Lots of Pale Blue Dots – Part 2

This is the second part of my brief series on Planetary Interaction, the new gameplay mechanic added to EVE Online with the Tyrannis Expansion Last month. Part 1 can be found here

This part of the series is where I lay down some guideline and tips that I have accumulated whilst mucking around with my planets. I’m doing this before I get into the technicalities before alot of these are useful to know before you start. Any abbreviations whould be explained in the glossary at the end of the last post. So here we go, on with the guide.

Planning

Probably the most important phase of getting your planetary infrastructure up and running, it is vital that you plan in advance what you’re going to do and how you are going to do it.

What?

As mentioned before there are a whole slew of end products that can be made with PI materials, so obviously the first decision you are going to have to make is this: Which one should I aim for?

At the moment, studying the market to see which items are the most profitable is not feasible at the moment as prices are still in flux and players have still got stockpiles of materials lying around due to speculative trading before the planets were finally opened up.

Personally I made the decision reagrding what ultimate end product to produce based on something I personally could use on one of my characters, something that would be of use to me and my corpmates. Being pirates this was obviously going to be Nanite Repair Paste. But I suggest that you take a look at your own needs before considering market values and trying to guess what will be worth the most.

Where?

Where you decide to set up is also of vital importance. If you’re after profitability then W-space or null-sec is the place to be as the planets will have higher concentrations of RMs than low or high-sec. Getting access to these areas will necessarily present its own problems however and embarking on w-space or nul-sec operations is not for the faint hearted.

Finding the right planets is also essential. As mentioned before there is a combination of 5 planet types which will allow you to build every end product. Ideally you want all 5 of these planets to be in the same system but this is not always possible. I managed to find each of the five required in one constellation however with a maximum of 2 jumps on the longest route between any two planets.

Where you set up your operations will also affect your day to day operations regarding your planets. In any space other than hi-sec it is reccomended that a blockade runner be used  for hauling any materials. It is also unwise to sit in orbit without a cloak at a planet playing with your pins in these more dangerous regions of space.

How?

Once you have chosen your end product, and the planets you will use to produce it, its time to plan the network on each planet and the overall logistics network. I can heartily recommend a great little program called yEd which I used to plan out my planetary network as follows (click to embiggen):

This was simply a preliminary plan and was based on using Standard or Improved PCCs. As you can see from the image, I have all my P1 poroducts being routed to one planet (apart from Oxides which can be made on the extraction planet for both its ingredients). This kind of plan should not be a fixed vision of the final network (as you will see in the next post) but it can be used in conjunction with Snidely Backlash’s Planet Product Industry Matrix spreadsheet which will allow you to calculate the costs and outputs for each of your planets.

There are many ways to organise a planetary logistics chain, I have gone for what I see as being the most efficient which is to transport all the P1 goods to a central manufacturing planet. Using this method allows me to start extracting and stockpiliing P1 goods whilst I get my Interplanetary Consolidation skill up to level 5 in order to build my manufacturing hub. Reading through the Science and Industry Forums it is evident that this may be the most efficient wat to do things and allows all the CPU and Powergird of the extraction planets to be utilised for extraction and manufacturing of P1 goods.

Further spreadsheets can be used to determine the profitablility of your network but as I’m not initially planning to do this for profit I haven’t really looked at that side of things very much. These resources can be found on the forums, I’d reccommend using EVE-Search (currently down) to find them as they have, as yet, not been collated into the Industry Resources Sticky.

Construction

Once you’ve planned your network to your satisfaction its time to start building it. It is worth noting that you do not need to be in orbit or uncloaked to place a PCC on a planet. As long as you are in the same system as the planet you are building on, you can place the PCC from a safespot whilst cloaked.

It is a good idea to place all your PCCs in one trip and then dock up to actually build your networks. Once the PCC has been built the only time you ever need to be in space and unclaocked when interacting with your planets is when accessing the Customs Offices.

Your LP should be placed in such a way as to minimize link length as much as possible. I found the best way to do this is to find the highest concentrations of the RMs you are seeking to extract and placing a single extractor at each point by flipping between them in the scan view of your selected planet. You can then see without having to switch resources in the scan view where the best place to put your Launchpad is.

Extractors should not be linked directly to factories, always route the ouput of an extractor through a storage buffer first. This is to prevent resources being lost. If an extractor completes a cycle before the factory it is linked to is ready for the RM it is producing, or if a factory only requires part of that cycles output to start its next manufacturing cycle, the excess resources will be lost. Using a storage buffer will allow you to stockpile the excess resources and can, in alot of cases, keep your factories in constant production.

It is better to chain extractors (a basic link can take the output of 3 extractors before becoming congested) and link the last one in the chain to the initial storage pin (LP or PCC ideally, see above) than to link each extractor individually to a storage pin.

It should be noted that gas planets are larger than other planet types and that the interface in the planet view is not scaled to account for this. The result being that links of a gas planet, whilst looking like they are the same length as those on a smaller, are actually longer. This doesn’t really factor into closely packed networks very much but with links of any considerable length the difference in CPU and PG use is noticable and can restrict your options considerably.

Hauling and Logistics

Once you have your planets all set up and producing materials, you’re going to need to haul them around. The number of trips you need to make and when you need to make them will depend on what you are producing and the volumes you’re producing them in. With my setup (detailed in Part 3) I have found that I can leave my factories producing (only needing to restart the extractors every 24 hours) and unload the products into my stockpile every three days or so. Once I have my 6th planet up and running I’ll keep moving products to my stockpile and move the necessary materials to my manufacturing hub from there rather than running between the planets directly.

In order to minimize the time you spend at the Customs Office, essential in any operations outside hi-sec, it is best to perform any exports whilts in warp to 0 at the office in question, you can then hit warp to your next destination as soon as you land and move the contents of the office to your cargo hold  while you align. The point at which this transfer is taking place is the only time you are vulnerable during the haulage of your manufactured goods (disregarding gates and undocking, of course). If you are operating in low-sec and W-space having a scout around is always advisable, but that should go for any activity in these areas.

As ever, a close eye should be kept on local and your directional scanner at all times.

That brings me to the end of my general tips and tricks for planning, constructing and operating a PI network. In the next post in this series I will go into some detail regarding my own personal operations so you can see how I have applied these guidelines in practice.

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