Since CCP has updated the wiki to include more lore, I've been thinking about buying some of the EVE Online novels and maybe helping out by editing or at least reading through the wiki. I'm sure the universe has a nice back story but many players ignore it in favour of pew-pew, mining, etc. The personal histories of players and characters are hardly explored and there's hardly any culture.
I'll take a look into more lore and buying a novel after I finish reading Ender's Game, heh.
Add Comment
 
 
Finally trained up for a mining barge. It took a few days to train but now I can rake in the cash from mining. I bought a Retriever with two Strip Miner I's, a survey scanner, two cargo hold expanders, and three medium-sized rigs for cargo hold optimization. This cost about 17 million isks but the mining yield is around 1600m3 every 3 minutes. Going to be making a lot of cash now. 
The more important thing is that you can refine the ore and use the minerals to manufacture your own equipment which saves some money. 
The hardest part is coordinating mining operations because with a yield like that you need an Orca....or you can use an iteron and make several hauling trips. 
Add Comment
 
 
One of the ways to make mining profitable is to partner up. One person flies around in a heavy-duty mining ship and dumps everything into a secure cargo container or a jet can, while the other person flies around in a hauler and once every few minutes picks up whatever has been mined. Haul to the nearest station and then trade to one or the other and refine or sell the ore outright.
I did this with a friend yesterday and within an hour we made over 30 million ISKs. It wasn't too difficult and gave us enough time to read/study/screw around on the internet :P 
Playing EVE online with a friend is more fun and way more profitable, whether you're mining/hauling or doing missions together.
2 Comments
 
 
So running a corporation is a lot of hard work that I just don't have the time for. I started a full-time job in February and it's difficult to choose playing a lot of EVE over taking a nap. That makes me a sleepy CEO :P so I quit the corp and found another one to join with a few friends. We've been doing level 3 and level 4 missions and there has been a lot of cash coming in just from the bounties. Not to mention that we have dedicated salvagers and miners as alt accounts and we can easily make 20mil per mission.
I tried to do an Incursion with my friend and we got wiped out in under 10 seconds. We lost our most expensive ships, and I lost my Myrmidon. I think I've spent 70-80 million ISKs replacing it. I forgot how pricey T2 drones are, I haven't had to replace them in a long time, they're just so heavy with with armor!
Today we're going to do some more missioning and mining and I'm going to get to Stacmon and sell whatever resources my planet operations are producing. That would be Oxygen and Mechanical Parts and both of those sell for a lot of money. Oxygen is being bought at around 175 ISK and I have over 16,000 units of it. That's over 2 million ISKs, I just have to launch it from the planet, grab it and then haul it to a station and sell it.
1 Comment
 
 
I've been busy with work and haven't had too much time for EVE. I've been taking quite a few EVE vacations ;)
The 5 Year Plan corporation is doing okay and we're looking for some more recruits who are interested in mining and missioning. We're building up an alliance with other smaller corps. It's informal at the moment.
I still haven't lost my Myrmidon though I've been close. Warping out as soon as the hull reaches 50% was very exciting and very expensive to repair. It costs a few million ISKs to repair the ship. With a hull and armor repairer you can save a lot of money. My friend lost his ship though and he was so demoralized that he took a 30min break from EVE! We figured out what he could do until he bought his ship again...make a fitting for armor/hull repairing. The ship is basically designed to support other ships in a fleet and repair their damage. It has remote hull and remote armor repairers, armor repair drones, and cap boosters (repairing uses a lot of energy). It repaired my Myrmidon's armor from 0% to 100% within 2 minutes. With some drones and improved skills, it can do that even faster.
We've been doing some level 2 and 3 missions and I'm thinking of organizing a big mining op for Friday or Saturday. We might do a mission run just to get everyone's standings up with certain corporations though. I'm also hunting for an Incursion to do, I've been wanting to do one for a while now but we need a bigger fleet. Should probably get more of the epic mission arc done too.
2 Comments
 
 

Creating the Corporation

If you're already in a corporation, you have to leave it first. If you're in an NPC corp, you don't have to leave.
You're going to need to train the Corporation Management skill up to level 1 before you can create your corporation. Here's a list of other corporation management skills you might want to train:
  • Anchoring, for anchoring deployable items like Giant Secure Containers (highly useful for mining in solar systems with less than 0.7 security)
  • Empire Control, + 200 corp members per level
  • Ethnic Relations, good if you want members of other races to join your corp, you'll need at least level 2 corporation management
  • Megacorp Management, + 50 corp members per level
  • Sovereignty, + 1000 corp members per level
  • Starbase Defense Management, control of 1 array per level
When you first create a corp, you're asked for the name of the corporation, the ticker symbol, and then you get to make a cool little logo. I called the corporation 5 Year Plan (5YP is the ticker symbol) and gave it a communist-inspired logo, big red star on top of a white circle background :-P To get my friend into the corporation, I had to train up ethnic relations since he's Amarr and my corp is Gallente.
After this, you'll need to jump to a station where you can rent out an office/hanger. The rent in popular stations, if there are offices available at all, can be very pricey. In Bille, the University of Calle station is the only one that has science/industry and is the only place where you can manufacture things in that system. All the offices have been rented out there for that reason and the rent has soared to 7 million ISKs per 30 days. However, when you go to another staton, there are more offices available and the rent drops to under 100,000 ISKs! Very cheap and even the poorest corporation can afford those rates. Unfortunately, to get any manufacturing done you'll need to ship materials from the corporation hanger to another station. You're paying cheaper rent, but you're paying more in time.

Managing The Corporation

As soon as you create a corp, the game changes and you're going to need to do a little more long-term planning. Instead of the simple planning of training the right skills and doing enough missions to be able to afford a kickass ship, you're going to need to deal with the future of the corp. A corporation with no money and no goals is a dead corporation. The goal of GoonSwarm and its corporations is to take as much sovereignty in 0.0 space as possible. The goal of 5 Year Plan is to set up manufacturing and mining at the 100 million ISKs level.
You're going to need to plan some short-term actions that support these long-term goals and in our case, we will be doing mining in high-sec, slowly moving into low-sec and securing that. In terms of manufacturing, we will be creating more items like ships and ammo and then setting up a supply line to a better place to sell our goods, such as Dodixie. Things like ammo are always in demand, no matter which part of the universe you're in.
After figuring out these goals, you will need to figure out a compensation system as well. How much will players get paid? What will they get paid for? In 5 Year Plan, we reward based on missions and mining. If you mine a ton of stuff, we will pay you something for it. We can't pay you as much as you would make on the market because we're using the material to manufacture items, but you will see a cut of the profit from those items later on. When a mission is completed and a salvager was tagging along, you will see a huge cut of the salvage profits. You can keep doing missions, just pass along the bookmarks of the wrecks to the salvager and they'll spend their time salvaging and selling what they've got.
You can raise funds for your corporation by selling shares to people but this requires a ton of work. They will want a financial audit to be done of your transaction logs and will want to make sure you can pay out solid dividends. Running a corporation that isn't isolated from the rest of EVE players is hella hard work! :P
You can check out the EVE wiki to see more information about managing a corporation
Add Comment
 
 
I started a casual corporation for newbs in EVE, it's called 5 Year Plan and you can read about it here.
In other news, I manufactured some 300 Ogre I drones and the expected profit is 10mil, we'll see how fast they move!
Add Comment
 
 
So I downloaded this neat Android app, EVE Industry Calculator, that calculates whether or not it is profitable to manufacture an item from a blueprint. I found that the Ogre 1 drone can be sold for more than the cost of the minerals used to manufacture it. Unfortunately, this requires a certain level of skills. The better your production efficiency and industry skill levels, the more your profit is. I have level 4 production efficiency and level 4 industry which gives me a decent profit. When I get to level 5 production efficiency, my profit will have increased a LOT because the cost of production will be greatly reduced.
To further lower the costs of production, I did some mining for a few hours. Boring but it does help a bit. If you're going to do this, train up your mining and refining skills. If you're mining veldspar (which has the most amount of tritanium I think...) then you'll want to train up the veldspar processing skill.
The only trouble with manufacturing and selling items is that it'll take a while to sell them off. Some drones aren't bought that frequently or in high enough volume to be worthwhile to sell. I suggest checking out the volume that items are sold by using the Price History in the Market window. The blueprint cost a bit too so now I'm stuck manufacturing a lot of the drones and selling them just to make up the cost of the blueprint. 
Add Comment
 
 
Someone on the newbie forum asked what they should do next. They said they felt "lost and without direction". Someone replied with a link to a nice poster that details a lot of what you can do in EVE. I wrote it up as text which is a bit easier to read and scroll around than the poster.
Click here to find things to do in EVE Online!
Add Comment
 
 
After some discussions on the forums, the in-game chat channels, and Twitter I thought it would be a good idea to write down the total amount of ISKs you can get from a mission. I went through the mission, looted everything I could find, salvaged everything I could find, and then figured out how much ISKs you could earn from that. Not only that, but I looked at the amount of loyalty points earned (which also results in ISK if you sell items that were bought through Loyalty Points) and the amount of ISK/minerals you get from reprocessing the loot.
Add Comment