EVE Incursion: Changes to Planetary Interaction

The new EVE expansion, termed "Incursion", is set to be released in November of this year. Aside from improvements to the player's character avatars, changes are coming to the Planetary Interaction aspect of the game.


Quoting CCP Omen:

• Upgradable Command Centers will allow players to increase and decrease the CPU/Power capabilities of their colony without having to tear it all down (existing undeployed command centers will be migrated to the new system).

• Only the first Command Center must be bought and hauled in space, after that there is no longer a need to haul command centers in order to upgrade

• Surveying has been radically revamped and will allow players to create extraction programs that span anything from an hour to 14 days!

• Extractors can now be moved when in program creation mode

Read the full devblog here


In my opinion, the ability to upgrade the command centers without having to tear down several million ISK worth of other structures is the most important improvement to planetary interaction. It makes it much easier to attempt planetary interaction while you are still in the process of learning skills or if you want to scale up your resource extraction due to market demand/etc.

Allowing the extractors to be moved around is an interesting feature that should allow sacrificing some CPU/Power for gains in harvesting yields once the resources inevitably run dry in the immediate area. This once again should save the player from having to dear down the colony in order to relocate elsewhere on the planet.

Only having to haul the first command center is big benefit for those who extract their resources on planets in 0.0 or WH space (or even low-sec for that matter). This should serve as an incentive for more competition. Competition inevitably drives the prices down, but such is the nature of the market.

The 14-day extraction program also sounds like a great idea for passive income. Just click and forget about it, letting the commodity accumulate. But just like in the case of the current 96-hour program, it is likely to come with severe reduction in yield per cycle coupled to the total yield..

Overall, these are much needed improvements to the current mechanics of Planetary Interaction that should streamline installation and maintenance of your colony.