Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Sigh, trade

So it occurs to me that before I can actually make a list of items to stock systems with, I first need to decide what sort of systems to stock. There seem to be several options:

Highsec: No. Just no.

Lowsec FW area: Putting a bunch of people in a clearly defined volume of space and having them shoot at each other should make for a wonderful trade opportunity. The downside is, I'm pretty sure everybody else knows this too. I would tend to anticipate a lot of competition, and getting in on this would probably involve first learning about FW.

Non-FW lowsec and NPC nullsec: These areas should give me larger margins, but one expects the volume to be much, much lower. Bonus points, though, for less frequent restocking.  Access to player sov stations would be optimal, but I don't have that.

Nullsec entry systems: One expects stocking these could result in higher volumes and higher margins than many other highsec/lowsec systems.

Incursions: I don't at all feel like chasing these around.


In theory I can stock between 6 and 11 systems, depending on how thorough I want to be, so I'm not restricted to only one of these options. Lots of research to do, I guess.

7 comments:

  1. Oh well... it's the planning and researching what makes it so complex and interesting... but then I spend half a weekend researching some manufacturing options for interweb spaceshipz and end up being mad at myself :P

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  2. Don't be blinded by ISK. I would suggest not getting into trading since it tends to be quite time intensive activity, while your whole ISK-making approach is about minimizing time spent.

    Since you now have POS with 15 copy slots and whopping 75 invention slots, why don't you look into T2 ship manufacturing? You can make ~2.5bil per month producing JFs (1 char), or ~5bil producing Marauders/Blackops (3 chars). Smaller hulls require more time spent.

    Another option is copying and selling Freighter BPCs (~7% monthly ROI), bunch of them are purchased for invention and production.

    Profits on Freighters are also pretty decent currently.

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    Replies
    1. Doing any of those things would mean tearing up my current processes. If JFs make 2.5/mo/10 slots that would be more profitable than my capital manufacturing, and so might be worth looking at, thought I hear bad things about the effort involved.

      Freighters are more profitable then carriers right now, so I should start looking at a set of blueprint to switch out to when capital prices go like they have.

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    2. Not necessarily. You can buy couple cheap production characters in character bazaar, I would assume they cost ~3bil max.

      You can do JF production in two ways: one is buying the invented BPCs off the market (look for -1/-1 ones), that's extremely easy, doesn't even require POS, though needs some T2 manufacturing skills that most likely you don't have.

      Another way is inventing BPCs yourself. That would add some 100-200mil to your bottom line (if you buy T1 BPCs from the contracts), however might not be worth the effort. In addition to that, you can own a set of freighter BPOs and do copying yourself.

      JF hull takes 24 days to produce, components (7 BPOs for each race, cheap ones) 3-7 days. Once setup, in continuous production you can make 4 hulls per month. Profits are 700-1200m/hull at time of writing, using already invented T2 BPCs -1/-1 from the contracts and T1 hull at Jita sell prices.

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    3. Well, if we talk about adding characters, I can also increase income indefinitely just by adding accounts. Right now I'm limiting myself to two, which means 6 characters, all of which are fully utilized except for market slots.

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    4. Adding extra account with 3 additional characters costs pennies and the marginal time increase is small. Hence it's much more efficient than going into time-intensive efforts such as trading.

      Though I would not recommend getting past 3-4 accounts, it gets annoying to manage so much.

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    5. If trade turns out to be time intensive, I just won't do it. My first goal is to find one or more niches where all I have to do is put items up and wait.

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