EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hmm you need basic info, so it's hard to explain shortly. You should check out the stickied thread at the top and/or find some guides about tanking, about weapons function / tracking / range / etc, and about PVP in general.

1. Does the ship description indicate a bonus to Hybrids (optimal range, falloff range, damage, or rate of fire)? It means if you install hybrids in the ship your damage gets multiplied, if you install other guns (lasers, or projectiles), your damage does not. As for what size hybrids, the ship bonus may say "bonus to small hybrids", in which case it's frigate-sized small hybrids.

But, you can also tell by looking at the power grid of the ship and comparing to the fitting power requirements of the guns. Frigates and Destroyers have about 50 power grid, cruisers and battlecruisers in the 800-1500 range, and battleships in the 20,000 range. And guns of increasing size require orders of magnitude more grid, so that you won't be able to fit even a single medium gun to a frigate, etc.

The power grid of a ship limits the size of guns, and the size of shield or armor defenses you can put on it.

The CPU of a ship limits the number of electronic warfare, scanner probes, or mining/industrial modules you can put on it.

If a ship has many low slots, it's intended to be armor-tanked, if it has many medium slots it's intended to be shield-tanked.

And finally, in the high-slots, you can put in as many guns as you have turret slots, and as many missile launchers as you have missile slots, until all your high slots are full. If you can't fill out your high slots with guns and missiles then the ship is intended to have other high-slot modules, such as energy neutralizers, remote armor or shield transfers, drone support modules, a cloak, etc.

2. You can train any race's ships nobody's stopping you.

Minmatar ships are fast, versatile (they can use shield or armor tanking), and use projectiles and missiles, which don't require capacitor juice, so there are a lot of surprise fits. It's why they're popular for PVP. But, in order to fly Minmatar ships properly, you have to train for all the options, shields and armor, projectiles and missiles and drones, a lot more training compared to the others.

Amarr ships use lasers, are usually armor-tanked, and because lasers don't use ammo, amarr battleships are favored in large fleets where the battle will last a while or you're deployed in enemy territory for months. Downside to lasers is that they only deliver EM and thermal damage, so if your enemy knows you have Amarr he'll resist against those.

Caldari ships use shields, missiles, and long-range hybrids (railguns). Shields respond to damage a bit faster than armor, and missiles can be tailored to deliver the specific damage that an NPC is most vulnerable to, so Caldari ships are very popular with the PVE missions crowd. In PVP, the fact that missiles take a while to get to the target means you show lower on the DPS meters, so they're not liked.

Gallente ships use armor, usually short-range hybrids (blasters), and drones. Some of their ships use drones as the primary damage weapon, and drones don't require high slots, or power grid. As a result, you can take your guns out of the ship and have a huge amount of power grid available for the armor tank (so much that you can oversize your tank - battleship armor plates on a cruiser, for example). This makes the drone boats also very popular with the PVE mission crowd. Drones can also be a surprise in PVP, but drone skills aren't typically preferred until the capital ships like Carriers, where the Gallente one is currently a favorite along with the Amarr one.

3. The expansion balances the frigate, destroyer, and cruiser ships. They'll do the battlecruisers and battleships later. In general, the expansion beefs up a lot of the ships so that instead of picking a frigate like the Merlin because it's the only one with enough power grid and weapon slots to be a combat frigate, now you have a choice because they all have decent power grid and weapons and armor/shields, so you can choose based on whether you like missiles, or based on a role (ewar, probing, etc.) with all the ships being relatively equal tough nuts and survivable.

4. For missions, you just need to progress along with the mission level, frigates at L1, cruisers at 2, battlecruisers at 3, battleship at 4. With increasingly good support skills (Engineering, Electronics, Navigation, Mechanics, and Gunnery/Missiles/Drones - whichever your ship uses). Each race is able to PVE missions, you don't really need to worry about cross-training, it's just Caldari and Gallente were preferred / easymode. CCP will change the NPC AI somewhat, so it remains to be seen how the smarter NPCs affect how easily you can do missions now.

5. You cannot do damage while cloaked. Cloaked ships are used for scouting, and for fleet approach vectors (you position yourself so when the fleet warps to you, it lands smack on top of the enemy for maximum surprise and DPS).

Advice for the future, if you don't want to get flamed for irrelevant things, don't bring them up. Doing otherwise is like saying you don't want to be flamed for being gay, but write about how much you love the taste of sweaty man meat in a post about internet spaceships. Just say that you're a PvP player, but are new to EVE and want to ask questions about EVE pvp. If someone brings up WoW at that point, the flames will be on him with good reason.




1) Weapons are mainly categorized by two things: Size(small, medium. large, capital) and range (short and long). Generally speaking frigate/destroyer sizes ships use small, cruisers/battlecruisers use medium, battleships use large and capital ships use capital weapons. There are exceptions, but generally you don't even have the fitting space to online oversized guns. Especially the powergrid demand spikes heavily with bigger guns. If the ship doesn't have a bonuse to fitting a weapon system, it is meant to use the standard size. The actual weapon type(laser, hybrid, missile, projectile, drone) is decided by looking at the ship bonuses. It's not a hard limit though.

2) No, you don't need to train minmatar. They're a good skirmish race with a solid weapon system, but nothing magical. A better advice might be to not forget, that Caldar is also a hybrid weapon race in addition to missiles and that you aren't limited to training ships for one race. If you train hybrids, you have an alternative to missiles and their weaknesses and you can fly many gallente ships quite well with minimal additional training.

3) Cheap small ships are getting a huge buff and a redesign. Previously there was a tier system in place where in each ship type you climbed up the tiers and had little reason to go back. Now every ship in a class is good at something and much more competative with their more expensive counterparts. Every ship category in the game will get similar treatment of tier removal.

4) For lvl 1s any frigate. For lvl 2s any destroyer or cruiser. For lvl 3's any battlecruiser. For level 4's any battleship. Naturally there are ships and fits, that can do them more efficiently, but they're not needed. I'd only say that your support skill levels have to improve when going to higher level missions. For example a battleship is a pretty lousy ships without strong support skills to back it up. It doesn't mean missiong in one is impossible. It just means you're not really better off upgrading even in missioning where bigger usually is better.

1) its a destroyer so it uses small guns and you are caldari so it is best using hybrids. The ships bonuses usually give a good clue, in this case bonuses to small hybrid turret. Blasters are short range high damage hybrids and railguns are long range low damage. Take your pick, depends what you want to do.

2) People exagerate the advantages of one race over the other and most skills you would train will transfer to minmatar ships anyway. Many use missiles as a secondary weapon system and most shield tank. At any time simply training a minmatar ship skill and a projectile weapon skill will get you into the minmatar ship. For example if you fly a moa at caldari cruiser 4 and medium hybrid turret 4 then you simply need to train minmatar cruiser 4 and med projectile turret 4 (a few days training) to get to the same level, all other skills effect both. If you were to change to the gallente thorax you would maybe want some armour tanking skills but would already have hybrid turret trained and so on.

3) t1 frigs, destroyers and cruisers will be much more balanced against each other and also less terrible compared to larger and more advanced ships.

4) Hard to say really as they will be balancing the bigger/more advanced ships next and it will change. Currently for caldari it would be Caracal -> Drake -> Raven (cruise missiles are broken atm so people tend to go straight to tech 3 instead) for the t1 ships but only if you are going to focus on missiles. For minmatar it would be Rupture -> Hurricane ->Maelstrom.

5) All races have a stealth bomber which is basically what you are referring to. They use torpedos and do a lot of damage against large targets, as well as using bombs for area effect attacks (only in null sec). they are very weak against other frigates and most cruiser sized ships however.

The anger is because a number of them have suggested changes to EVE that aren't needed (or popular), and they often begin their post with "if you want EVE to have 11 million players like WoW, then blah blah blah."

Amazed at how long this Winmatar stuff hangs around. Seriously, I still hear new players going on and on about getting into Rifters.

@ OP, fly the ships you think are cool. Very few if any corporations that I can think of which are going to turn you away because you skilled the wrong race.

For the T1 stuff you should be flying, the races look about like this:

T1 frigs
1. Gall/Caldari (incursus & merlin are FTW)
2. Amarr/Minmatar (punisher/tormentor/rifter)

T1 Dessies
1. all 4 I'd guess. This category is hard to judge w/ 4 new ships coming and a few other tweaks.

T1 Cruisers
1. Gallente/Minmatar (tiericide will really help the Gall ships, but they're already pretty boss, Ruppy & Fleet Stabber)
2. Amarr (new Omen will be nice, Arbitrator is already quite good)
3. Caldari (bait Moa is fun, new Caracal may end up being a mini HAM drake)

If you want a rogue type ship, I'd suggest either the Rapier or Pilgrim. They are not high dps ships, but you can solo pvp in them, can always pick your fights and will make most frig/cruisers pee themselves if you uncloak next to them.