This is my second post on PI here. The first one was when PI was first published in a very rudimentary form on the test server. This time I’ll just post some pointers for people who want to take a look at it on the testserver.
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The interface of the whole thing is cryptic, not very straightforward and sometimes downright annoying. But as usual with Eve’s interface, once you get the hang of it, it’s workable. Still it could be a lot better and a lot less of a click fest in my opinion. The feedback thread on the Eve-O forums has some nice suggestions, let’s hope CCP will take it seriously !
When you start out the most frustrating thing you have to do is link and route your goods to storage space and then from storage space to a factory. This is after you have put down your command center and scanned for some resources, which is all pretty straightforward.
Assuming you have an extractor and are extracting some resource you can click on the products button and this screen will come up. Also make sure you have a link to a storage facility.
After clicking the create route, select the storage facility. And you’ll see this screen.
You are still in Edit mode. Once you have pressed submit the route will be there. You don’t have to click it every time it’s up, but don’t forget to click it before you leave the planetary view mode. It’s very frustrating to have set up several routes, only to find out next time you forgot to press submit :(.
As you can see here, stuff if being moved from the extractors to the processor and back to storage again. In this case you could route things directly to the processor, as the extractors are no where near overproduction for the processor.
The problem I have at the moment is that I can hardly make anything else besides the bacteria in the above picture, I only have a bunch of raw materials.
UPDATE: I just found out you can click on the blueprint in the basic processor selection screen and pick other stuff like precious metals as well O.o.
Maybe I should move me to FD-MLJ and better stuff is seeded there ? I also took a peek in lowsec and there seemed to be more resources there, but I am not sure whether this was just a coincidence.
All in all PI is starting to look interesting, although it does feel a bit like an odd side game within a game, which doesn’t feel very much like a part of the rest of the universe. Also it’s quite a click fest when you’re going to setup six planets. And the command centers will need to be upgradeable. At the moment you need to remove everything and start over if you want to upgrade.
Just got the book this week and I am only a few chapters in. But who knew these mission agents in station had such a tough job ! Wow :).
