843 Epidemic wrote: Decrease the ISK cost, increase clone count.
25 million ISK for 150 clones.
If it isn't too difficult, a system in place where the more districts you have the more a clone pack costs wouldn't be so bad, either.
I'll post what I put in the main sticky.
Kain Spero wrote:
A shift to active ISK generation is long overdue. As is a shift from a top down payments to a bottom up approach by utilizing increased biomass payouts. The increase in clone pack price would only need to be relative to the increase in size, so for every 10 clones to the pack you added the price would go up by 3 million ISK. That is unless their needs to be an increase in cost due to an increase in biomass payments. The balance always has to lean towards not allowing corps to self-attack with clone packs, destroy the clone pack, and as a result farm isk or lock out their district at a low cost. Also, corporations have been wasting far more ISK on clone packs that have a high probability of failure.
There is another side benefit to raising biomass payments. ISK generation shifting to biomass makes it possible to recoup costs much more quickly for breaking into PC. A team that consistently wins their battles can clone pack and take a districts and then proceed to use that district to attack others.
In the current system say you decided to take out a Cargo Hub. It would take three crappy clone packs ,that are too few clones to really win with anyways, so expect it to take more then 3 at best to take the district. This would result in an upfront cost of 108 million ISK plus whatever costs there are associated with fighting. You would likely land on the district with 100 clones or less, so you then have to spend at least 5 days just to fill up the district. You would then have to hold the district (without attacking or being attacked) for 2 weeks in order to barely get past breaking even.
With the scenario changed to biomass being the primary income source you would need to spend 5 days defending your district from likely counter attacks because you just kicked someone's teeth in. These attacks, because of the increase biomass payment, already start to fill your coffers as you win your fights. Once you hit 5 days of regen (or sooner if you decide to be bold) you can launch an attack with minimum cost and destroy an enemies clones for a significant profit. If you send a large attack (which owning a district enables you to do) you could even wipe out another district in one go. When you wipe out that district you will likely hit ISK positive if you have been defending from other attacks and payment from clones lost in battle as well. As you see with the changes a corp has gone from an ideal scenario of recouping their investment in almost three weeks to potentially less than 1 week. Nothing changes the fact that in order to be profitable you must win your fights.