Goal update

Today's developer updates, particularly the UI one, reminded me of the goals I set for myself a couple of weeks into playing:

• Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
• Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions 
• Buy blueprints for a cruiser
• Get proficient enough at mining to scramble enough materials to make and sell copies of that cruiser

Done.

It didn't take too long after I bought that Thorax cruiser before I could fly it. I did, and then moved up to a Brutix battlecruiser that got blown up two weeks later. I've moved up to a battleship, which I've decked out to run level 4 missions for more money and better standing with a couple of NPC factions. I had the money to buy an original (as opposed to a less expensive copy of a) Thorax blueprint, and carved out enough ore to provide most of the manufacturing material. This weekend, I popped the blueprint and the refined ore (plus some extras I had to buy) into the queue to manufacture at the Dodixie IX Federation Navy plant.

Overall, this operation still has me in the red, i.e. I haven't recouped the cost of buying the blueprint by selling enough of the cruisers. Heck, the first one hasn't even come off the assembly line. I need to do some poking around to figure out where to sell them: Dodixie has a pretty active market, but it might be worthwhile to put them on sale in some of the starter space stations, where new players (particularly some trying to get a leg up by cashing in PLEX) might buy an overpriced ship in exchange for not having to travel to a different market. I might also discover that I can make more money selling copies of this original blueprint rather than spending the time mining (or the money buying) materials to build them myself.

From eveonline.com

This summer, Eve will get a significant overhaul to its industry mechanics. Some of the changes seem more like they're rearranging and combining columns of figures rather than adjusting their values, so to speak. Simplifying rather than changing mechanics -- and I'm all for that. Something I appreciated from the UI blog is the graphic at right, which visualizes exactly my thinking around taking these first few steps in the industry gameplay. I look forward to the overall UI changes, ditching some of the tabs with tabs and making language more consistent. We'll see how it all plays out.