Funny week
by A scientists life in Eve on Aug.17, 2012, under Eve online
It’s been a funny week so far.
We’ve had some drama in Corp which has, unfortunately, resulted in somebody leaving. I’ve also been very busy in RL which has limited my play time.
However, projects continue to tick along nicely, with 4 carriers and just over 60 T2 Cruisers currently either in production or about going into production in the next two days.
Other T2 manufacturing is progressing nicely, with the last batch of Shield modules having been taken to market and the next batch of various modules about to start the production cycle. This time I’ve got around 3,000 different modules to build which will give me a little more time to replenish T2 stocks through copying and invention for when I finish making all of those.
I’m also using Passive Targetter I blueprints to compress Tritanium for moving around 300 million units into a lo-sec staging area for a contruction project my CEO is currently completing. Between 425mm Railgun I’s and Passive Targetter I’s, it’s very quick and easy to move huge quantities of minerals around in a very cost effective fashion.
While online, I have had the fun of talking to another Corp mate who is just starting out with T2 manufacturing. He’s going for an easy target by manufacturing T2 drones, however I need to work with him a bit as he had proposed buying the T2 components instead of manufacturing them… so still a bit of work to do here, but it’s enjoyable working with somebody else just starting out, and allows me to think back to where I was when I started.
Like many players, I didn’t have somebody to help me understand the processes, and thinking back if I knew then even 10% of what I know now, I just facepalm at the possibilities.
This, once again, reiterates to me that Eve is a social game, and the importance of being in an environment where more experience players can talk to and work with newer players is what makes Eve stand out for me. The obvious answer is for the new players to join a player owned Corporation, but also I think that the community have a big role to play, including such sources as blogs, websites, wiki’s, YouTube videos, and excellent publications like EON Magazine and the associated ISK Guide.
Eve is a very good game, but when you add the community into the mix, it transcends good to become great. But then maybe I’m biased 
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I guess i’m missing something just like your corp mate. Why is buying the T2 components a bad idea? If you make more isk by manufacturing t2 drones than you save by making the t2 parts, isn’t it better to buy them?
I’ve somewhat recently set up a high sec POS and have been furiously copying and inventing. I did make the newb mistake of not figuring out accurately enough what ratio of manufacturing slots to research slots I would need. I’ve now realized I need to train up some more (advanced) mass production skills as i’m unable to use all the t2 bpc’s I create.
You mentioned you have cycles of production and invention. How do you organize that? Do you keep a stockpile of t2 bpc’s with a certain number of each bpc in stock or something? My corp doesn’t really do much manufacturing anymore (if they ever did) so I don’t really have anyone that has done this before to ask.
The reason for making the T2 components instead of buying them, is that somebody is selling them for a profit, and therefore it’s always worth checking whether making them yourself would allow you to improve your own profitablilty. I’ll take making 100 Warrior II’s as an example via 10x 10 run -4 ME invented BPC’s. Assuming that during your production cycle you have one slot free for less than 3 hours, you can use that slot to make the 100 Thermonuclear Trigger Units yourself (just over 2 hours in a component array at a POS). This would increase your profit from the 100 Warrior II’s by 1.77 million ISK.
Now if you happen to have 10 slots and are able to spend 100% of your time manufacturing Warrior II’s from an endless supply of invented BPC’s, then it is actually slightly more profitable to use all 10 slots to make Warrior II’s and buy the Thermonuclear Trigger units as otherwise you’d have to sacrifice 1 run of 10 Warrior II’s to make the Thermonuclear Trigger units. How likely that is depends on your setup, but for me I can always shoe-horn in 2 hours (as I use a Component Assembly array at a POS) and so I make my own T2 components.
As to cycles of production and invention… I’ll tend to have around 6 to 8 different T2 products in production at a time to spread the risk and allow me to react to market changes during production. I will generally have around between 100 and 200 BPC’s for each module, so be producing between 1,000 and 2,000 of each module in that cycle, this gives me buffers to match the market. While this is happening, I will be busily inventing the next 6-8 different item types to prepare the BPC stocks, and other toons will be copying the 6-8 module types to follow that ready for invention. So I’m really running a 3 phase process.
As production of the first batch nears the end, I switch one production toon to make all of the T2 components needed for the next batch of modules, I will also gather all the minerals and PI product needed, and also make the T1 modules. This usually runs for a few days, at most a week.
Every so often, maybe every 2-3 months, I stop copying modules and do a series of maximum run cruiser copies. I then invent those with decryptors to get T2 Cruiser BPC’s with the copy toons switching back to module copies. I then make somewhere between 50 and 150 T2 cruisers, depending on how much working capital I decide to tie up. Making the components for this usually takes between 1-2 weeks, so that extends the cycle a bit.
Variety in manufacturing adds enjoyment. I could just sit there and make thousands of one or two common modules, but that would bore me to death very quickly. I like the challenge of a multi-stream approach, and it allows me to play the market much more.
Of couse, alongside all of this I’m also running a Capital Ship production line
Opportunity cost. I have 30 manufacturing slots. I can not make the same output in t2 moduals by spending some of them making components.
I am completely fine buying the parts from someone else who did the dirty work. However, if I had a buddy making the components for me…. that’s different. Otherwise its not much different then buying the minerals instead of buying or mining ore.
@Thighzen I’ll put it this way, you can buy components from people like me or many others who for whatever reasons at time chooses to sell manufactured components. By doing so you put profits in the pockets of many others including myself. Thus by “calculating your costs” you can in most cases manufacturer T2 Components cheaper and thus manufacture your T2 overall cheaper and thus make more profit.
Why do at times i choose to sell components, quite simple: many capsuleers somehow like the convenience of buying components and i sell mines for a profit and often when i do sell them make a good decent profit even though at times it can be a slow business sometimes. But its profitable! So you come out cheaper if your making your own components if your calculating your product costs before you manufacture them.
I don’t do full time manufacturing or T2 manufacturing all the time. Yet i do consider myself a Trade Invention Industrialist. Whenever i feel like manufacturing something i go on a manufacturing spree, not to just manufacture stuff but to sell the stuff i make within my Trade network. Because i clearly know places i can sell stuff profitably at times and can fill a need.
When i started to do Invention and T2 manufacturing for almost an entire year i did nothing by Copy almost all of my entire collection of BPO’s. I just did Batch Copy Copy Copy Copy… When it was all done, more like i kinda decided it was enough. I had several thousand copies of vast amount of BPC’s copied from my BPO’s. I could pick and choose whatever on any day i felt like Inventing and eventually manufacturing for T2. You just pick and choose in the end whatever it is you want to make, however your choose to do so in your manufacturing method. I haven’t done any copying in many many months. But i have lots of secure containers all sorted in my hangar with lots and lots of BPC’s to choose from as a choice to do something with if I did choose to.
Needless to say I have several hundred T2 BPC’s as well. I’m not exactly in a hurry to manufacture all those T2 BPC of whatever item or ship they are. At my rate of manufacturing, i have enough T2 BPC’s to last me for well over a year and more. Yet there is enough T1 BPC Copies as well sitting around to Invent more T2 if needed. And every so often I buy a new BPO which mean I have more stuff now than before to make copies of to Invent to get the T2 BPC to manufacture it and make a profit.
Do stuff at you own pace that work for you and not to someone else standard, but manufacturing your own components usually comes out cheaper. I’ts my belief that most serious Inventors and T2 item producers actually make their own components.
I don’t think anyone can disagree about making your own components being cheaper for you, however it isn’t necessarily more profitable. Its hard to tell whether you (Ardent Defender) are agreeing with that statement or not. Suppose you use a manufacturing line to build a component thereby saving you 2-3 million isk. However in that time you could have bought the components and built the end product and made a net profit of more than 2-3 million isk. In this case, buying the components actually increases profits.
Like… the scientist? (I don’t have a name for you) says though, if you can fit a run into a gap somewhere in your production then maybe it makes sense. I’d still argue though that if you have a gap you could start a production run of the final t2 item sooner. The difficulty I see here though is that with a limited number of manufacturing slots, one has to be around when that job finishes to start the next.
Scientist: How many accounts do you have? It sounds like you have quite the industrial empire going
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Do whatever you feel works for you however you calculate it to your liking that’s it’s in your best interest to do either. What works for someone else may and dont always work for me. What works for me may not necessarily either work for you or anyone else or to the degree of Manufacturing or Industrialization someone else does. The Point here is not everyone does everything the same or so the same amount of T2 Invention/Production/Manufacturing. Everyone does things a little different as per how the operate in space and their circumstances. But you can get ideas of what others do and see if it fits or improve what your doing or not doing or considered differently.
In the end like said before do whatever you feel works best for your situation! What EVE Scientist does above don’t always work for my situation. But that don’t mean I can’t take some insight from to maybe improve or consider doing some things differently. Sometimes doing some things just don’t quite apply to my situation in the same way or to try to do so. In the end I do what works for me.
I have 4 active accounts and most slots on each of those accounts in use. My CEO also has a number of accounts, with his potential output making mine look a little bit second class, although I am catching up gradually.
I tried inventing, I tried manufacturing and I tried hard but it wasn’t to be. Fortunately I joined a corp whereby there are people more dedicated than me who do manufacture stuff. We have a high sec POS to do all this in and it’s running 23/7 copying, research and all that. All I do is provide my characters free slots to copy items that aren’t as important as others (e.g. Orca BPO copies on a 30day cycle, my characters do that, Captial parts 16 x 5 run, my guys saving the others to do the more important stuff).
Does that make me a third wheel? No, what I do in the background and in places the others aren’t (e.g. null) is run reactions and mine moon goo for them to make components cheaper than buying. This is the fun stuff for me, not copying/making the items (captial ships excluded, I love making those).
Each to their own, do what you enjoy and more importantly what is profitable.
Try to avoid Excel, the more spreadsheets the more complex your world is and the more your head hurts
I usually run 4 clients at a time, three are Eve and the last is Excel. Sadly Excel is now so much a part of my game play that I do really almost think of it as a client now. I certainly can’t do many of the things I do (well not easily anyway) without it.