EVE New Citizens Q&A

Roll whatever race you like you can train any skills at all

Don't try to gain any real insight about the game from the various whinethreads that populate the other forum sections. People embellish and talk about a context that may or may not be relevant to you. Further, a lot of people who play (and particularly a lot of the people who post complaints on the forums) are bad.

The big chance recently is that prior to the Retribution expansion, NPC pirates would never switch targets. Ever. You could have an alt in a noobship running around 200km away from everything else and as long as he got rat aggro first, they would pointlessly chase them forever while you could come in and murder the rats in something else.

Retribution changed that. Rats occasionally switch targets, but only within their size class (frig rats may target light drones, cruiser rats may target med drones, and BS rats may target heavy drones). This can be a problem in high level missions if you're sending slow (Gallente) heavy or medium drones distances of 40-50+ KM and you can't pull them back in time, or you fail to pay attention to them taking damage at all. Furthermore, these missionrunners will be using tech 2 drones, which can be expensive.

You will be using t1 drones to start and in level 1-2 missions, where there are really not that many rats..and if you do lose a drone or two, you don't give a **** because t1 drones are basically free.



That's because each race is good at PVP and each race is good at PVE. If someone were to tell you that one race was distinctly superior for PVP and one was distinctly superior for PVE then they would be wrong, and such a balancing mechanism would be utterly stupid.

It sounds vague because it is vague. You don't fly Amarr because they're better at X type of content, you fly them because they're tanky and have good damage projection and you don't care if you're pretty slow.



In general racial ships are good against racial NPCs (Amarr against sanshas/bloods, Gallente against Serpentis...). You noted why that might be a problem for Amarr. For Gallente, blasterboats are limited to kin/thermal damage, and droneboats only have partial damage flexibility (as you trade off other things, like damage and tracking, when you change drone types). Some Caldari ships are limited to kinetic damage because of a ship bonus, though this is disappearing. They also have high base sensor strength which is useful against the ECM that shows up in Guristas missions.

Minmatar has the best damage type flexibility, but the versatility is one of their few strengths in the PVE department, and their long-ranged t2 autocannon ammo (barrage, useful in a lot of PVE contexts but not all) is only explosive.

Drones have always been stupid little buggers that need micromanagement. Start out sticking with T1 drones, make sure attack and return to drone bay at minimum are on hot-keys somewhere, and never upgrade Ogres to Ogre IIs unless you have just ridiculous stacks of isk lying around.

You'll get used to the new aggression patterns and the micromanagement soon enough.



A good rule for Eve is "Read everything, trust nothing". There's a lot of information out there that, even if it's current (much of it isn't) isn't so much "good advice" as "good enough advice". Even, perhaps especially, the forums.



There is no race that is _bad_ at anything across the entire race. What you'll run into is that your choices for a given application will be more or less _restricted_ by the race you first pick. There's also nothing stopping you from just training another race's ships, frequently it's just a matter of a couple of skills, with most of your stuff applying to either ship line.

Regarding PVP/PVE: in the sense of combat, any skill that's good in combat in PVE also helps in PVP. The only skills from PVP that don't help in PVE are propulsion jamming and cloaking. So, going from a mission-runner or exploration combat character to a PVP combat character is just a matter of training propulsion jamming, typically. There are other roles in both PVP and PVE than combat, but you can't go wrong at the beginning with being the guy that shoots stuff and can take some hits.

Races vary mostly in their primary weapon and tanking style, though there are exceptions to every rule:

AMARR:
Tanking -- Passive Armor. Loads and loads of armor HP, you'll almost never want to fit a shield tank.
Weapons-- Primary: LASERS. A bit stronger in PvP than PvE because they're stuck with EM/Thermal damage, but have a very broad damage application range as far as min range/max range/tracking goes due to instant ammo switching.
Secondary: Missiles.

GALLENTE:
Tanking -- Active armor: not as many HP or innate resists, but more flexible base stats allowing you to do shield if you want in many cases
Weapons-- Primary: HYBRID TURRETS. At extreme close range, the highest damage in the game. Still restricted to two damage types, kinetic/thermal, but this is less of an issue in PvE because every NPC has one or the other as a secondary weakness. RAILGUNS have extreme range but not as good damage as other long-range weapons, making them excellent for sniper boats but kinda mediocre as mid-range weapons. Gallente bonuses favor BLASTERS over RAILGUNS.
Secondary-- DRONES: As noted above, kind of a ***** to control at times. But several Gallente ships have a full drone damage bonus (100% at level V), making them hit as hard as a primary weapon system, while freeing up some of your other slots for utility.

MINMATAR:
Tanking -- Active shield: the shield version of Gallente, not as hardcore defensively as the Caldari but flexible enough to fit armor tank instead in many cases.
Weapons-- PROJECTILE TURRETS. Favored by lazy folk because they achieve more of their power at relatively low SP totals (tech 2 ammo doesn't really do much compared to other systems), and their good mix of ranges. AUTOCANNONS are a bit weaker than blasters, but can hit things all the way out to mid-range with some reliability and have solid tracking. ARTILLERY has pretty long range and the longest time between shots in the game, meaning that it does the most damage in a single volley of any weapon system.
Secondary: MISSILES.

CALDARI:
Tanking -- Passive Shield. Much bigger numbers than other shielded ships, but almost never amenable to armor tanking
Weapons -- primary: (KINETIC) MISSILES. Missiles have a different damage algorithm than turrets (or drones, which follow the turret formula), based on simple proportional factors of ship size and ship speed. They have no miss chance, making them very easy to use, giving caldari a somewhat undeserved reputation as the noob race, although a competent Caldari pilot is as good as anybody else in the end. You can fit ASSAULT MISSILES for shorter range, higher-DPS situations or poke people to death at long/mid range with regular missiles.
secondary: HYBRID TURRETS. Similar to the Gallente section, but Caldari have fewer ships that can handle the minor capacitor load involved, and their bonuses favor RAILGUNS over BLASTERS in general, meaning they have more viable sniper fits and fewer viable blaster fits.


IN GENERAL:
DRONES are everyone's third weapon
Due to tanking similarities, it is popular to pick AMARR/GALLENTE or MINMATAR/CALDARI as your first two races to train. MINMATAR/AMARR is probably the third most popular, for... some reason.

Keep in mind that you can train anything (given enough time), but not "mix" everything. You don't want to put lasers on a Minmatar ship or hybrids on on an Amarr ship. Once you have enough experience and skill, you can try to be creative but in the early days, stick to standards. Fit for the ship's bonuses and whatever race you pick should work just fine.