First thing to mention - alot of things are very eve-alike. I really think that the basic idea was a spinoff of EVE online with some minor changes so it is not a clone just with robots instead of spaceships. Currently there are six islands, the three inner ones "alpha islands" are pve zones. You can toggle yourself for pvp at any time but I did not try pvp yet. The outer islands "beta islands" are ffa pvp zones with some police-guarded areas but I have no idea about the PvP mechanics...
There are three basic factions:
- Nuimqol (missile weaponry)
- Thelodica (laser weaponry) - those are armortanking. Ama... No its not EVE.
- Pelistal (magnetic weaponry) - did anyone say railguns?
Skill-system: Skills are called extensions in perpetuum. Each account gains one extension point (EP) per minute independently from a character being logged on or not. The EP pool is bound to the account and you spend the points between the characters on your account. Extensions have a NIC (the incame currency) and EP cost, some got other extensions as requirements. Depending on players choices during character creation the EP cost of extensions varies from character to character. Each extension got 10 levels, after the first 5 levels the EP required increases more steep. Its said that the time required to skill everything to 10 is above 24 years. Nothing really new with the skillset - robot control, fitting, support, relations (social), corp management, you know it... Items and robots come with extension requirements just like we know from EVE. Robots get a specific bonus per level in the required skill.
Robots come in several tiers: (noob mech), light mech, assault mech, mech, heavy mech. Noob mech is free and you can request a new one if you lose it. Light mechs are currently npc sold (takes like 2-4 hours to farm enough NIC). Assault mechs and above are player built - npc sell orders of those were removed like 2 weeks ago. As a result to their leader being banned from the beta a player corp currently tries to f*ck the market by buying each mech on the market and relisting them at ridiculus high prices. Since the playerbase is somewhat limited that sudden shortage of robots causes alot of drama.
The industry system is indeed somewhat different from EVE. You gain basic knowledge about each and every module and robot by consuming kernels that are dropped as you kill npc robots. It is said that you need like 5000 or more kernels for each tier (light, assault, mech, heavy). There is no luck involved here with enough kernels each player can get knowledge of every item in game. Each item comes in four tiers - to create an item you will need to build a prototype first and then reengineer that prototype into a calibration template (calibration templates are like blueprints used in factories). Factories and the other required facilities come in three qualities affecting the outcome of your jobs. The materials and time required and some some conditions on earlier steps in that process are affected by standing and extensions yadda yadda.... One thing different is that with each item built from a calibration template the quality of that template degrades so at some point the efficiency is so low that its not worth building more items with that template. In theory you can refresh production lines with a new template of the same item (like adding up efficiency of both templates) but that does not work yet.
Resources are gathered by either mining or refining loot. There are two harvestable plants in game - the materials gained by harvesting are used for refining ore to different metals. Some high end minerals are only mineable on the pvp beta islands. The process of scanning for mineable minerals is somewhat complex compared to "warp to asteriod belt" but the spots themself are static.
The community is not very large but there are some nice players in the help channel at any time answering questions and most of the time devs or GMs are around too. The game/client got some bugs and is (according to the devs) far from complete. But compared to several other betas I did it is in a pretty good shape already.