When I visited a gamma base, I made the error to active signal detector to see all buidlings at once.
This required me to kill perpetuum in task manager as the instance freezed forever (>3 mins), while my other account there was working normal on.
I consider this similar to freeze I experience on beta, when doing signal detector near a lot of npcs or explosion dmg on beta. I guess there is a lot of sync traffic between client and server in that case.

This is light ewar. I rember an old corpmate that used to support even large battles with repair Cam due to sveral reasons.
You are not forced to do ewar in these bots.

Hi Nibbles,

I understand form your post, that you are unsure about your role and goals and I want to line out, that your goals and roles are free to you, also free to modify whenever you like.
This is unconvienient for a lot player. A often set goal is to enter the bigest bot in best equipment.
This will take a lot of NIC as well as several weeks until the EP are available.
Followed by the goal beeing able to have enough NIC, to replace this bot, when you loose it .

For the mix of combat and industrie in one agent you should be clear that a agent spending no EP in financial/mining/industrie but all in combat will be faster to have maxed combat skills. But after 3 months playing, the difference between lvl6 or level 8 is quite small.
A Miner will be faster having full benefit from mining, when not spending EP in combat skills, but again, after 3 month it is not that big deal, if someone gets 10 or 20% more ore per hour, as long as you have fun playing your agent.

Nevertheless a good number of Miner/Harvester have spend some EP in "Combat assistance" which is the logical role of a Miner/Harvester, while I know some people who spend EP in their Combat char for Indu skills like Repair/Recycling to be able to earn money without having an dedicated Indu Account.

The start specialisation leading to your start skills. You get a bit less than 10k (~1week of EP) for free with these start skills as well as several NIC you need to spend when purchasing the extension later. This is the only loss, you will have, when you detected later that you start in "wrong" corp. Regardless of combat/indu/commercial or if you detect too late, that you would prefer laser instead of EM or so.

A very profitable way for a miner to join combat with someone else would be to support a fighter with an mining/harvets bot fitted with energy transfer, remote repair and remote sensor. This support bot gives the fighter a decent boost as the fighter is then able to fit fully on dmg and neglect repair/energy.

If you check corp farm actions you see usually several of these support bots, as these boost farming significant. In my opinion these supporter are more important than a bot dealing dmg for succesfull farming on challenging spots.

Since several month I experience sometimes strange lag spikes and it seemed to me, that my ISP experiences some traffic shaping in a part of the network I believe to be property of German Telecom. This issue is especially during European main time (19:00-21:00 CEST), but not limited to.

Today I see an additional effect, the routing seems to be complete different, than normal.
But still a lot variance in ping.
With Pingplotter, I never got the same max lag, than I was shown ingame, which I believe is an effect of traffic shaping, as I guess ping plotter uses different packagesize than the game

Target Name: 158.152-228-195.hosting.adatpark.hu
         IP: 195.228.152.158
  Date/Time: 30.08.2012 07:38:46 to 30.08.2012 07:47:01

Hop Sent Err PL% Min Max Avg  Host Name / [IP]
....
7    34   0 0,0  10  73  12  ae8.scr4.FRA4.gblx.net [67.16.145.241]
8    34   0 0,0  10 277  37  po4.ar2.FRA4.gblx.net [67.16.130.233]
9    34   0 0,0  26 147  30  [209.130.172.106]
10    34   0 0,0  27 123  31  [81.183.0.104]
11    34   0 0,0  26  94  28  [81.183.0.217]
12    34   0 0,0  25 124  28  [81.183.2.210]
13    34   0 0,0  27 171  31  158.152-228-195.hosting.adatpark.hu [195.228.152.158]

Actually I'm still missing the point of improvement against the actual system, that cargo load has no impact, but the weight of each equipped modules decreases the max bot speed with the lighter a bot, the more impact is given by each module.

+1 this is quite simple and easy to understand. ATM it is quite hard to plan what resources you need for production without a full fledged spread sheet even when producing only a few light bots and T1 equip (what I actually have and use, but don't like for everyday use).

I think it is ok, to need a lot of different resources for T4 equip, but a light bot like yagel should not need 7 out of 12 different raw materials with 1 plant beeing from "enemie island". That would be ok (still not ideal) for assault, but not for smallest player produced bot in game.

+1
Shutdown without consequences would be ridiculous. I would like to see a Gamma outpost beeing something that eases the defence, and avoid a light roaming group of 2-3 bots to even come near, but it has to be possible to do some damage to outposts with less than 100 HM.

Tips:

- Choose your role. The following list covers only most important roles:
* Miner/Harvester (Supply with raw materials)
* Refiner (Convert raw materials into commodities needed for production)
* Recycler (Convert loot into commodities)
* Producer (build bots/equipment/ammo using existing CTs)
* Prototyper (Do research and produce prototypes)
* Reverse Engineer (Create CTs using existing CTs, Bots, Ammo, T1 Equip)

- An agent covering all roles will be no expert even after spending 1 Mio EP. Start with focusing on only one role, although it is likely to cover more than one of the roles above after spending a time in game.

- A producer gets now benefit of research of the items he produces, but this can be neglected as beginner, as extensions will have more influence.

- The easiest role for a beginer without large corp support is Miner/Harvester.
- Refiner and Recyler can be seen as support roles that can't support you with a NIC income in their role alone. But every corp needs one of those supporters.

- Some roles require a good standing to be on maximum efficieny (e.g. refine) other benefit slighty from standing. Miner& Harvester are the only roles above that require no standing at all.

FAQ:
More Information can be found at http://wiki.perpetuum-online.com/index.php/Main_Page
A general FAQ is available at http://wiki.perpetuum-online.com/index.php/FAQ

Raw Materials:
Getting raw materials means finding a place to get them, and use time to mine/harvest.

There are two principial kinds of raw materials:
1. Organic get by harvesting plants
2. Minerals (Ores & Liquids) get by mining the surface

For each color of island (blue, green and orange) there is one ore and one plant missing, so you need to change island or trade to get all possible raw materials.
There are the following special raw materials:
Noralgis (organic) grows only on plants seeded by player, grows on every island, on beta/gamma better than on alpha.
Epitron (ore) only mineable on beta island
Colixum only mineable on gamma, needs gamma building to mine.

Finding plants to harvest:
Drive around and keep your eyes open. If you target a plant, the landmark info window shows in yellow text its name and in brackets the number of cycles to harvest.

Finding minerals:
Equip geoscanner with directional scan for the appropriate mineral. Do a scan to get the direction to the nearest mineral spot of that kind, until you are above the mineral spot (X in directional scan, or be sure by triangulation) then use tile based scan for this mineral to get a picture of tiles. Red and large are the tiles with most cycles,  dark green and small the worst spots to mine.
Attention: The accuracy of the scan result is limited and bad accuracy leads to wrong information. The tier of the geoscanner and the extensions „Basic Geochemistry“ increase the accuracy of scans as well as the bot bonus of Argano and Termis.

Area scan charges are the old system but can still be used. They say for a larger area how many percentage of ore is in. Typically you strip the island until you found spots with more than 1%. Good spots should be over 5%.

Refining Raw Materials to Commodities
The raw materials can be refinedto commodities using a Refinery.
The amount of materials needed for one commoditie depends on the Tier of the facility (T1 & T2 on alpha, better on Beta and Gamma) as well as the level of the extension refining and the standing to the terminal owner

[Edit: Standing and island to find epitron  updated to reflect changes in game]

Actually before the ore spwans got modifed, a good Epi-Field was near Initia under a random NPC-Spawn.
We did this several times as corp action, shilded Termis with some shield harder instead of tunings and at least 4 better more fighter. It went ok, but there were losses on mining bots, as they got dmg from time to time mostly if a Mech or HM explodes to near.

With the new modification that container gets dmg on beta, I consider it quite frustrating, as you could not avoid having NPCs blasting next to miner/container. A blown miner is not as bad, as a blown container after 60 mins mining of a corp.

And some spawns are with the recent modifications that hard, that I would not mine under them as corp even with 10 players available.

First thing to improve this situation would be the introduction of "Shilded container" that withstands dmg from bot exploding next to them.

Than I would _not_ stop ore spawning near NPCs in general, but prevent ore spawning under some "hard" spots.
Especially ECM and neuting is quite frustrating as miner, plated Mech and HM do too much area dmg.

I think there should still be spawns left with small bots where you could have fun as corp to allow miner getting ore next to them.

just to highlight which corp you are actually joining