R&D agents, the carebear ranch, and PvP.

Unfortunately my planet side schedule has still been busy with family fun in the sun and some new habitat module shopping. Which means the old habitat is being primed for repackaging and sale. This creates a ton of extra production runs and research jobs for me in the real world. So as a result EVE time is limited.

In game I recently started into T2 production with all its skills and exciting new materials and sub components. Inventing this and that also has some costs to it and offsetting those costs with R&D agents has become a perfect use of my current drive by gaming schedule.

The concept of R&D is simple enough. You find a friendly NPC corporation with R&D agents. You train to the same level skill as the research available for that agent. Then you start to research with that agent earning so many RP a day based on the quality of that agent. To add some sugar once a day you get to run a quick mission for that agent to get twice the RP for that day. Simple stuff and even a level 2 Quality 0 agent can see you with 1-2 datacores a day with 10 minutes invested time.

Yet I find myself biting into a rotten raisin in my R&D agent cookies people. See the part about a “friendly NPC corporation” brings a little more to bear on the types of research you can do with the agent. They are limited to about 2-3 skills or areas of research. These areas are dramatically affected by the race of the agent and the factions they are bed buddies with. Meaning that if the minmartar centric NPC corporations are none so fond of my work with the Caldari Navy I can kiss goodbye any free rocket science datacores. That is unless I am willing to grind level 1 missions to win back there love. So yes it pisses me off that the R&D agent system is a rotting pool of racism!

Even with this things are picking up speed. The 1MN AB II has been a good success for the carebear ranch folks. The profits are good and zombi’s box of goodies waiting for the jump Freighter to null is healthy. The next batches of BPCs out of the copy house are rifters and kestrels which soon will be invented into wolf/jaguars and Manticore. This is good as Zombi will be able to fly them both shortly AND the R&D agents I do have can help with the starship datacores for the stealth bombers.

Sadly PvP is suffering badly at the hands of my current real life schedule. I’ve contemplated lowsec solo roams to keep things moving, but honestly by the time I jump back to empire, pod over to my nearest cache of fitted hulls, and warp to lowsec life tears me away. To make matters worse my bloody learning implants made the run to null with me. So unless I want to waste days or buy another set of learning implants. The best thing for Zombi right now is to warm a bench and read his books on PEW PEW.

Cheers

EVE SOB