Quote:
Originally Posted by Killeah
It's easy to find covop targets for bank hack, as a big planet (even top 10).
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OK, so let's look at those planets. There are 2 top 100 cov op planets in the top 10, at least one of who has not bank hacked. There are another 8 in the top 11-50, at least one of who has not bank hacked either, and another 2 are low on value, supporting my theory even if they had. Only 4 of them are Cat, and that's not the end-all be-all of cov opping: Etd and Zik have more stealth (enabling a higher success rate). The only advantage Cat gets is that they can double their gains. But double of 0 is still 0. So what kind of gains could you get when you're a top 10 cov op planet?
Let's step away from cold hard facts for a moment and look at how bank hacking works. The bigger your target, the more resources you can steal, up to 8k per agent at 4 times your value. Planets in the top 10 have few targets available, so they'll always hit at or (more likely) below their own value. At a generous 2/3 of your own value, you can get 4000 resources per agent per cov op, but each agent in an op costs 1500 resources to use. On top of that, each agent costs 6000 resources to train, and will cost another 1500 for the op on when it dies. That means that an agent needs to succeed (6000 + 1500) / (4000 - 1500) = 3 times to break even in value (success rate: 75%). Add to that the cost of finding targets (~2500 per attempt at finding a stockpile, and another ~5000 to detect SCs), and you'll find that you actually
lose resources if you fail more than about 1 in 6 to 8 attempts (success rate: ~84-88%) . And keep in mind: breaking even is not good enough: if you'd invested those resources in your fleet instead, you would've been able to cap more roids, on average, allowing value gain, not just value stability.
Going back to the cov oppers in the top 10 and 50. Do our 10 high value cov oppers hit that success rate? No. The average success rate among them is 78.8% or 79.4% (depending on which method you use), which are both significantly below our break even point. The 4 most active cov oppers among them, including the 2 in the top 10, have a success rate of, respectively: 67.7% (10:4:6, big loss), 80.4% (7:8:5, small loss), 95.1% (2:1:4, possible gain) and 80.8% (2:1:1, small loss). If we look more closely at 2:1:4, we see he's top 2 in value. This means it's unlikely he's hitting at 2/3 of his value, which erodes any potential gains. And he's not even Cat.
So no.