Thursday, September 26, 2013

Rubicon: Quick and Dirty Speculation

Jumping the bandwagon on this one, I figured it's worth trying some "shoot from the hip" predictions.  I didn't get to watch, so my info is second source.  Going to pinpoint my predictions in T2, I'll let others speculate about the surrounding metas.

The Obvious

Marauders: winners

This isn't exactly news, but some of the features are getting ironed out.  I think the new meta around Bastion are neat, but the hull is still expensive.  I see <40 man gangs adding this to their roster, but not the big nullsec brawls.  They are just too adaptive for the epic-space-battle meta, and their cost is almost 2x that of other standard doctrines.  I am adding the capability to do marauders to my production lines, but I have yet to see the market wind up in excitement.

Interceptors/EAF's: big winners

With interceptors getting bubble immunity and EAF's getting boosted to look like their big-brother counterparts, both these ships will be in MUCH larger rotation.  Pair that with the proposed warp-acceleration change, and I think we're poised to see these ships really come back into the fold.  I worry about the T1/T2 balance in this case, but I am very happy to see more T2 hulls come back into vogue.

Recons: Losers

With EAF's getting such a generous boost, I see recon use dropping off sharply.  Without a buff to effectiveness or EHP, it looks like we'll be seeing even less recons than today.  Simply put, if an EAF costs 1/3rd the cost of a Recon and gives 80-85% of the effectiveness, I can't see the need to put the extra money down for a Recon.  

Dictors: Winners

With the warp-acceleration change, these stand to become much more mobile.  For losing out on interceptors, and gaining that weakness, they stand to become more versatile in leapfrogging your opponent in a chase.  Also, murmurs are that the added warp maneuverability is going to lay some pretty strong blows to capital/supercapital deployment.  

Hictors: Winners?

I want to believe that hictor + cyno jammer = elite supercapital hunting force.  It's rumored to be getting a warp-acceleration boost above its cruiser counterparts and will be far-and-away faster than its prey... but I'm conflicted.  I wonder if the EAF > Recon problem of ISK/utility will be mirrored in Dictors > Hictors.  Hictor volume is pretty critically low at the moment, so I think the only option is to go up from here, but I won't be rushing to the factory to churn a big pile of them.

Not So Obvious

Moon Goo

I'm wishy-washy on this prediction, but the Siphon Unit stands to change the moon goo game.  On one hand, this will wrestle the ability and effectiveness of stockpiling from people trying to artificially constrict supply, applying downward pressure.  It also has the ability to lower net supplies by a small margin, adding some upward pressure to the price of business.  Odds are it's a wash.

The Siphon Unit does look to interrupt any point in the moon goo reaction tree though: extraction, simple reaction, complex reaction.  Which makes the whole picture even more foggy.  It definitely puts the brakes on my moon reaction farming plans, since the bar to harass my operation in low-sec is pretty low.  I keep flip flopping... stay tuned.

Third, with so many T2 hulls getting love between Odyssey 1.1 and Rubicon release, I think we stand to see some interesting shifts in the moon goo market regardless.  As consumption picks back up going into winter, I think this will be the biggest net driver of prices, and I believe that pressure will be up.  I don't think many of the biggest surges and bottlenecks will emerge until January 2014, but between T2 hull consumption increasing and the Siphon Unit we'll see moons come back to being a conflict pivot point.

PI

With POCO coming to high sec, and CONCORD turning a blind-eye to defending those resources, I think this will push the price of PI products up.  With HS carebears being squeezed on getting their low-margin products off planet, this has the opportunity to swing products pretty significantly.  There are also A LOT of planets, and if CONCORD is not intervening, this could be noisy to start and die down when the new stable medium is found.


Remember your First Rule of EVE before speculating on my opinion, but I figured it was a good chance to put some words down to check later.

4 comments:

mynnna said...

Recons will be getting their buffs soon enough, of course.

My personal opinion with respect to moon goo is that it'll be an overall rise in prices if siphoning is popular enough. Anyone can take from the siphoning units, the siphoning units could be destroyed, the ships recovering goo from the siphoning units could be destroyed, etc. Raw moon goo is currently very rarely destroyed, so it's a lot of new places for that to happen. And even if it does make it to market eventually, it's still a disruption in the flow of supply.

Unknown said...

I am leaning towards agreeing. But I think the effect of additional consumption by more popular T2 hulls will outstrip the effects of siphoning.

Of course, I am speculating off VERY LITTLE, but I am very interested to know the exact statistics/rules/uses for the siphon units before I am willing to make more serious predictions.

Quixilva said...

I'm really curious about the high-sec POCO changes too. The real money in high-sec PI is in T4 factory planets. If you know what you're doing you can make about 2-5 Misk per planet per day 1 jump from Jita, and with about half that again going out in taxes.

Allowing all COs to be player controlled really harms the independent and small PI players, while allowing the big players to not only make money off taxing the small guys, but also run tax-free T4 production. The saving grace might be that there are a lot of planets out there.

Of course I'd argue that for whatever reason, the profits from PI are way to biased in favour of the more advanced products at the moment. It is much more efficient to buy T1, T2 and even some T3 products off the market than actually go to the trouble of setting up the different planets that you need to produce them.

Fengrar said...

What I am curious about concerning the Poco is if CCP is going to institute a cap on the high sec tax % to prevent the planet goo from spiking in price wildly.

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