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Tuesday, 10 July 2012

The "opportunity cost" fleet

Posted on 22:00 by Unknown
Since I'm sure that griefing is the best way to make the World a better place, by liberating participants from the bonds of outdated (rather ape-age than medieval age) mental schemes, I'm thinking about the way of implementing it. No matter where I will go, I will have to fly with a fleet doing it, so it's time for me to think about fleet doctrines.

ISK efficiency is a goal for all alliances. On the top of that, CCP designed the game as "every ship is playable" which can't be done without diminishing returns. A 2x more expensive ship isn't 2x more effective. This pushes fleets towards cheapness. It's better to field 100 Drakes than 50 Tengus. Hell it's better to field 50 Drakes with 250 spare ships waiting for reshipping than 50 Tengus with no replacements. However more expensive ships are still better (otherwise everyone would just RvB in T1 frigs). They are rarely fielded because they are not ISK effective.

Avoiding polishing the sneaker is a major goal in ship fitting. The hull, fitting and consumable prices should be balanced. You should spend your money on the weakest link of the system. If the hull with T1 projectiles, gyrostabs and the tanking modules give 300DPS for 100M, spending 100M for gun/gyro upgrade that increase DPS by 20% is a waste, as the cost would be +100%. Spending the same 100M on the same modules on a 1B hull+tank ship would increase DPS by 20% for 10% cost lost, clearly a good trade. So overfitting a lame hull or underfitting an expensive one is to be avoided, that's basic knowledge.

However the "I farmed it for free" attitude appears here well, valuing time spent in the battle zero. You know, the veldspar is free too, since you spent no money on it. Just 10 hours of your life. Everyone has an income. For some it's 20M/hour, 50M/hour for others, 500M/hour for me (and planning to cut my trading to half, trashing the least profitable items, hoping to get 800M/hour with the rest).

If you wouldn't be in a battle but farming something, you'd be making that ISK. Being in the battle is losing on that profit. Consider this value a consumable cost. Now imagine that someone shows up with the idea to fly a 70M BC hull with 50M fittings and 500M spent on a booster. You'd call him the largest idiot ever. However if I'd fly a Drake, I'd do just that.

Imagine that I participate in 5 battles, each cost 2 hours. I lose 4 logies with 120M hull, 100M fittings, 10M faction cap boosters each. My losses would be 5.9B. 85% of it would be lost time. Now let's consider 1B carrier hull, 1B fittings, 2 lost ships. My losses would be 9B, only 1.52x bigger than before. I can't give exact power relation between a Scimitar and a Carrier, so as quick and dirty method I just compare capital shield transporter (300HP/sec) and large shield tranporter II (85HP/sec). So for 52% more cost I buy 353% power increase. Let's repeat the calculation for a guy with 30M/hour: 920M logi, 300M time, 4B carrier, that's 400% cost increase. For him, upgrading to carrier would be a bad move.

The fleet of traders would naturally fly T2 and faction ships, well-fitted strat cruisers, carriers, dreads. Of course others field such ships too, but we could and should field them like Drakes. Lost one? Jump home and reship. My point is that it's not luxury action, not a "give everyone a finger by wasting billions", it's the proper choice of ships. Anything cheaper would be an unacceptable waste of ISK.

The leaders of any alliance we'll move to must understand this. We will not and we must not fly doctrine drakes. We must fly 1-2B ships just to break even with our time costs. We must not care of losing them, just like a drake pilot must not care about his drake. The FC must accept this and consider it an asset, not an annoyance. The pilots are intelligent enough on their own (remember, they did not get their ISK from AFK-mining) to find a unique niche in the fleet, replacing one of the doctrine ships with something stronger, probably a capital, knowing that they might get left behind if the enemy drops capitals. Remember, no need to worry for ISK, the pilots can pay for the replacement easily.

For a obvious reasons no alliance used a "throwaway 1B ship" doctrine, so it will need some thinking to figure out how can these ships be used out of their standard rules. Tracking dreads against enemy BS fleet? Neuting/ECM carriers in the place of alphafleet scorpions? 15-fighter (or 15-drone) carrier against enemy BCs? Covert ops battleships as moving target beacons to bombing runs? Or equipped with ECM burst and smartbombs, sneaking in the middle of the enemy BC/Tengu fleet? My knowledge about it is very limited, so it is of others. However figuring such things out will be the only way to effectively incorporate traders/industrialists to fleets. Or "keep it simple stupid" and let us blow up the structure while the drakes are busy with the enemy subcaps?

Of course the global optimum for a trader/industrialist is to fly nothing, but make ISK, giving it to the alliance which would use it to allow others to fly. I mean the 500M opportunity cost + 500M spent on pimped combat ship could buy 6 drakes + 6x1 hour of average guy. 6 drakes are definitely stronger than whatever pimped subcap I can create. However the question arises why is it so good for the trader? The problem isn't "fun" in the sense that pressing F1 is inherently more fun than updating orders. The problem is power. The 6 pilots who fly on my ISK will have higher weight in decisions than me. The current culture devalues industry and worships combat, so the one who contribute to the common victory by ISK is considered "whore" or "slave". The only way for breaking it is indeed joining the fleet in a globally sub-optimal, but at least locally optimal ship.

I see that this isn't something great. I'm seeking the answer here for the question: how can a dirty-rich trader meaningfully join a nullsec alliance neither being altruist who just gives nor just one guy in the crowd who collects billions of unused ISK while flying Drake#1532.

Since I'm tired of deleting "get experience FFS" things, let me reformulate: "imagine a pilot who is very skilled in flying any ships. He is also damn rich. What ships shall he fly?" I know I need fleet experience and without it I can't fly anything. I will get it (as soon as my logi skill is ready)


You can join trading discussions on the Goblinworks channel.
Wednesday morning report: 95.2B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
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