Day 42 : Droning on about Drones

I’m powering towards drone skill 5 when I am not interrupting the queue with stuff like the skills to fly huge transports. I’ve bought a Mammoth, thinking I was only only skill level away. In fact I’m two skill levels away so won’t get to fly it for three days instead of a few hours. I must pay more attention when playing EVE. All the great mistakes I’ve made are usually due to lack of attention brought on by booze, knackeredness (4 hours sleep in the last 2 days - woo!), illness, or my crap short term memory.

Drones at level 5 will bring the ability to learn another skill that lets me install a Drone control unit adding one more controllable drone to my swarm. I have a quick look at this. It is a massively expensive skill, and even more expensive is the add on it allows you to control. The blueprint is cheaper - I’ll run the calcs and make my own.

Hang on tho - it takes up a high power slot on the ship. Where would I use it? Not on a mining ship where the high slots are filled with miners. Not on a transport ship with no drone bay. The only place is on a dedicated drone boat. The Vexor is suited to such tasks but couldn’t even power it. Given the price of the unit I can’t afford to lose one in combat just yet. Having more than 5 drones will have to go on the back burner and I’ll line up the other skills that have opened up to me to increase the efficacy of the existing 5.

Word about mining drones and their lack of use: space for combat drones, travel time vs yield, always get attacked first by rats. I can optimise my drone use, particularly now they will be doing more damage. I can take one mining drone out and add it to the mining yield. See how it goes. If my advanced drone skills make rapid killers out of the combat scout drones then I can swap more out. It actually might start to make a difference to yield.

I tend not to use mining drones. I always have combat drones orbiting the ship waiting for the arrival of rats. This isn’t optimal mining but rats inevitably gun down mining drones if I don’t pay attention, which I frequently don’t. I could go into the figures and literally drone on about travel times to and from the rock but this post is incredibly boring enough as it is.

I find out today that everything to do with mining is changing anyway. I read this

http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/x2nlc/new_mining_barges_with_fitting_details_from_sisi/

via Mabrick, http://mabricksmumblings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/barge-changes-now-on-sisi.html

who gets it from http://www.sobaseki.com/wordpress/

What effect will this have on me? Well - I’ll be able to stop using cans from the Retriever. You’ll see less of those chains of cans spread throughout a rock belt. The ore bays will make them obsolete, at least in the short term.

What effect on mining in general? I’m too inexperienced to give an accurate assessment but I think in the long term we can expect a crash in ore and mineral prices since it will be so much easier to mine. We’ll see a lot more AFK miners initially. The tank (effectively the amount of damage it can take) on the miners will make low sec mining viable for the solo player. Even the earliest mining barge, the Procurer, is now a decent ship and will get people out there quicker. Again the developers lean towards tempting us all out to low sec space. On the other hand there is the matter of Hulkageddon, the ongoing war against the hugest of mining ships. The tank will make this harder, and the specialised role of the Hulk will mean it will be seen less. What will the Hulkageddon organisers do? They won’t give up, they don’t sound like the type. They’ll develop new strategies for taking down these tough new miners, and possibly extend their choice of targets. It could suddenly become dangerous to be a miner and that might stabilise the ore and mineral prices. A self regulating system. EVE is that complex. Of course I’ve only been playing 44 days. Anything could happen. I need to make sure my income isn’t dependant on mining just in case.

Some other random stuff : an EVE noob advice thread I should have read before

http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/rpffl/the_have_a_tip_leave_a_tip_eve_thread_round_iii/

I particularly like the “do one thing every day that scares you” and the advice to go to low sec and take risks. I need to get back into that sense of adventure. I’ve become too attached to my implants but if they go up in smoke my skill queue will slow down. Sod the skill queue.