Skill Points

Incursion 1.0.1 has been deployed and as of last night (local time) I had some skill points for allocation, at the moment I'm still training as an Industrial and I'm slowly getting towards Cybernetics V and Mining Director V so I can use the Mining Foreman Mindlink implant I bought a while ago and have been itching to install.

Logically I should have spent my 320,000 SP on those skills but I did not, I actually spent them them on Spaceship Command and gunnery skills. Why, quite plainly as I'm an industrialist these skills have been on the back burner so the ability to get Cruiser IV, Gunnery V and a couple of other skills to level 3 mean I can at least fly larger ships and throw out a little more punch.

I don't regret it, especially as I'm now able to fly Battleships, should the need ever arise, in defense of my comrades or (when I get enough money) I can run Level 3 missions on my own with some nice firepower.

Updates

It's been a busy week or two for ZGG, we've gone from a war footing to peace, opened a new office and have made progress towards our aim of manufacturing vessels, components and ammunition.

Peace and quiet


Firstly our War Declaration was withdrawn and we were able to restart full operations. I'll admit that the WarDec wasn't great but it really didn't have an effect on ZGG operations. Perhaps it was timezones that did it but whenever we were on our "enemies" weren't and when they were on we weren't. Still being able to hit an asteroid field without constantly monitoring Local for red marks was welcomed by the whole Corporation.

Production Line

Mining operations over the last three months have meant we've built up a sizeable store of minerals (at one point we'd collected over 11million m3 of Concentrated Veldspar and 0.5million m3 of Luminous Kernite) that we can use for manufacturing.

The Corporation has also splashed out on two BPC's that will allow us to create 10 Armageddon (Battleship) and 10 Harbinger (Battlecruiser) vessels. We've already built our first Armageddon and this currently sits in our hanger at the headquarters awaiting sale or assignment.

We are aiming to sell all the Harbingers' we make as well as 7 of the 10 Armageddons we will be making. The only issues we've had is that two of the minerals needed, Megacyte and Zydrine, are both expensive and not available in high-sec locations. To make the Armageddon we had to spend 12million ISK on the Megacyte to make one Battleship, if we had to spend this on each we'd cut our profit margin by at least 25%.

Obviously we need to secure Megacyte and Zydrine by mining, and that the result of that endeavour will be the subject of a future post.

Alliances

We haven't formally entered into an Alliance with anyone but we do have a casual alliance with another corporation at the moment. We provide certain logistics and intelligence in return for protection and a "friendly" posture.

I was a little wary at first but speaking via Teamspeak to members of the other Corporation and a frank discussion with the ZGG member who arranged for it I'm actually happy with the arrangement because in addition to the agreed two-way assistance I'm learning a lot about parts of the game that I have little experience with (such as PvP ship fitting, Planetary Interaction and more)

It's funny that in two weeks so much could happen but it has, ZGG is moving on and things are looking really good... and more importantly profitable.

Incursion

The deployment of the new Incursion expansion started last night (I'm in Australia so downtime is at 10pm at the moment) and as a result downtime was longer than normal. Deployment of the Incursion expansion appears to be in three parts:

1. 30th November 2010
2. 14th December 2010
3. January 2011

for items 2. and 3. they are what I've seen reported and may be subject to change. Details of all proposed changes in Incursion can be found here.

This first deployment, CCP have dubbed this the ‘player patch’, contains a plethora of CSM/forum-inspired fixes, wants and must-haves. Not only that but the new dedicated salvage vessel the Noctis: 

Most people will already have the majority of the skills to fly the Noctis, as it only needs basic skills in salvaging, mechanics, survey and electronics. However there is a new skill that is required and that is ORE Industrial but requiring only level one means no more than 30 minutes to an hour to train this.

As with all new things getting hold of a Noctis is going to be expensive and hard, at the moment only four stations have the BPO's for the Noctis and apparently the gates to/from these locations have been heavily camped resulting in more than eighty kills so far. BPC's are available but you're looking at 800 million ISK for a 15 run copy and prices for single ready-to-buy ships range from 150 million ISK to 400 million ISK, compared to the CCP stated RRP of 10 million, the Noctis is over priced and definitely going to be the target of pirates, gankers and griefers for the very near future.

December 2010 will see the second part of the Incursion being deployed, this update sees more stuff but little information is publicly available on what this stuff is, the one thing we do know is come the release Learning skills will be removed.

As for the final update in January 2011, again not much detail but looking at the feature list here, you can see that there is a lot to come in the final update.

Incursion is coming, and it's going to be fun.