Trading Performance: Battlecruisers


Given the shakeup coming with the tiericide effort, Armor tanking, and the sweeping changes coming this summer, I feel comfortable disclosing performance numbers for production and trade involving popular Battlecruisers hulls.



The Drake and Hurricane market has been and continues to be a very competitive market. I contribute this to a few factors.

First there are many industrial people that will not consider the time it takes for them to mine minerals; remember that time is money and the hours that you spend slaving away staring at a rock for a few million an hour could be better spent doing more lucrative activities. Note that this point is not isolated to these hulls and is a common error in production logic for new industrialists.

The PVP and PVE proficiency of the Drake makes it a very popular ship. There will always be a large draw for industry people to focus on this hull, making for high competition.

Lastly, given the time that these two ships have been in the game, many industrialists have these BPOs researched to high levels and have had them for many years.

My production and trade focus shifted off of the Drake and Hurricane when the Tier 3 Battlecruisers were introduced as I saw a high demand for them in the PVP arena.

As you can see the trading performance below, they have proven to be far more profitable on average than their older counterparts.



Make Naga, Oracle, Talos, and Tornado hulls not Drake and Hurricane ones.

How to Profit from New Ships

New items in game, especially ships, produce a huge market opportunity if you can stage and plan out your production properly. Here are some pointers on how to make a lot of ISK.

1. Get on the test server as soon as possible to lookup the BPO requirements. This workup on the unresearched BPO shows that the build cost is about 43.6 M per Tornado.

2. Stockpile minerals in a location close to Jita that has open Manufacturing slots.

3. Before the expansion comes out, have a freighter or Shuttle character in a NPC station where the BPO will be seeded.

4. After the expansion has been deployed and you are back  in the game, buy the BPOs and burn to your production system.

5. Build a few BCs with the unresearched BPOs and get the ships to market. Here is a screenshot of the Tornado market about 6 hours after they were seeded on the market.

Despite the markup, they were moving. People were making a 170M+ profit on each Tornado because the demand was so high.

6. After the market has become competitive, place your BPOs in research and start the ME grind in order to stay competitive.

November Financial Report

Following the trend of EVE-fail, I am going to continue releasing monthly financial reports.

November saw a resurgence of trading as the anticipation of Crucible brought me back into the game. With all the PI changes, there were ample opportunities to turn a profit. The change over to Player Owned Offices meant a tax barrier and therefore an increase to PI goods. Now that PI goods are involved in many production chains (POS’es, POS modules, T2 components), there has been an increase across the board.

New to the net value charts is the inclusion of Corp assets as I have taken the CEO role and put a lot of ISK into our ventures.

Here is a sneak-peak at my top trading groups. As you can see Implants far outweigh the other items. When a person goes to replace their implants, you are not only selling 1 implant, but 4 or maybe 5, as people will replace the entire set.

I have not tested the market with Skill Hardwiring implants but now that they are visible on killmails, I may have to parse what ones are popular. Expansions always bring new trading opportunities, you just have to look for them. I might write something to scrape killmails and give me a report on what are the top 10 by volume per month.

There was a large growth in November compared to October due to a renewed effort into trading. I expect that December will be a good month as the introduction of the new Tier 3 Battlecruisers opens up many avenues. They are going to be popular and will die quickly.