Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Isk per effort: Capital manufacturing

I'm a big proponent of non-grind professions, and of maximizing isk per effort.

To illustrate this concept, consider PI. Supposedly, a plasma planet makes 500m/month. That's not a huge amount of isk, especially over a month of time, but if it only takes you one hour per month to keep it running you are making 500 million isk for one hour of effort.

Traditional grind type professions - mining, exploration, etc. - make numbers like 15-150m/h. In these cases, isk per effort is easy to measure: Work for an hour, and see how much isk you've made. You may have to factor in LP, if you do missions or incursions, or take an average over many hours with exploration, but the principle is the same.

I decided to do this with capital manufacturing. It's a little harder to measure time spent, and there are some grey areas which require consideration. I decided to tally it thusly:

Only time when I have to be at the keyboard counts toward the total. This includes time spent playing with spreadsheets, setting up and modifying buy orders for minerals, jumping minerals to lowsec, installing and delivering jobs, and setting up and modifying sell orders. It does not count time spent autopiloting, but does count the few seconds it takes to drag minerals to/from my cargo on each end of the autopilot route.

Using these criteria I measured the time required to build and sell a 4 ship run consisting of two tier 1 capital ships (carriers) and two tier 2 capital ships (dreadnaughts, rorquals). This came out to almost exactly 1.5 hours. Then I found all the 2x1+2x2 runs since mineral prices stabilized a few months back, which turned out to be only two. That's a very small sample, so I also filled out two 2x1+2x2 runs which are in progress with current lowest sell order prices for their ships.

Averaging the 4 runs returns an average of 1648 million isk in after-tax profit, or 1100 million isk per hour of effort. This is a fairly ballpark figure, but feels approximately correct.

So, newai. That's how I roll.

7 comments:

  1. To further decrease this time, I would strongly advise you to pay someone to raise one of your character's standings with the corporation that owns your production station. I am sure there should be someone doing that for couple bil ISK. Then you could use mineral compression thing.

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    1. I wasn't aware that someone else could change the standings of one of my characters.

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  2. Unless CCP has changed it, you can fleet other person, park your character in station and that other person running missions & sharing awards gives you corp standing increase (as well as half of mission rewards).

    It doesn't work for storyline missions though, which increase faction standings.

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  3. Out of curiosity, now how much capital and training time have you invested to make this work?

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    1. Aside from the jump freighter, training time is pretty minimal. Capital is the big barrier, and I have about 120 billion in it, between ship blueprints, component blueprints, and materials.

      If you were only building on 4 blueprints, though, you could get away with much less. Refer to http://eve-fail.blogspot.com/2012/04/building-capitals-like-boss-part-1.html

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  4. What about the amount of time needed to ramp up to this level? Obviously it took a lot of investment for hull and cap component BPOs, but how much time did you spend researching them before you started manufacturing? For cap hull BPOs it seems like you'd have to research ME/PE for about a year on many of them to get them to the ideal levels as you outlined in your 'building like a boss' thread.

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    1. That's precisely why I recommend buying hull blueprints from contracts instead of researching them yourself. When I started, I happened to have some hull blueprints which I had researched and had been copying for more than a year before I even ran the numbers on capital manufacturing.

      The building thread is a "if I had known then what I know now, this is how I would have done it" thing. My actual process started up slowly and in a fairly halfassed manner.

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