Greedy Goblin

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Mining missions and boosting

Fleet boosting is an important thing for all fleets, but especially for miners. 2 miners + Orca mines more than 3 miners and that's just one module, skills and mindlink! The other boosting module increases mining range, removing lot of slowboating. The third highslot of the Orca can greatly decrease capacitor need or increase shield resistances. Besides the very casual solo miner, every miner must have Orca boosts. This is no different for mining missions. You need the yield and the range to finish them timely and the shield resists are handy too.

The boosting mechanics aren't simple in EVE. The ships in a fleet belong to a squad (max 10) and a wing (max 5 squads). You can assign a booster to the squad, the wing and the fleet. However to work, there must be a properly skilled commander in every position. For example if you want to boost 40 miners, you'll have 1 wing, 4 squads. You'll need a wing booster Orca, a wing commander (can be the same pilot) and a squad leader for every squad. The skill demand for that is minimal.

However the squad leaders must be in space to relay the boost. That doesn't look a huge demand, but it is problematic. We are talking about missions here, which means that the mission running ships must dock up to return the mission and pick up a new one. When the squad leader is docked, all ships in his squad lose boosts. The main problem isn't the yield loss, but the temporary range loss. All gas mining ships and some ice miners will stop cycling while the squad leader is docked (losing their last cycle), and you need to manually restart them or they don't mine.

While this looks minor nuisance, it's not, since you aren't a perfectly operating robot (unless you are botting), so you will forget to restart miners. Actually I've found that the loss of yield - even without restart fail - is comparable to the loss of one ship. Which means you are better off just giving its own Orca to every squad and not having to deal with restarts.

Anyone has a good idea how to bypass this problem?


PS: I'm more cautious to celebrate an upcoming alliance without seeing results. But the SOTA of Total Absolution made me happy. "Our primary strategic goal is to make CFC disappear from the map." "we are not going to fight any of them in the open field." "Spending money on what would be bling toys [supers] for us is stupid. Spending money on useful things is smart. So we will spend money on dreadnoughts and carriers." Did someone told these earlier?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Former White Noise is going to wipe CFC off the map....

Maybe you should look at the history of what happened to White Noise last time they fought the CFC...

Unknown said...

Sounds like how you have to pause skill training to jump clone. Ideally, CCP would fix it so that the lasers would merely change cycle times and rates in mid-cycle just as jumping to a new clone should (but doesn't) train skills at the new rate.

Anonymous said...

for super speeds.

multiple covetors or hulks for ore/ice. an orca. the SMA carries ventures for hot swapping and one DST to shuttle the ore back to the station. orca is fitted with range and cycle links a tractor beam.

the DST pilot turns in the mission with the harvest and initiates the next one. the reason the orca cannot be off-grid is the necessity to swap to gas harvesting.

if possible Feeding the Giant mission should be declined.

when the DST warps in to base, the barges can warp to the station to receive fleet warp from the DST pilot. once at site, the orca warps to fleet. meanwhile the on site barges can get into position/range.

consider using crystals, but keep in mind these are high end. (longer train) Gnesis, Dark Crok etc. And these do not occur in high - which means they are limited use.

PS. orca should carry logi drones

Anonymous said...

Use your Orca as wing boost and min skilled Pilots (i.e.) just Leadership 5) for Squad commanders.
Put them on safespots somewhere in system and forget ybout them.

Drawback: You only have 9 barges in every squad

Gevlon said...

@Anon: that's 1 Orca account + 1/squad leader account. I can save one account by having 1 orca/squad.

jstk said...

Maybe try upgrading your gas mining ventures into prospects? With 4 low slots, a reasonable shield tank and the sig reduction bonus you may be able to passively tank those mission rats witouth moving with orca shield links (and thus wont need range links). With a 10k m3 ore bay you will also need less trips back to station.

Gevlon said...

The mission gas is 4250m3, Prospect isn't faster. But it's true that it wouldn't lose cycle when the squad leader is off.

Gevlon said...

The mission gas is 4250m3, Prospect isn't faster. But it's true that it wouldn't lose cycle when the squad leader is off.

Von Keigai said...

I expect you are running into the range problem by orbiting fast using an afterburner?

I tried running some mining missions after you posted about it, in my case to build relations with various corps. I was running missions solo; no boosts. I found that I could run them fine unboosted, but I could not orbit at full speed. IIRC something like about half speed was fine though. It was fast enough so that I could still tank the rats. So, warp in, deploy drones, burn over to the gas cloud, then click at about half speed. Now you can AFK normally.