EVE: Building The Myrmidon
I've been assembling the goods for some days now to build my Myrmidon - a Gallente Battlecruiser that I consider to be pretty much the best-looking ship in the game. The BPC - Blueprint Copy - for it cost me three-quarters of a million ISK. The necessary minerals have, thus far, cost me about 8 million, and I still haven't assembled everything. I expect it to cost about another 10 million to get the rest. But that's better than the 30 million I'd pay for the ship on the market.
It brings home how important specialisation is in the game. I went looking for the necessary minerals at lower prices, and found a good lot of tritanium selling in a 0.4 security system for about 7% better than anywhere else in two regions. So I bought a chunk of it, and went about making the runs up to collect it. This consisted of setting my hauler (an Iteron II) off on on a seven-jump autopilot run to the second-last system in the journey (0.5 security), and then doing the last hop into the system and into the station manually, just in case. Only to discover that I couldn't take it all in one load - indeed, it was going to take me three. If I had specialised in the Industrial ships, though, and had Gallente Industrial V, I could have probably brought it down in one load.
And there's something incredibly tedious about a run that can't be done fully on autopilot - I don't much mind long low-sec runs; they've a good burst of adrenalin every now and again, particularly when the automatic get-lock-on-anything-that-locks-me shows up a T2 frigate aiming its barrels (or worse, webs) at me. And I don't mind at all setting the thing to autopilot and going to do something else for a while. The half-way solution is annoying.
So having found that while I could get minerals somewhat more cheaply than market rate, the process would eat up time, I considered mining. From the last time I was playing regularly, I had a Tristan - a Gallente Frigate - kitted out with mining gear. That is, it had mining lasers, and enough CPU-boosting kit in the low slots to mount two missile launchers as well, for the inevitable belt rats. I went and I mined. And I mined. And I mined some more, and hauled the goods and the loot and salvage from the rats back to the station. My Iteron has a salvager in the high slot, since trying to mount a weapon there would really only provoke more trouble. And when I calculated it out, I found that the single Alloyed Tritanium Bar I got in salvage was worth more than all the ore I had brought in, after about an hour's mining. Unsurprisingly, if I had specialised more in mining, and had the skills and gear to kit out a cruiser as a mining ship, I could have done a lot better.
However, while I was at all that, my trading brought me in a solid 2 million ISK, and the two missions I ran after I got tired of mining netted another 1.5 million. So clearly, what I should be doing is trading and running missions, which is what I'm specialised for, and leaving long-distance hauling and mining to those who are good at it.
EVE: Teaching people how the Market works since 2003.
Posted by Drew Shiel at September 2, 2007 12:47 PM
