inventor in only NPC stations, but that is quickly becoming impractical.  The problem is not invention or manufacturing slots, if you move around and are flexible enough you can find a sweet spot to do that in that will allow you to have near 100% efficiency. The problem is that you need ~105% or more of the T1 BPCs to make T2 BPCs.  You will find that in most high sec areas, you are looking at 8-30 days lead time until your copy starts.  Another trap you run into is that some of the copy slots have costs an order of magnitude higher than the rest.  Normally, my copy costs are in the 140K-280K isk range for full runs and 20 copies, and I'm fine with that.  But you sometimes find a line that will cost you 2.5M isk for the same thing, which I am not ok with.

   So, I need to look into dropping a couple of POSs.  2 Medium POSs will allow me to run up to 8 inventors, doing copying, inventing, and manufacturing at the POS.  This will also run me ~440M isk/month, or almost a PLEX.  I can't afford to do that until I have my other 2 invention lines established.  Not only that, but I don't have any characters with faction standing above 5, so I will have to hire a standings service to be able to drop the POSs.  POS cost is also another problem, to drop 2 medium towers will cost nearly a billion ISK, with only 4 equipment arrays and 1 each of mobile and advanced mobile labs.  This is the minimum needed for 2 characters.  The second tower is so that I don't have to worry about a standings service when I outgrow the first.  I also need to start doing missions on one of my invention characters so that I can boost my corp faction standings myself.

  This is all not mentioning the fact that I have been neglecting my faction warfare duties.  I need to have time to be bad at PvP and run plexes.  Oh well, it keeps Eve interesting :)