Incursions: Planetary Interaction Changes

So I used the handy dany SISI launcher tool CCP has created and quickly set myself up with a test environment to get on Singularity and try out the new character creator and the new Planetary Interaction over the Christmas break. Today I'm going to cover the PI changes and tomorrow I'll have a post on the new character creator.

The first thing I noticed upon investigating my colonies is that the old extractors were there but were now called "Obsolete Extractors" with only one available operation: Decommission. Well that's obvious.So I deleted them and their links and set about putting a new Master Extractor in play.

There are a few things to note. When you are placing the master extractor, you see a very large shaded area around it. This represents the space in which the extractor heads can be deployed within. Its very large and as far as I can tell the distance of the extractor head from the master extractor has no cost, so feel free to keep the master extractor closer to the launch pad to save on the link costs between the two.

Secondly, once its placed you can survey and pick a resource from the left side of the Surveying Program window that comes up and the density scan comes up on the planet surface to help you place the extractor heads. Each master extractor can support up to ten heads within the limits of your available power grid and CPU of the command centre. To activate a head, click on one of the free blue buttons on the right side of the survery program and it appears randomly on the map. Now move it.

Here's where things get tricky and is not obvious from the interface. The size of the extractor head correlates directly with the running time of the program. What this means is that if you want a 23 hour program time, you need to adjust the size of the extractor head using the painfully shitty slider bar on the bottom left of the Surveying Program. Do this before selecting and placing many heads because when the extraction area of a head overlaps the amount each one returns diminishes! Get the first head sized to the program length you want, and then place other heads with minimum overlap.

As you are placing the heads, you can see the Surveying Program showing the expected return of resources over the time of the program. As well, each head has a value beside it which goes up or down depending on the amount of resources it extracts. Try to maximize the values without overlapping. Note: make sure your master extractor is off the resource you are extracting to avoid getting it in the way! I made that mistake once.

Here is a second colony with the master extractor off the resource hot spot:

I found that I could replace 5-6 old Extractors with three extractor heads, but I needed to upgrade the link from the master extractor to the launch pad in the process. My initial 23 hour results in comparison can be seen in this chart:



My initial efforts are almost always less than before, but I would like some more chances to optimize and see if I can squeeze another extractor head in.

Now some more details:
- The program running time can be customized to any 15 minute increment from 15 minutes to over 4 days, perhaps longer. I used 23 hours in my chart above as comparison, but it could have been 23 hours and 15 minutes, or 22 hours and 45 minutes, etc. Since you get diminishing returns over time of the program, you get more resources by shorter run times and resetting.

- The reset of the operation after a program is done is simply done by having the master extractor resurvey and then clicking "Install program". No need to reconfigure extractor heads as far as I can tell. This is a potential huge time saver.

- Upgrading Command Centres in place is really nice.