How Crius affects industrial day to day operations

Many bloggers already covered in detail all the changes introduced by the newest EVE Online patch known as Crius. Some have even speculated, how it will change industry in the game.

Some time has passed and we can now answer the question how it really affected industrial corporations. We will do that by looking at each feature mentioned by CCP Greyscale in his dev-blog.

No more remote blueprint installation

This feature is a major game changer, and a big pain for many industrialists. Before Crius it was possible to install BPOs in POS labs remotely, from the safety of NPC station. Well, it’s not possible anymore. CCP believes that industry needs more risk involved, probably because the rewards can be pretty high.  Solution is simple: use NPC station for copying, and store your precious BPO there. Another idea is to have a copy-only POS with one Design Laboratory and some sizable defenses. TL;DR: it is an inconvenience, but there are workarounds.

ME and TE

No big changes here. Blueprints are usually researched once after they’ve been bought, so in typical day to day operations nothing has changed. What did change is that the perfect ME is now well known without using blueprint calculators – and is simply equal to 10.

Invention and copying

Tech II BPCs invented without decryptors now yield ME 2% and TE 4%, but since all Tech II blueprints had their base materials multiplied by 1,5 it means that invented items actually take 2% less materials than they used to. However BPO owners are much less happy, because their perfect researched blueprints now require 35% more materials than they used to. Aideron Technologies can consider themselves lucky in that regard, because we did not own any Tech II BPOs.

Copying is a funny one, because some blueprints took much more time to copy than to manufacture. This has been changed in Crius to a static 80% of manufacturing time. CCP also changed invention and it now takes 1 run from a BPC, so you can either use 1 run BPCs or reuse a multi run BPC as many times as the number of runs on it. This means less clutter in corp hangar, as we no longer need so many BPCs at all times. This one actually seems to be a good change.

Slot removal and NPC job cost

Right now even jobs which you install in your own POS cost you ISK. This means on top of fuel costs to run these 10 POSs, you will also need to pay ISK for each and every job you installed in them! For many people it seemed simply outrageous. But fear not, with slots gone, we only need 1 or 2 Large POS now. And with the standing requirement for anchoring Control Towers gone, you can freely move our operation in case a system gets too crowded and the install costs are too high. According to the formula, if we assumed uniform distribution of industry jobs over the whole k-space, the cost index is about 0.0136, which translates to NPC install cost of 1,36% of material value per manufacturing run, but it can be more (or less) depending on the system you’re in.

With the number of POSs required to run industrial operation substantially reduced, corporations will save tons of ISK in fuel. This did not affect ice and fuel prices just yet, but probably will in the nearest future. On the other hand corporations have to pay for every job they installed, even at their own POS. Let’s see which is bigger: fuel savings or install costs.

We used to have 5 Caldari Large POS towers before Crius, and now we only need one.

This is a reduction of 2466M ISK monthly. Now 30 days of manufacturing in our system (cost index 2,6) would yield 416M ISK of additional costs. So in the end this change is a very much positive one, saving us roughly 2 billion ISK monthly.

UI changes

I love the new S&I UI in terms of both features and look & feel. Previously installing a single job required 7-9 clicks, now it’s 1 drag and 1 click. Awesome! The new GUI is much more informative, too. While we still need LMeve to do job planning at the corp level, at individual player level, the amount of information displayed in the new Industry GUI is more than enough. Granted, the new UI is still a little buggy, but all CCP needs to do is add a little polish here and there.

Unfortunately, like every rose, this one has some thorns as well. The new UI is really bad performance-wise. Our corporation is doing a heavy duty operation and we own hundreds of BPOs and thousands of BPCs, not to mention about 120 containers in corp hangars. This new UI will try to scan for each and every single bleuprint, so with the amount of data our corporation has, it becomes really bad.

Example:

• When I open S&I window, I have to wait 21,6 seconds before I can interact with it,
• Once it loads, I drag a Tech II BPC into it and the game literally freezes for 18,2 seconds,
• Then I enter the amount of 10 runs (game freezes for 3 seconds),
• Then I click “Start” and the game freezes for an additional 14,7 seconds,
• Then I drag another BPC and the story repeats.

As you can see, all time savings related to the reduced amount of clicks are quickly diminished by the amount of time I have to wait.

EDIT: According to CCP Nullarbor and Crius 1.8 patch notes, one of the performance issues when submitting industry jobs has already been fixed. Devs are still working on performance improvement for long blueprint lists.

By the way, while I appreciate the possibility to install jobs from a container, the list of corp hangar divisions and containers under input and output is way too long in our case. A tree approach (only hangar divisions visible initially, and containers shown only after you’ve clicked a specific division would be perfect).

* times measured on Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at 2,4 GHz & with 4GB RAM.

** the performance problem has been reported to CCP in the form of a bug report with attached log server logs

And how did Crius affect YOUR industry processes?