TL 150 Research Missions

[Lucas Kell]

It also takes a (almost) capped resser and a ~1mil tool. And hopefully 2-3 ressearch chips like a ~2mil SS or ~2mil TH CPU. Now add to that your 500k value for empty cubes and substance.

Leaving facts out of the equation again arn't we Kell ?

Over and over you completely disregard the main requirement for making TL150's, which is the char and and the imps and the tool. That alone is a 20-25 hrs playing to get the XP (without cubes, remember you can't make them ?) and then saving up to for the chips and also SS CPU can be quite rare and not always available for purchase.

The underlying problem I see here is that he (OP) probably only bought the cubes from someone dumb enough to sell them under market price because they're either dumb or because they're dumb.
My cubes are precious to me, highly valuable good that are worth a lot for the XP for the starter chars, it's true. This is why I don't sell them.



Selling cubes at under market price is the problem.



As for OP, if you think cubes are easy to make, you havn't ever made them thats for sure.

I suggest you just go ahead and make one. Make a spy from scratch and lv it however you want and spec the necessary 225 ressearch points and buy a tool and make a few 249 stacks.

Then come back and tell us how you feel about TL150's.

Sigh... how many times do we need to cover this. I have been back only a few weeks. I already have a resser that can do this and 3 spies that are of a high enough level they could do it. You only need about 70 base INT to get started, You don't need the SS or the Hawkins chip, Just a TH CPU (which is easy to get as its an epic reward). You also can make enough of of TL 90 missions to buy your tool (which is 600k, even less if you ask Rosalia to get you one) and can then immediately start raking in funds.

Just to be clear - It does not take 225 res to start doing these. It take around 200 res, and you can use buffs or drugs to lower that even further. Once you are doing them, you get 50k INT XP per cube, so it doesn't take long to level up. As for making a spy to do it, due to the double res, it took me less than 8 hours to turn a droner from new to PA. He could easily be lommed over and start producing cubes. If I didn't already have a resser I'd consider it.

I am not guessing on making stuff up when I'm saying this. I actually have done this. I'm not saying there are not things you have to do to get this I'm saying in comparison with ALL OTHER FORMS OF INCOME it's got a ridiculously high profit margin. I mean even compare it to construction. It will cost around the same in grease, except that really does take over a million for the tool, you also cant just keep trying through fails, as a fail will likely destroy the cube meaning you have to drop and retake the mission. You also can't preemptively create a 249 stack of construction mission items. Then at the end of it you get half the reward.

You are exaggerating how much time and cash goes into this, as you are afraid they will take this away and you won't be able to make huge volumes of cash. That's all that your raging trolling boils down to.

Edit: Just to add, 1.5m - 1.7m is Market Price. Most ressers sell them for that at the moment. You may not agree and by all means keep yours to yourself, but that's the way the market is. It's probably that way because a lot of people manually making them are running a second PC, so running the mission themselves means they can't play their mains at the same time. Sitting at a factory, clicking once a minute or so they can still play their main chars on a second box.

Even at the cap, the failure rate of researching the TL 150 cubes is around 33%. Of that, 33% of those are critical failures where the cube is destroyed (ok, yeah, cube cost is trivial). I remember the discussion back in the day and the resulting change to the research mission system - this is the reason for the really high return on investment for the TL 150 missions. It helps to recover the cost of the research lube that you chew through in doing this. Of course, regardless of having a barterer or not, the 30k still way more than covers it.

And for the record, research missions DID used to be random. Each mission would always ask for 3BPs from a pool of 3 predetermined items for each mission TL level. For example, a TL 40 research mission would always ask for 3BPs of either implant xyz 2, implant abc 2, or implant def 2. You wouldn't know which one until you took the mission, and it was random. So you used to have to research stacks of these three items more or less equally. Then, at the next mission TL level, 3 whole new items.

I'm with Kame; I don't sell my cubes. Far too precious to spare the 800k-1M nc lost to selling the stack. 2.5M for a couple of hours running 83 missions is worth it. All that work for up to 1M nc less would kill me a little inside.

Well that's just not right. Even at 210 res you only fail 1 in 4 (25%). Where are you getting the 33% failure rate from? A guy was making them not even at a lab yesterday, with only 85 base INT, and he only failed every 5th or 6th cube (i thought he was crazy since he's FA and there loads of labs he could go to).

The reason you say "it's worth it" is because its drastically higher than other forms of income... And can be done on a second PC while still playing your main...