Perpetuum. Its setting is a far away planet inhabited by robots

[Draegan]

I kinda wished I started an industry bot.  Running around killing things isn't fun playing solo.  At least with industry you're making things.

[Ghambit]

Yah, the crafting premise is kinda neat.  I sell every cube and fragment I find right now though, since I dont build... make beaucoup NIC that way.

Getting an industry bot isnt really the probem inasmuch as getting the EP needed.  I'm a corporate soldier, so any indy and engi. stuff is weak for me.  'Spose I could roll another toon though.

Anyways, I'm stuck working a few days so I probably wont be back ingame until tomorrow night.

And honestly, the game is interesting to check out.  But, the "fun" right now doesnt exist beyond the newness of it due to lack of population and a few other things not turned on yet.

[Stabs]

Finding it somewhat hard to get started with industry. I did a combat mission to get enough isk to buy mining ammo and got rather sidetracked, upgraded my guns to some lasers I found bought 400 ammo for them (blowing all the cash I'd got for completing a mission) then the server crashed while I was fighting and I woke up in the clone bay minus my lovely laser-armed bot with its cargo of laser beams.

Will give it another go tonight and this time focus on survey missions.

I'm still puzzled as to how to actually make something. I guess it's to do with those little black balls - I have to scrunch a load of them, right?

[Draegan]

My in game char is Rambrant.  If you see me online I'll give you a few 100k.

[Stabs]

Thanks for the offer but I think it's more useful testing if I struggle on without donations. I'd like to be able to write a reasonable summary of what it's like to start out as an industrialist. I think they need to change it if they want a reasonable retention rate.

[Shatter]

Figures, the last few weeks been itching for something new and Aion's 1.9 patch comes out tomorrow finally.  Naturally today I get a beta invite to this lol

[Draegan]

They were saying unofficially that they are targeting the end of the month for open beta.  But the DEVs/GMs were just guessing at this point.

[Shatter]

Just to clarify, this isnt under NDA is it?  I didnt see anything on their site and the forums are public so Im guessing it is not?

[Draegan]

I didn't sign an NDA.  I downloaded and installed the client before being accepted.

[Cadaverine]

Re: industrialists.  The way to easy money is the transport quests.  There is one for ICS Alpha, one for Trund Murchan(or whatever it's called), and one for AscinTech(or whatever it's called).  18k NIC to deliver one doodad to one of the other 2 places.  Just a bit away from each building is a teleporter that takes you just a bit outside the one you need to go to.  You can run them in a circle, essentially.  Boring as all hell, but I made 400k in pretty short order.

As for the drone kernels, you gather them up, and research them.  This basically allows you to build single items at any time, but for more resources.  You can also reverse engineer items to create a blueprint called a CT.  With the CT, you can basically set up a production run.

I'm at work, so I'm off on the names.  I'll update it or whatever once I get home.  If you have any specific questions, just shoot me a mail in game.  My indie character is Brujah.

[Ghambit]

In order to make ANYTHING, you're required to reverse engineer the item you want along with obtaining the necessary knowledge through Kernels and supplying the decoder.  Once that's done, you have your blueprints.  Then do your prod. run with mats.

The key here is the decoder, 'cause if you use a higher lvl one than required you get nifty bonuses.  (I made +1 ammo this way)

You can also prototype if you dont have all that stuff available.  But, it's a ludicrous amount of mats.

Btw, transport runs are better done with a stripped down starter bot. and a lightweight frame module.  You'll go 80+ kph.  There's a stealth bot. you can buy also that STARTS at like 70+ kph... once you get the coin.  This is assuming the cargo will fit - most of the time it'd require more than one run even with an indy.

I'm finding that the game definitely caters to those who are willing to experiment with their builds and min-max a bit.  You really cant get by with anything "vanilla."  You have to work some.

[Cadaverine]

In order to make ANYTHING, you're required to reverse engineer the item you want along with obtaining the necessary knowledge through Kernels and supplying the decoder.  Once that's done, you have your blueprints.  Then do your prod. run with mats.

Yes, and no.  If you want to do a production run, then yes, you need to get a decoder, and reverse engineer the item to make a CT, which can then be used to make multiple items, though the CT degrades over time, and thus the end product becomes lower quality, I guess.  I am in the process of trying this right now, so I'll know in just under 2 hours what the specifics are.

There is a second option, which is the Prototype facility.  This allows you to build a one shot item, from whatever items you've learned from researching kernels.  However, it costs more materials, as well as NIC, and probably takes longer per unit than a Factory run.  However, from the help files, you need some extra stuff for a Factory run vs a Prototype.  Namely alien fragments, and a previous generation version of the item.  This might be old info, however.  Once my CT for the Standard Light Autocannon finishes, I'll be able to tell what all I need to have to make a run of them vs the prototype, and so on.

Edit:  To make a Standard Light Autocannon in the Prototype facility would run me 4307 titanium, 1077 plastioscene, and 538 phlobotil.  Also 99k NIC, and takes  a hair over 9 hours to make.  This is just with a starter character with almost all Industrial choices made during creation

[Cadaverine]

Ok, Factory run with Std Light Autocannon.  I have a max of 2 that I can make from the 1 CT.  Total time for the 2 is 3 hours, 57 mins.  42, 708 NIC, and 100 titanium, 384 plasteosine, and 192 phlobotil.  No weird alien artifacts, or previous gen autocannons needed.

So that'd be your different crafting options.

[tgr]

What's with the prototype? Will it be a sort of investment for you to make subsequent runs cheaper?

[Modern Angel]

Wow, when it's referred to as an EVE-alike they're not kidding.

[Ghambit]

What's with the prototype? Will it be a sort of investment for you to make subsequent runs cheaper?

I'm assuming if you dont actually find an existing model to make a CT from, you can just prototype one and then reverse engineer it for a production run.

Wow, when it's referred to as an EVE-alike they're not kidding.

Yah, at its core it's pretty much Eve.  Beyond that, it's its own game.
Interestingly, I betaed Eve and this game is going through much of the same growing pains (the learning curves, borked player markets, lack of meaningful pvp, useless stats, etc.).  It's tough to really put your finger on a future for something like this because the game relies so much on player input.  Not only that, but just like Eve in the beginning, not everything is working or turned on...  really just the perfection of a "template" for now.

For me, I just want my own outpost, terraformable terrain, and FvF or corp. ownership of territory... and I'll be happy.  Especially the terraforming, where there's a synergy with bot design, since only certain bots can traverse certain types of terrain.  You could essentially create an outpost only reachable by small Arkhes, so impervious to large assaults.  Or, create chokepoints and so on.

I walked to the edge of the planet the other day btw.  Needless to say, for an 80kph bot it's not very far, largely due to the transport stations.  When you account for the way the islands are built though, the land area is vast and you could see the 1 world sandbox potential.  I wanna say the scale feels like Planetside.

[Draegan]

I havn't played much in the last few days.  But right now there isn't much to do for me other than gain EPs and make money for future upgrades.  I'm now reaching for my assault mech, the work on my missile damage/reload time.

I like the idea of industry, outposts, and terraforming.  I look forward to that potential.

[Ghambit]

Yah, that's the crux of it right now.  "Not much to do" besides make NIC and EP.
Same deal with Eve really until you organize ops with your corp.

One more thing I'm fuzzy on though is if they're gonna have any kind of instanced missions or at least large respawning "boss"-drones at some point.  That's one thing in Eve that empire-people at least had an option to do if they didnt want any part of the 0.0 space wankery.  Also, upon walking around I noticed there really is a serious lack of buildings and such around.  For a mechanized-bot game, you'd think there'd be a lot of non-organic junk layin around.

Right now, it's like these bots are just wandering around aimlessly.

[Modern Angel]

At its core, nothing. I was referring to the fact that the UI is an exact replica of EVE's. Same font, same color boxes, everything. It was weird.

[Stabs]

Gave up on starting as a pure industrialist after failing a courier mission. I'd managed to turn off all the placenames so I was hopelessly unable to navigate. Also I wasn't able to see the whole map, even at maximum zoom. Eventually I discovered that to see the whole map you need to both max zoom and drag the map size out to fill most of your screen. By the time I'd sorted all that out I'd wasted so much time that I failed the humble newbie fedex as I made my second trip (because 2 floppy disks are bigger than my cargohold - who knew?).

I'm playing an alt called Starve now. I've applied to the corp and spent a fun couple of hours shooting things. Shooting stuff is very enjoyable after the headache of trying to start an industrialist.

I'll use my original character as an ammo reseller. The market is seeded with infinite sell orders for the basic equipment and with infinite buy orders at 4 times the sell price. Newbie combat people pick up ammo for the wrong weapon type so there should be lots of missile users selling laser charges and laser users selling bullets. Time for a little 0.01 isk undercutting

[Draegan]

I can ride mechs now.  I just need 5 million to buy one.  Ho-hum.

[schpain]

got an invite to closed beta - anyone playing in this?

[Ratman_tf]

Hay, man. Looks like this beast launched. Anyone try it out? They've got a 15 day trial.

I have to go beddie-bye. Might give it a peek tomorrow.

[ezrast]

Huh, I was trying to remember the name of this just a week or two ago. Should be fun to see how far it's come, if I get around to it.

[01101010]

Free trial? Don't mind if I do... Little leery on the 300k client file opening to a ~430meg download? Will see...

[Ratman_tf]

Wow. It is Eve with robots. Not that I didn't believe anyone, but goddamn.

I'm... wondering what makes this more appealing than Eve, if I were to decide to pay teh moneys.

[Ratman_tf]

I got bored with it after one session. No interest in firing it up again.

[Pennilenko]

Im playing it, but mainly because I was snatched up immediately into a pretty active corp. They have been helpful with bots and info and ammo, and organized hunting parties. The big NIC is taking four or five guys in light bots and camping a t3 spawn. Made like a million NIC in less than an hour. This scratches my EVE type itch for five less bucks a month and I don't have to subscribe to eve...

[Draegan]

THe mining system was pretty fun when I played about a year ago.  However it just turned into running around a bunch of ugly looking terrain.

At least space environments are cheap to make.

[Ratman_tf]

Mining is what I tried first, since I dig tradeskilling type stuff.

After farting around for a while, I kind of figured out that there's 3 different things to do before you can pull up ore, and then you make the thing go wuzzle wuzzle to dig it up, and then the ore node ran out... I think, and I couldn't get anymore ore from any of the other nodes. I don't know why. At that point, I could have tried to take my ore to "town" and sold it, and tried the combat tutorial, but I was too confused by the mining, and knew it would be Eve style combat, and said "Fuck it, Starcraft!"

I dunno what they're trying to accomplish with the game, but I really think that making it as obscure as Eve is really unnecessary. There's got to be a simpler way to accomplish whatever it is they're trying to do.

[ezrast]

I made a character and chose all of the economic options.

Trial accounts can't see other players' market listings.

Guess I'll try a pew pew character instead.

[Xanthippe]

Massively has an article stating that this game is gaining many disgruntled Eve players, so many that it is experiencing server load issues.

Where is the f13 place to read disgruntled Eve players on CCP's foray into megatransactions?  (I looked in the Eve thread but saw little disgruntlement).

[Kitsune]

The Incarna thread in the Eve subforum is the most up to date about the current clusterfuck situation.

[Tyrnan]

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=20841.msg943894#msg943894

That would be the start of the failcascade I think

[Xanthippe]

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for.  I started reading the thread but my eyes too quickly glazed over, I guess.