Introduction
As you probably already noticed, Factional Warfare gameplay does not offer immediate ISK rewards. Instead, you gain Loyalty Points with the FW NPC corporation of your empire. For Gallente, that corporation is the Federal Defense Union or FEDEF for short. To sustain your character and to replace the ships that you will be losing in action, you need a way to convert those LP into liquid ISK. Fortunately, there are a few methods that you may employ to refill your wallet.
Indirect Trade
The simplest method is to offer your LP on one of the community channels, like militia Discord or in-game militia or trade chats. Your buyer will specify what items they need from the LP store, you buy them and trade them for ISK. On the plus side, this usually saves you some time on hauling and the buyer should be able to cover any transaction costs that may come from buying, for example, blueprints. On the other hand, you probably won't get the best rates possible. As you can imagine, your buyer needs to make a profit on the whole transaction and the best place to make savings for them is to shave off a few percent from the initial purchase.
Producing Faction Consumables
If you don't mind some light hauling, converting regular ammo and/or cap booster charges into navy ones is a surefire method to gain some ISK. This offers a good LP/ISK ratio and is available with a lower minimum LP required, so you can start small. The downside is that you need to bring the regular ammo to the station with the LP store and then move it back to the market hub (or your militia's staging system).
Build Faction Ships
If you acquired enough LP over your career, you may start looking for ways to cash out larger quantities of LP without going through the middlemen. The more involved one, especially recommended if you have a manufacturing alt, is building the ships available in the store. To make participation in the FW more enticing, CCP lowered the LP price of both hulls and BPCs of faction ships compared to 'regular' LP stores. Thanks to that, you can get some nice profit margins if you decide to go through the whole manufacturing process yourself.
Selling Faction Dreadnought BPC
If you really don't want to be bothered with all that nonsense, save up for the dreadnought BPC and sell it in Jita. They hold their price nicely, are easy to carry as they don't take much space, and are in quite a demand. The only problem is getting them safely to the marketplace as you will be basically flying with 1 bil ISK in cargo.
Direct corporation transfer
A new option added recently to the game, any player can donate their LP directly to any corporation's wallet. This is a perfect option if you have a reliable buyer, as it can be done from anywhere and saves you time on buying the items and hauling them to a designated drop point. As a drawback, this is the riskiest option, as there is no guarantee that the party you are trading with will transfer the ISK. When in doubt, always ask for the ISK up front to ensure it all goes smoothly.
Supplemental income - plex tags
Each NPC of the enemy faction you destroy during plexing drops some insignias, usually called "tags". These can be sold using NPC buy orders in the stations aligned with your faction. This can quickly add up, especially if you run medium and bigger plexes, netting you an additional 4-5 mil on top of the LP you gain.
Supplemental income - PvP loot
Loot anything - any wreck, drone and can you find in space is just ISK waiting to be picked up. Nanite paste or drones are always sought for and fetch decent prices to pad your wallet. Anything you can't use can be shipped to a trade hub or sold into one of the buyback programs.
Supplemental income - Clone Soldier tags
When roaming systems with 0.1 and 0.2 security status, it may be worth visiting the asteroid belts looking for the clone soldiers. These are unique rats that have guaranteed drop worth around 15-20 mil. Given they can be easily defeated in a Catalyst, they can offer a good option if you need to mend your wallet without fighting on the frontlines.
Appendix - the Galpec
As of September 2023, the Gallente militia has a recommended pricing for faction hulls and BPCs, the aim being to sustain a price level that makes it profitable to engage in Faction Warfare. While the prices fluctuate slightly depending on the mineral prices, the ultimate goal is to keep the exchange rate at 1000 ISK for 1 LP. At the time of writing, these were the recommended minimum prices for the Gallente faction BPCs:
Frigate | 6 million ISK |
Destroyer | 15,5 million ISK |
Cruiser | 23 million ISK |
Battlecruiser | 50 million ISK |
Battleship | 120 million ISK |
Dreadnaught | 1,1 billion ISK |
Conclusion
I hope this little guide will make it easier for you to keep your hangars well stocked for any adventures you may find the low-sec. After reading this and previous posts, you should be able to navigate through the core loop of buying ships, doing plexes and/or shooting enemy militia, and then cashing out your LP to buy more ships.
This completes the 'absolute essentials' post series. Stay tuned for more advice and ship guides and feel free to message me with any suggestions for content you would like to see on those pages.
Kommentarer