Making ISK - Part 1

  Making ISK is your next task. There are many different ways of doing this, and how you do it will be determined by what you and your corporations’ vision are. If you’re going to be PvP’ers, I will be up front and honest about the fact that this is not something I am all that familiar with, but will do my best to convey what I think could possibly help you. If I am way off, maybe someone will comment as to what would be better.

  You must realize as with any venture, your ability to have patience and to learn to walk before you can run is very important. Trying to do more than your able to do, over extending yourself, and flying something you can’t afford to replace can set you back, and cause you to start over from the beginning. To avoid doing this, have a plan in mind, take it step by step, and work towards the end result while taking care of any problems that may arise. It may sound like common sense, and an easy task, but you will be surprised at some of the things that my pop up as you try to build your corporation.

  Starting with the industrial route may be the best way to go, you can get started fairly easy, and you don’t need a lot of skills or ships to start turning out the ISK.  I would recommend that at least one person in your Corporation has good refining skills, if not, have someone working that angle since it will benefit you greatly. The easiest way to start making ISK is to go out and mine ore. Once you have a good amount of it you can try selling it on the market, but better yet refining the ore and selling the minerals will make you a little more ISK. We started out that way. We would mine hundreds of thousands of ore, refine it down and sell it in Jita. We did this for months, and every time we went to Jita the Corporation wallet grew.  You have to also provide some incentive to your miners. You can’t assume that they are going to just give you their ore without some form of payment themselves. What we did was to provide corporate contracts for their ore at 6.5% below Jita buy price. Granted it was less than if they took it to Jita themselves, but they had no need to refine or haul their product, all they had to do was mine the ore, sell it to the corporation and go back to mining, easy money for them, and the corporation took care of the rest. This is where patience takes over, do not get to the point that you think you have to move forward before your ready, set yourself a goal of a certain amount of ISK. Once you meet this goal, go on to your next step. We did this when we were planning on building a jump freighter. Our goal was to build three freighters and sell them before building the fourth that would be used in the production of the actual jump freighter itself. This allowed us to accumulate enough ISK to afford some researched blueprint originals, and the T2 materials to start building it.

  Starting out trying to make ISK through PvP, or mission running is another animal altogether and requires a totally different approach. I myself consider mission running as a prelude to PvP, the ship fittings are different, but you are moving in the direction of ship to ship combat instead of mining asteroid belts. This is if you run security missions. There are different types of missions, but running mining missions, for anything other than reputation is worthless in my eyes, you could mine more ore, and make more ISK just hitting the belts on your own. There are numerous agents and types of missions available. The chart below gives you some idea of what you can expect from certain agents in game.

   

Division Courier Kill Mining Trade Accounting 90% 10%   Administration 50% 50%   Advisory 66% 34%   Archives 90% 5% 5% Astrosurveying 30% 40% 25% 5% Command 3% 97%   Distribution 95% 5%   Finance       Intelligence 15% 85%   Internal Security 5% 95%   Legal 50% 50%   Manufacturing 95% 5%   Marketing 95% 5%   Mining   10% 85% Personnel       Production 95% 5%   Public Relations 66% 34%   R&D 50% 50% Security 5% 90% 5% Storage 95% 5%   Surveillance 5% 95%

  

Courier missions
Ship one or more items from one station to another.
The agent level defines only the maximum cargo space needed and does not influence the minimum. (IE you can usually run any lvl1 courier mission on a frigate, while lvl3 missions can require from 0.1m3 to a full industrial ship cargo space)

Kill missions
Fight against one or more enemy ships.
The level of the agent influences the number and hardness of your enemies. Be careful when trying an higher level agent for the first times, you might be surprised to notice how harder each level is from the previous one.

Mining missions
Need to deliver a certain amount of ore or minerals to your agent.
The choice of buying or mining what you have to deliver is up to you.

Trade missions
Need to deliver a specific item to your agent.
Trade missions usually costs money since you have to buy what your agent is looking for (you can naturally sacrifice an item in one of your hangars if you already have it) but the cost is usually repaid by good agent rewards and higher standing gains.

  I will end part 1 here, and pick up next time about locations, and where your corporation would be best to set up their headquarters.