How I Run My PI

There is a piece of me that is madly in love with Planetary Management.  I like engineering my supply chains.  I like optimizing for efficiency.  I like planning out my production ratios across my team of alts in order to ensure I get what I need.

That being said, actually installing extractors and factories and launch pads for thirty planets is a pain in the ass and I have been putting it off for about a month.

Still, it is what I have been doing lately.  I am now set up to produce enough POS fuel for 8 - 9 control towers at home, as long as I ship in enough isotopes, and have a few extra bits and pieces I'll be producing on the side to pad my wallet.  POS fuel has practically no margin, ~0.4% to 5% income per batch on the build (not counting the fuel you use running the assembly array since the tower is there anyway).  On the other hand, it is a convenient way to convert my alt's PI to Isk without hauling it all the way out. :D

After a lot of spreadsheeting and some experimentation (and several months of practical application and refinement, of course) I have settled on two basic ways to get the most out of my PI.  Option A, maximizing gross income, requires daily attention from each PI alt, maybe 10 - 15 min per alt.  Option B, income/effort, will pull 3/4ths to 2/3rd of the income of Option A but only requires you to log the PI alt in every other day, and you only have to shuffle products every four days.

They both start the same: four 'harvest' planets producing a single P1 (out of the first stage of factories, so water, precious metals, silicon, etc) product each, and a factory planet assembling the four different P1 items into either a pair of P2 (Coolant, microfiber shielding, construction blocks) products or a single P3 (Robotics, data chips, and so on).  The difference is that Option A runs four P3 factories, while Option B only keeps three going.

A basic harvesting planet, and where the bottleneck comes from for the above end goals.  A character with Command Center Upgrades 4 can run the above (launch pad, eight basic factories, and an extractor unit) with just enough power grid left over to squeeze out the raw material production to keep all eight basic factories cranking, but the link between the ECU and the launchpad has to be shorter if you need a lot of extractors.  The launchpad can fit about two and a half days worth of products in it, but you can also launch goods up to the POCO if you want to let them sit for a day or two before moving them to your factory planet.

For Option A, have eight basic factories and make sure your ECU is producing 48,000 units/hour (or slightly more).  You'll need to run your ECU for at most 24 - 26 hours, which means logging in daily to reset it.

For Option B, you can run the less efficient 48 - 49 hour extraction cycles, for 36,000 units of raw goods per hour and six basic industry factories, and use the freed up power grid to plant a storage facility between the ECU and the launchpad, to hold P0 raw goods and feed them to the factories.  You can collect four days of production in the launchpad before it is full and you need to launch it/move it.

With this stage, the important thing to remember is that your factories need 6,000 units/hour to maintain production, and that you can't process more than 6,000 units/hour/factory.  Extracting a little extra is fine since it gives you leeway for a suboptimal scan or if you are not exactly there when the cycle ends, but pulling too much extra clogs up your storage.

That is my Option B factory world; the factories on the left are producing mechanical parts, the ones on the right are all doing coolant.  Although I technically only have the P1 factory throughput to keep six P2 factories working constantly, I put a seventh factory of each in there to handle any overages I get from the P1 planets/backlog if I end up not moving product over immediately.  I pull four days worth of water down to the launchpad on the right, use an expedited transfer to kick it into the storage unit, and then pull the electrolytes down to the launchpad after it is empty.  That fills both of them, and I can let it sit for four days, with the finished product deposited in the launch pad at the top.

The Option A factory world is similar, except it doesn't have the power grid for three launchpads and two storage units (because you are running eight factories of each P2, or eight P2 + four more advanced factories putting out P3 attached to the top launchpad); you might be able to do two launch pads and two storage units, routing goods from the 'out' pad into factories to make room for incoming finished product, but running P3 (and hence, 20 total factories) leaves you with just enough power grid for an 'in' launchpad, a storage unit, and the 'out' launch pad.  Bring a half launchpad full of P1 down from the POCO to each launchpad and Expedited Transfer them into the storage unit (to build one half of the P2 factories) then fill the 'in' pad with the components for the other half.  You'll get a bit more than a day's worth of factory production that way, the other reason that Option A requires daily maintenance.

So yea~.  That was my weekend in Eve.

o7
-K