community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/command-bursts/

Well, here are the highlights from this blog:

- Duration between 60s and 130s
- 1 minute module reactivation delay.
- Uses ammunition to define the effect. Compact ammunition with "very large ammo capacities" for the modules.
- Range for Mining Boosts/Bursts will be between 15km (No bonus, no skills) and ~44km (Hull bonus, Leadership V, Wing Command V, Fleet Command V).

Based on these things, I wonder if a new bot type/license is warranted. It seems like the best logic would be for the miners and booster bot to warp to a fleet member (Selected Tank) and activate modules. This way, even if the other miners had to maneuver into range for their selected asteroid types, they'd at least have some hope of staying in range of the booster. The bot would also need to detect when it had run out of ammo and returns to station to reload as needed.

One issue I foresee with this (assuming the mining bot remained unchanged) is that the mining bot checks its range, duration, and yield when it undocks. If it uses those numbers and then warps to a belt with a booster, it will be harvesting faster than it will expect and that might disrupt its yielding/jettisoning/etc. calculations. Keeping in range of the booster is the other point to consider. Who stays in range of who? Does the booster pick a spot, and all the miners stay within the radius and hope that there are asteroids to shoot? Does the miner move and the booster just stick to the Selected Tank as the center of the boost? All questions that need to be answered.

Frankly, unless Slav2 is willing to invest time into creating a pretty sophisticated bot for this while also altering the mining bots' behavior to cluster together, I don't see how it could be feasible for us to use them. If he is willing to do all that, I'd certainly pay for the license, but I couldn't blame him if that seemed too complex. I imagine many of the people who use the Miner Bot don't bother with boosts. I can't begrudge CCP for making this change either, it's not as if they want things to be more bot-friendly (with boosts in particular).

Wow, if the range stays that small, this is going to piss off WH and 0.0 anomaly miners! Sure, 44km is enough to cover most or all belts from center, but not anomalies. Roids in anomalies can be 100-200 km apart. Anomaly mining teams will often be forced to mine the same roid at the same time because of the low boost range as higher end roids start to pop around the booster.

There are many ways to adapt EP, but these are the main additions that seem needed:

Issue - Warping to same area:
1. TankMode with synchronized bookmarks would solve this, or adding "Use Corp Bookmarks" as an option for Miner settings would work too.


Issue - Miner Keep Booster In-Range:
1. Add Booster Range to Miner (or Booster) GUI, 0=Disabled, so that the Miner knows booster minimum range.
2. Way for Miners to check if within range of booster
2a. Add boosting ships (Orca/Rorqual) in fleet to Asteroids Overview and change an existing EP mining module to make that check (Faster, but makes existing EP module more complex)
2b. Create new Overview group and/or tab and have the bot click on it every few minutes to check range


Issue - Booster Range To Roids:
1. Give booster a mining laser (no crystals) and this should be solved with "Keep # Roids In Range" feature


BIG Issue - Mining Yield Calculations:
1. Before the bot checks mining laser info for time/yield, it needs to ensure it is within range of booster AND was in range during last time the boost module activated.


BIG Issue - Mining Same Roid (Belt Only):
1. Because Miners will be close to each other, mining same roids constantly will significantly reduce efficiency.


BIG Issue - Mining Different Roid Types:
1. What does a non-Tank Miner do when overview is empty (all roids popped)? Sit there and lose mining time?

Looks like the bullet went through the church (it's saying we have here to say the decision has been made),

the booster will be changed in November.

As far as I see it and my vision on it might be limited

I don't like the weapons timer which you will get for activating a command burst

Fleet hierarchy does not matter for these new bonuses (pro)
The good thing is that all command boosts now take 1 slot (where mining boost now takes 3 slots) (which means we can have 2 more boosts)

what I do wonder now is that if all skills need to be retrained...

I think in order to prevent ganking these boosters we might need to launch drones before and have tanking mode between vm's

I think they played well in favor of ganking fleets here... pack em all together and go for a rooks and kings tactic...I can see the pipebombing drama allready

I see belt stripping mode coming completely if they command bursts stay only for that short time...ore type in belt empty = time lost :/

Weapons timer only prevents docking and gate use for one minute. It does not set the booster to a criminal status. Anyone attacking the booster in high sec will die to concord before killing moderately tanked orca.

still... I don't like it.
on the other hand, when booster is now running you can't dock also until cycle is finished.
One thing I hope to se changed tho is that when creating a fleet, that the booster also creates a extra squad so U can have more then 9 in a fleet
I need that with my large fleet operations

So, with decent skills and a mindlink, the Orca can reach something like 34km (puu.sh/qSPzU/b9f2ac28a6.png). Given that it's a sphere, that would cover most of an asteroid belt. This would not work for anomalies, but I wonder if something like this would be a feasible option until (hopefully) slav2 can make something better:

Make the booster the selected tank: Orca warps to belt, launches drones, starts modules, etc. Rest of miners then show up and mine. Limit their maneuver distance so that they won't go too far from the Orca. This doesn't answer the problem of mining the same rocks, different rocks (and running out) or the bad calculations. I wonder if we could modify the Algorithm so that the Laser Check comes after the WarpToBelt? Either way, this would be a start.

Separate from the bot, I did some math on the risk vs. reward of bringing an Orca on grid. If you operate in highsec, and keep the Booster in the NPC corp, it can only be ganked (not wardec'd). If you tank the Orca properly it can get around ~380k EHP with just T2 modules and T1 rigs. In a 0.7 system, with an 11 second CONCORD response time, it'd take ~40 max-skilled/fitted Catalysts to beat the tank before they're destroyed. If you have 4 miners mining Veldspar in tank-fitted Procurers (which I used just as a minimal level of profit), the difference per hour for a T2 booster is about 3.6m per miner, or 14.5m per hour total. Dividing the cost of the tanked Orca (~800m) by this, you get 55.3 hours, or 4.6 days (at 12 hours a day). So, unless there are MASSIVE ganking fleets showing up in your system every 5 days that you can't put on Local monitoring and evade using the 0.0 Support, it's still worth it to keep an Orca on grid (IF the boosts can stay applied). I imagine that if you're mining anything other than Veldspar, the time spent for it to "make sense" goes down precipitously. Obviously, if you have only 1-2 miners, this number goes up dramatically. Food for thought.