My self-censorship failed with the last post – it contained too much frustrated ranting on life and not enough frustrated ranting on computer games. Let’s rectify that.
EVE Online has started its latest event – the election of a new Gallente leader. Capsuleers can influence the results by doing tasks that support 1 of 3 lackluster political aspirants.
The Hi-Sec tasks generally need to be done in Gallente space – Sing Laison being the closest to me. Looking at the statistics, there was a substantial amount of suicide ganking going on. The kill reports rarely showed an economic rational, so it was mostly griefers benefiting from CCP’s artificial clustering of players together.
I decided to start with the mining task that required me to laser up 30,000m3 of a particular ore. I picked a bunch of relatively quiet systems with plenty of belts and moved a mining barge there.
It was only a couple of hours after downtime, but the first two systems I checked had been entirely stripped of the ore, and the skerricks available in the third system amounted to only 15,000m3.
I will have to consider if this is going to be fun or not.
I also spent a bit of time looking at the performance of Star Citizen.
As I remarked somewhat recently, my PC is 15 months old, running Windows 11 on an Intel i7-14700K with 32GB RAM, a pair of GeForce RTX 4060s with 6 monitors (3x4K, 3xFHD), with all executables running off performance m.2 SSDs. Every component was researched and from a good brand, the system is well cooled, and I keep the patching up to date.
4K multimonitor gaming does not always work straight out of the box, but I have almost always been able to find workarounds. For EVE Online, if I want to run two 4K clients I just need to remember to allocate each to a different video card. In Satisfactory there is one specific setting around lighting or shadows that I must change. More often I just use Desksoft’s WindowManager to move and resize windows or THS’s Lossless Scaling to get a FHD game to mostly fill up a 4K screen. That works really well for DDO.
I initially left Star Citizen to pick its own settings, which were running at low visuals on my primary monitor in full screen, at 2K resolutions upscaled. When slowly moving around in the short tutorial it seemed to be ok, but once out in a station it would work ok if I looked and moved straight ahead but was jittery any time I tried looking left or right.
As you change graphics settings Star Citizen shows you how much VRAM is required. At the default settings it required more VRAM than my 4060s have (8GB).
So, I started playing around with the graphic settings.
Unlike EVE online, setting tooltips either did not exist or were poor. To understand what settings did I generally had to google them.
When making changes to graphics settings I found the client sometimes picked up performance issues related to making changes but unrelated to the actual change. After making a string of changes the game was also prone to crashing. To test properly you had to log out and back in again between each individual change.
This highlighted that the login times for Star Citizens seem to be frustratingly slow compared to other games.
It turned out that while I could bring the game’s VRAM requirements below the 8GB I could provide, it never seemed to run ok full screen on my primary 4K monitor without it being ugly to play.
I tried changing the scaling options and using the NVidia specific settings recommended without much improvement. I also tried using Lossless Scaling instead, but it crashed my PC.
I could only get the game to run smoothly in borderless window mode at settings below 2K.
I then thought I would just run the game on one of my FHD monitors instead – but it kept forcing itself back to the primary screen which is 4K. Google searches suggested the only solution was to make one of the FHD monitors the primary screen – since Star Citizen generally runs on that. That is not an option as I do much more on my PC than just play Star Citizen.
I still must go through every setting individually – in case I find something like I did with Satisfactory which makes a big difference by itself. Reading the commentary however suggests the game is poorly optimised and requires beefy hardware.
I am still looking for a balance where the game’s visual experience and performance align to make it worth playing. I am not there yet. I still remain unimpressed.
Evehermit 
Five days after the event start and the rocks are gone 2-3 hours after downtime. You start needing 30K and it ramps to 90K m^3. I think the total you have to mine if mining is your only progession is 600K m^3+. My fully boosted Hulk using T2/A2 Crystals required 4-5 hours and that was only because I was in the belts immediately at the reset.
Protip — Your mining drones don’t count!
By comparison completing a total of 39 – level 1 missions is much easier for experienced pilots that can use a faction cruiser with T2 modules. There are a number of good systems with multiple agents where you can get 3 or 4 missions at once.
Thank you for the tips. I find most of the rewards seem poor until towards the end. If I don’t feel like I am going to get that far, it leaves you unmotivated to even start.
Well the motivation does come at the end. The campaign bus is selling for 250M isk as of this post. I ran the event on my combat main and utility main. Total favor gained was 900, total presidential favors was 4. The 900 favor was sold directly on the market for 800M and I used the 4 Pres favors to get the scanning officer module which sold for 850M. The Pres favors would have sold directly for about 750M total.
I did the mining for 1/2 of the points for my indy character … minimal ISK, lots of time.
I did the missions for 1/2 the points on the combat main and the other 1/2 of the indy main’s points. This was also very minimal ISK but an ok bump to Gallente standings with some ISK for the story missions.
I did the scanning in null sec for the second half of the combat main character points — this was very lucrative. It required 3/4/5/6/7 sites (25 total) and I ended up with about 10 of the drone data items per site. These sell for 1M each so that added another 250M to the event rewards plus random loot as I worked in the relic/data sites mixed in with the drone data sites.
All in all I ended up over 2B+ ISK for the event. Along with the daily rewards which will continue it’s a pretty good chuck of ISK.
If the mining gets less used as the event goes on I will probably take (2) of my much lower SP alts and run them through the missions and mining just to generate that favor/P favor. It is the highest ISK per hour I can ever get for that kind of content.