Planetville!

My corpmate Nick sent me a text the other day, that he was playing PLANETVILLE. I about fell off my chair, because that's exactly what we're doing.

Ever since Planetary Interaction released, we've been babysitting our planets; in my case, it's 11 planets across three characters. We've built spreadsheets to keep track of all the raw materials we're collecting, who is processing it all, and what High Tech products we're going to produce. It's right up my alley of being the most efficient industrialist I can. Except my efficiency involves doing one thing I don't generally do: Go to Lowsec.

I am your proverbial carebear, I don't PvP because I can't stand losing isk. If I had the mountains of isk I would need to PvP efficiently, I'd do it all the time, no prob. But my character, even though he has fairly good ship combat skills, is also a hulk pilot with the skills that go along with it, first. Meaning I have expensive mining implants in my head. Yes, I have a jump clone and could go that way. But again, it comes down to having money for the ships. Maybe I'll get around to tricking out some frigate or cruiser to go PvP in, but, at heart, I'm no pirate.

Anyhow, so Nick did some checking, and discovered that low sec and lower planets have significantly higher concentrations of all raw materials. So much more so that to put our Command Centers onto planets in high sec would be a complete waste of time. So on to low sec we went.

At first, it wasn't so bad. We put most of our PCCs in Mifrata, and in Jaymass. We stayed a single jump into lowsec. When we couldn't find Autotrophs or Felsic Magma worth using, we had to go four jumps deep, through a major hub system. I guess you go where the scans take you. But, like I said, at first, it wasn't so bad. But then, the local pirates and thieves figured out what was going on, and the gatecamps began.

Like I said, I'm not a PvPer, but that doesn't make me stupid. I'm an accomplished scanner, and I've trained up to the Anathema and Cloaking. I always check my gates with either a shuttle. or someone that can bust a gatecamp with cloak and microwarpdrive. Anyone is waiting on the other side, my Impel does not come through. I leave my Orca on the high sec side to await the resources.

So this takes ALOT of time. Dodging low sec scum, all the jumps back home, reprocessing all the materials, combining them, and finally producing all the High Tech end items; it all takes a huge amount of time and resources. Which of course, is what the developers want, and I congratulate them on making both sides happy. Industrialists now have control over another aspect of the game with control towers, POS fuel, etc. And now carebears like me are venturing into low sec and worse, in search of the better and more efficient way to break through the profit margin into profitability.

So I guess I will get popped one of these days. And then I'll have lost my 100 million isk Impel, with it's three 40 million isk cargo rigs, and near 20 million in cargo expander 2s.

Hopefully I'll pull enough raw materials out to justify it's loss.