Endie is an advisor* in Goonswarm who happens to know a few things about leading a corporation. In his words:
Apparently, it works. The overarching theme is forming a community and motivating them to play. If your corp doesn’t have these goals, then you’re probably one step from a fail cascade.
*probably in the same way that the CIA has ‘advisors’.
Following on from the freighter pilot implants post, I thought I’d write a short guide to what’s available for pure gunnery DPS for turret users.
Generally, dealing more damage is more important for PvE than tanking ability, so these implants are ideal for mixed usage clones.
I think the sweet spot for pvp clones are the 3% implants (with a few notable exceptions), which I have linked below. Note that, often, you’ll have to choose between different bonuses for the same slot with no clear best option – it’s a more difficult choice than missile implants.
Slot 6
Slot 7
Slot 8
Slot 9
Slot 10
I’m in between alliances at the moment and enjoying a vacation in high-sec space. In between resisting the urge to tackle neutral freighters on gates, I have been experimenting with planetary interaction.
The terribly low extraction rates I can get in High-sec is quite depressing. No more extracting 55k units of P0 per planet per hour for me. However, there is a handy market I can buy stuff from, so maybe there’s profit to be made from processing P0 or P1 materials to higher levels.
The first thing to do is to check the market’s price history. It would be quite embarrassing to find a great opportunity, only to find it was a short-lived market manipulation or demand spike! A while back, Wyke Mossari made some spreadsheets with 60-day price history, pulled from the now-defunct Eve Metrics site. I fixed them up to use a different data source and set the region to The Forge (i.e. Jita), so you can easily see whether the price is stable or not:
Which PI to manufacture changes from week to week, which I imagine is part of the fun. For the purpose of my initial test run, I chose a P3 that my spreadsheeting skills told me would make a profit, and bought the P2 required to make it. I only bought enough for a few days, in case I turn out to be terrible at math.
So, I figured I’d start with one planet and see how it goes. I have Command Center Upgrades IV, which allow me to squeeze in a bunch of advanced industry facilities and a few spaceports, provided the planet is smaller than about 5000km in diameter. If I had CC Upgrades V, I probably would install a fourth spaceport instead of more extractors, since I can’t go a full 48 hours without running out of input material. If you’re after a more passive income stream, you can go big on the silos and spaceports so that you only have to check it once a week.
I call it LV-426 Terraforming Colony. What could possibly go wrong?
Each advanced industry facility takes an hour to process five(5) P2 or three(3) P3 materials. The planet above is configured to use 9120 P2s per day and produce 1368 P3. Each spaceport can hold about 6000 P2s, so I run out every 2 days (although I cheat by storing a bunch of P2 in the customs office so I can fly by and top the spaceports up on my way to market)
To a certain extent. You can add more planets to theoretically pull in six times the profit (or more realistically, only triple it), but you’re probably better off making different stuff on each planet so as not to destabilise the market. Past that, I guess you’ll need an alt or three.
More to the point, there’s not really a way to get extra income by putting in more time, unlike mining or killing NPCs – it’s just some nice, semi-passive bonus income if you’re able to take advantage of a local market.
A week or so later, I’ve gone through something like 70 000 P2 items and turned them into a fairly large amount of P3, which I sold to buy orders (the buy/sell spread was small). I’m now richer by 80 million isk, less transaction fees and duties, so let’s say 10 million isk per day profit. That’s not awesome compared to what an accomplished station trader can rake in, but considering this only takes 250k skill points to achieve, it’s quite impressive isk for a new character.
Considering my Eve time is at a premium right now, I think this is a good ‘during the week’ income stream that doesn’t use much time, so I can spend the weekend losing ships without worrying about paying for replacements.
Since the advent of player-owned customs offices, high-sec manufacturing is still profitable (prices just rose 10% instead). If you want greater profits, you can set up in low-sec, which will add 9% to your profit margin.
Over the last few months, I have had a few new players ask me for some suggestions on what to train their characters for. For a new player, there are so many paths to choose, and many players are quite concerned about making the right choice. This is probably a legacy of other MMOs (and games like Diablo 2) with more restrictive (and sometimes unreversable) choices when advancing.
So, the first piece of advice I can give is : It’s not the end of the world if you make a ‘bad’ skill choice. You can recover. In fact, you may find your bad skill choice comes in useful at a later date.
Having said that, it’s easier to have a plan from the beginning. So, a few decisions need to be made first.
New players often put all their skill training in the same character. This is of course quite convenient at times, since your combat character is also your salvaging character, your scanning character, your hauler, trader and miner. You also don’t have to juggle the training plans or assets of two separate characters.
However, the disadvantages, while not immediately apparent, do come into play soon enough. Your corporation is at war and suddenly you lose access to the safety of high-sec space for mining or purchasing replacement ships. You become torn between multi-day stays in hostile space and the day-to-day tending of planetary installations and industry jobs back home. Indeed, you will probably find that a neural remap for combat skills blows out the training time for your industry skill plan.
The solution is to specialise with multiple characters – one dedicated to combat skills [and associated stuff like mission-running and incursions], and one dedicated to non-combat skills*. This enables more efficient neural remaps, and allows you to keep a character ‘at home’ tending the farm and selling stuff while the other character gets into fights.
* Exploration skills are a bit awkward, in that they’re easier for Int/Mem characters to train, but are really convenient to have on your main. This is probably why scan characters end up in a separate account, so you can use both at the same time.
Null-sec combat is different to low-sec and high-sec combat. The lack of gate guns means that smaller ships are more useful, and certain ship classes become very different in role due to unrestricted access to weapons that are forbidden in Empire space.
This guide will concentrate on a null-sec progression and leave low-sec for another post, but the short answer for new players looking for fights in low-sec is: train the Battlecruisers skill (ideally to V) then get in one.
First off, train Cybernetics and get some +3 implants (or better). Prioritise the Int and Per implants above everything else. You’re unlikely to get podded for a while, and the benefits are worth it.
At the start of your career, you’ll be lacking in two main skill trees: the Int/Mem support skills, and the Per/Wis combat skills. While it’s tempting to dive right into the combat skills, realise that it will be a long time before you’re outputting the same damage of more experienced players.
In addition, the support skills that you’re missing mean that you will move slower and be more fragile than them, so you have a double whammy.
The solution? Don’t play by the same rules they do.
Some modules are just as effective, no matter how many skill points you have trained. By concentrating on combat roles that use these modules, you can get some good pvp action even while training up the support skills to keep you alive. Then, once your support skills are ‘good enough’, you can use a neural remap and get into main line battleships or dreadnaughts or whatever you want.
Neural remaps save a lot of time on skills that you’re specialised for, and add time to skills you’ve specced away from. There’s about 40% difference in training speed between a specialised skill and an off-attribute skill, so that’s a pretty big jump.
When I made my character, I trained Int/Mem support skills for close to six months before losing my patience and remapping into Per/Will. If you are ok with that, then by all means do so. Just realise that you won’t be having a lot of fun for a while, and will have used up both your remaps – you’ll be training combat skills for the next 12 months whether you like it or not.
Perhaps a better choice for a new player would be a single remap to maximum Int and the rest in Perception. That way, you have a major specialisation in support skills, but combat skills won’t be completely terrible for you. Navigation skills, in particular, will be exceptionally fast, which dovetails neatly into the Minmatar combat philosophy. Plus, you get to keep a remap for later.
The majority of PvP characters can fly Minmatar ships. Most can fly other races, but generally you’ll find that the Matari ships are a good combination of tactical flexibility and solid performance. They can be flown aggressively or tentatively; they can be fit to suit armour or shield fleets; they even have a good mix of gun and missile capability.
However, as a starting character, you’ll need to pare down your options a bit. For this, I suggest sticking to:
A great starting point for PvP combat is the Rifter. There’s an excellent Rifter PvP guide available at Wensley’s site, so I suggest you read it. Choose any of the shield-tanked fits and take them out on a roam with corp mates. You’ll likely lose the first half-dozen fairly fast, so it helps to have replacements already pre-built in your home station. At this stage, don’t fret if you only have tech 1 guns – they entire point of this skill plan is to have a ship that is useful in any fleet, even if you aren’t doing as much damage.
When this milestone is reached, you should have (amongst other skills):
The role of the interceptor is to stop ships from escaping. They’re relatively cheap ships to lose, but essential in a fleet. Train for a Stiletto and get a warp disruptor ‘point’ on people and watch them die at the hands of your fleet mates. Gun skills aren’t essential for Stilettos but you’ll likely have some (tech 1) gunnery skills from your Rifter days.
When this milestone is reached, you should have:
Continuing on the theme of ‘small ships that are crucial in fleets’ is the Interdictor. A role that is only available outside of Empire space, the ‘dictor drops warp disruption bubbles that prevent escape nearby. This is practically the only way to kill pods and cloaked ships, but also has defensive uses, stopping enemy ships from warping right into the heart of your fleet. To this end, train for a cloaky sabre. For the time being, the tech 2 guns are optional but it’s a really good idea to train to fit the cloaking device. Note that Sabres often have a ‘kill me’ flag on them, so you might be able to convince you fleetmates to pay for a replacement ship if you pop.
By the end of this milestone you should have trained:
By now, you’re probably antsy to have something tougher in your repertoire. The Hurricane battlecruiser is a great choice for larger engagements, as well as being useful to gain income via ratting. This shield tank fit is pretty decent, although many people prefer medium neuts or heavy launchers in the highs. BTW, read that entire article – it hammers home the fact that you do need quite good gunnery skills to fly a ‘cane effectively, so if you decide to remap to Perception/Willpower, make sure your support skills are up to scratch first. It might be an idea to look ahead and see if there’s some other ship classes that have support skills as prerequisites so you can train them up before switching.
This milestone is optional, but a recommended set of skills would be
By this point, you probably don’t need this guide any more. However, in fleet battles, everyone loves a Hictor, and you’re very close to being able to fly one. Hictors are a very good way to tackle enemy capital and supercapital ships, and by this stage in your career, you’ve probably seen a bunch of fleets that are advertised as
Logistics > HICs > DICs > Scorpions > Battleships > rest
so it’s nice to be able to fill a needed fleet role in a tougher ship than the Sabre.
All you need to fly a Broadsword like this is:
There are many paths that suit different people. For instance, you could go light on the support skills and heavy on the gunnery/piloting skills. Your progress might look like so:
or maybe you like the idea of covert ops, and progress like
and that’s ignoring the Logistics tree, and the fallback option of “battleships and large guns”.
However, hopefully you’ve gained an idea of how a bit of forethought will help you in your skill planning and have a skill plan you can use as a base to customise to your own needs and wants.
Enjoy.
You know those stories you hear about people losing (or making) millions off the trading mistakes of others?
I now have my own story 😦
Logged on at midnight after a long day and discovered my two dramiels had come out of the oven, thanks to a corpmate with manufacturing skills. “what ho!”, said I, “I shall verily list these for sale!” So I put them up for sale.
This morning, I checked my transaction history and saw they’d both sold…
for 1% of what I thought I’d listed them at. /o\
Welp, there goes 100 million isk.
not this bad
Stumbled across Dmian’s page recently. While I think he stopped playing Eve a few expansions ago, he has created a small, but perfectly formed collection of Eve-related wallpapers and logos.
Oh, and he also has this for download:
Oh yeaaah.
It’s a fact of life in Eve that ships blow up and players get podded. Being podded is sometimes convenient, saving you from the worry of flying it home after a roam; other times, you lose Amarr Battleship V and become a sad panda for a lengthy period of time.
Besides the rare loss of skill points, being podded destroys any implants you had plugged in. There are some things you can do to lessen this loss, like clone-jump into a pvp clone, but it will happen eventually, so it’s important to decide what implants to plug in before you lose them.
I’m not going to get into the effect of pirate hardwirings, of which all I know is that they are expensive but awesome.
Instead, I’m concentrating on attribute enhancing implants, because
Let’s take, for example, a player training a skill with the minimum attributes (17 for primary and secondary). Training a rank 6 skill to V takes 34d 10h 27m 4s. With implants, that time drops to:
So a +3 set of implants will save just over 5 days a month training time, a +4 set will save an additional day and a half, and a +5 set will save a bit less than a day and a half per month.
Note that the better your base attributes are, the worse, percentage-wise, the improvement that implants will provide.
Assuming a PLEX is 360M ISK, that’s puts a neat price of 12 million ISK on each day’s training, or 500k per hour saved. That means that the pay-off period for the various implants are:
however, that’s against base, rather than comparing against each other. If you do that, then the extra 30 hours a month that you get from +5/+5 instead of +4/+4 is only 15M isk, which takes a minimum fourteen months to repay the extra 210M isk you outlaid for the more expensive implants. Conversely, the outlay of +4/+4 pays off over +3/+3 in only two months or so.
Null-sec pods are much more vulnerable than anywhere else; bombs will pop you; bubbles will trap you, and security status is not a deterrent.
Recommendation: Always plug in +1/+1 implants on even the most suicidal mission unless you’re a dictor pilot. If you have a pvp clone that you expect to get podded often, run with +3/+2. If you have a PvE/low risk clone, run with +4/+4. Generally, you wouldn’t go above 3% hardwires in null unless you’re in a capital ship.
Low-sec pods are generally fairly safe due to no bubbles, so you’re much more likely to be fighting a Sleipnir with a high-grade Crystal set than in null.
Recommendation: +3/+2 minimum, and anywhere up to +4/+4 is quite common. Feel free to put in pirate hardwires if you’re rich, or some cheap 3% hardwires if you’re not.
The land of apparent safety. Do whatever you want, here, but a rule of thumb is not to spend more on any individual implant than the cost of your hull. This means you jump-clone to a cheap +4/+4 clone if you’re going to fly to Jita in a stealth bomber, unless you’re pro at avoiding smart bombs and bored 0rphanage Thrasher pilots. And try not to get wardecced.
Personally, I still wouldn’t go for a +5/+5 configuration in high-sec – +5/+4 would be the highest I’d go unless that character literally never undocked. But hey, I also don’t fly officer-fit Marauders in level 4 missions, so what would I know.
Serpentine's Eve 
