Taking Care Of Business - The New Planetary Interaction

While most players of Eve Online were having fun with the new character creator, I kept my nose to the grindstone and redid all ten of my colonies.  I have to say I'm impressed with CCP's second iteration of planetary interaction.  Here are some of my thoughts after playing with the feature for a couple of hours.

First, the cost of getting into the business went way down.  Instead of paying 45,000 ISK for each extractor head, budding industrialists only have to spend 45,000 ISK for a master extractor that can sport up to 10 extractor heads.  I also liked the fact that I got my money back for the

The next point I liked is that, if I read my readouts correctly, I am extracting more P0 products than I did before the patch, and doing it with less extractor heads.  Of course, I am doing this in high-sec.  Output on low- and null sec planets may differ.  I write this because of all the complaining I have read in the forums.  I may have to train up a PI alt whose sole purpose will be to run a factory planet that runs on the excess production from the other planets.  Or perhaps training Wandering Rose up to Command Center Upgrades V would be a better long-term play.  I'll have to look into that.

The third thing I like is the charts and the sliding scale that allows planning for up to 14 days of production.  Okay, the slider is a bit of a pain, but I do like the way the graph shows you what your production is.  From what I can tell from looking at the graphs, I think that I can set the production for 2 days and then stop and start the production plan at any time.  If I do so after the graph shows the peak production period is past, then I actually increase production.  I'll have to play with it, but setting production for two days would help with my crazy work schedule in which I sometimes had 3-4 hours of non-working extractors because I had to work late.

Finally, the new system is much less of a click fest.  Instead of having to set 150-160 extractors every day, I will only have to worry about 20.  And with luck, maybe I will only have to click on those 20 extractors only every 2-3 days.  I can dream, right?