Ships & Modules

Howdy folks.

I've been playing for a few months, and I've fallen in love with the game. Unfortunately, the sheer number of choices and options for training and fighting has been driving me absolutely nutty. I've been jumping back and forth between gunnery skills and missiles, and between racial ships like crazy! After getting Minmatar and Caldari cruisers to V, and Amarr to III, I'm finally beginning to find that I am a big fan of missiles, with long range turrets coming into a not-that-distant second (range tanking, while maybe a cheap tactic, is so very fun). I'm pretty specialized into shield skills with very few in armor, and no tier 2 weapons yet because of the aforementioned indecisiveness. Now that I feel like I'm done really experimenting, I'm looking to establish a sort of doctrine for myself, with missiles and shield at the forefront, followed by some just-for-fun turrets, but I'm having trouble deciding between Minmatar and Caldari hulls. I'd like to start specializing in just one race for now, and actually getting good at something instead of middling about trying it all. I'll probably be going all the way back to frigates and boosting weapon and racial ship skills with all classes, so that I can start small and venture into PVP.

On the one hand, Caldari:

Pros:
- Better known for their missile ships, especially the Drake and Raven.
- Railguns offer a good second weapon system for my fondness for range tank.
- MANY ships are fit better with the shield tank skills I have, and like.
- The BC level ships and up look great and professional.
- ECM boats if I feel like branching out without training a new race.

Cons:
- Cruisers and below all look just insufferably ridiculous. (Except the Corax, which is the damn sexiest ship I've ever seen.)
- There have historically (from what I've read here and various wikis) been complaints about the effectiveness of railguns if I'm doing anything but specifically sniping.
- They're not as quick as Minmatar ships, so KEEPING a range seems more difficult.

On the other, Minnies:

Pros:
- More focused on turret ships, but their missile line (esp the Cyclone and Typhoon) seems perfectly respectable, giving me more versatility.
- Greater speed means greater ability to keep ideal ranges.
- Quite a few ships are flexible with tank and let shield skills really shine.
- The utilitarian design of the smaller ships appeals to my fanatic Firefly fandom.
- Artillery alpha is addicting.

Cons:
- Artillery alpha isn't DPS.
- The opposite of the Caldari, the larger ships seem ... weird. Just looking at them, I mean.
- Neither blasters nor autocannons appeal to me, so that so many ships seem to favor A/Cs over artillery is a negative.



Thoughts? Are any of my assumptions wrong? I'd love to get some input on what you all think of the two different missile boat lines, and why you prefer one over the other. This is killing me, I swear.


Thanks in advance!

Well, we're in the same boat as far as being relatively new and addicted to the game. I started almost exactly the same time. We are, however, on exactly opposite ends of the skill tree: I've spec'ed almost entirely in Gallente armor-brawlers, up to a Proteus now that I'm dying to melt things with.

All the help I can be is to make two points. First, I heard, didn't like, and eventually came to accept, is that better guns are better than bigger ships as far as PVP goes. T2 guns and ammo, as well as hull and weapon upgrades, are pretty much mandatory for any solo combat. I only recently got to Cruisers V with one race, but I've got weapon, armor, upgrade, and several other important skills to V as well, and only now do I feel that I can branch out to the other races. Also, from experience, rail guns are awful as far as tracking speed goes. Every rail fit frigate and destroyer I've used or fought has died, except for one pirate Atron (that was embarrassing, but he probably had 20mil SP against my 8mil)

Second, sticking to one specialty until you've mastered it pays off. I realized much to late that armor-brawlers are the most difficult type to fly, as they're most vulnerable to range dictation. Now, I'm winning fights against vastly more seasoned pilots because I know exactly when and how to engage, what I can win against and what I can't, ect.

Nothing sucks worse than having a 35mil assault frigate kited to death by a 5mil kestrel, but it happens. Good luck!

This. And with awesome Mordu's Legion pirate faction ships coming in 2014, you will benefit both Minmatar and Caldary skills.
For now fly Gnosis as it is so cool missle / guns / shield platform with huge cargo bay, superior agility and passes exactly to the concept of learning everything but nothing really to master degree.

Now seriosly - if you aim to PVE, you should probably focus to Raven Navy Issue or Typhoon Fleet Issue. Look at them, decide with your heart (you will stare at the ship you've choosen for a long time) and start learning Armageddon. ;)

If you get caldari frigates 5 you really get all you can get out of caldari.
The only thing you may miss out on is the golem, other then that.
Caldari missile-cruiser class huls are garbage while minmatar still does 'okay', minmatar and caldari missile-BC both suck.
Typhoons are more versatile then ravens, projectiles are much less SP intensive to train.
Blaster boats for caldari are mostly functional for techI frigate and cruiser, yet gallente make for superior progression and choice.
No matter what you do with caldari, you always lose somehow.

And regarding your fondness of railguns, caldari get range bonuses on the highest ranged, long range weapons. IF you already have the highest range, range becomes a very useless stat. But Gallente at least get damage+tracking+rate of fire bonuses.

It is where you should go on to "Now seriosly" part of the post and understand, that I was trying to be sarcastic. Which is the task, that I apparently fail.

Minmatar for PvP; Caldari for PvE.

Tengu is OK for lv4's but after flying a drake, nighthawk (pre-changes), and tengu all of which I flew for freaking ever it fells like before making a switch to TFI. I would say Tengu is OK but definately not close to being best. It's worth training for but not worth over specializing in. I would think of it as a good stepping stone.

One of the nice things about the Tengu as mentioned is it's versitility even in hi-sec. For missions you can run a setup like I am going to post, though a pithi-c small shield booster would help out more, this build will work but require more use of the ASB or overheating which is quite cheap to do depending on the parts you use. Not to mention the hull bounus to it, you have overheat for a long time, I think for my Tengu I could overheat for several minutes and it still cost me less than 100k to repair it all (closer to 10-20k everytime I felt the need to, which I did usually before using an ASB). And on a note on the use of the ASB, it's there as a get out of free button for the most part.

A pithi-c will be able to keep your shields up under 95% of the mission conditions if you manage the room properly, but overheating it for 1-2min sometimes will be required sometimes to keep your shields up which as I stated before doesn't cost you much to repair at a station and if all your doing is overheating the shield booster you can run it for several minutes without worry. So the ASB is there for mainly screwed up triggers, this is from my experience your millage may vary. (Though the experience with shield boosters on tengu was before they boosted them months ago, so it may be even easier, but the dread guristas still probably won't be capable of doing all of missions without a little help of overheating or ASB)

Depending on your skills, and implants you can easily swap the shield resistant amps for shield hardeners, etc. My old Tengu setup used to use something like this but a large ASB, but instead of T2 shield resist amps I had to use dread guristas and implants to achieve that. Personally I wouldn't recommend that route I'd work with a setup along the lines of this for simplicity and the fact that the large ASB probably saved my butt once or twice when I did something VERY stupid, but a medium ASB could have probably done the same.

[Tengu, Current Recommended Cheap]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

10MN Afterburner II
EM Ward Amplifier II
EM Ward Amplifier II
Dread Guristas Small Shield Booster
Explosive Deflection Amplifier II
Medium Ancillary Shield Booster, Cap Booster 50

Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Fury Heavy Missile

Medium Bay Loading Accelerator II
Medium Warhead Flare Catalyst I
Medium Warhead Flare Catalyst I

Tengu Defensive - Amplification Node
Tengu Electronics - Dissolution Sequencer
Tengu Engineering - Augmented Capacitor Reservoir
Tengu Offensive - Accelerated Ejection Bay
Tengu Propulsion - Fuel Catalyst

Than besides your mission build you can always setup a cloaky hauler build as well, and all the other fun things a T3 can do. Since I got my TFI I use my Tengu mainly for hauling valuable goods unnoticed as I can do so with an high EHP and cloaked so it's near impossible to suicide gank me in hi-sec.

I have both skilled to BS V with prefect missile support, and I have flown the raven and typhoon variants.

From this experience:
• you will hardly need both, they are similiar, focus in one race first!!! (!!!)
• caldari missileboats are foolproof in pve, minmatar ones are only good/better if you have t2 sentries
• caldari missileboats are wide spread and all have some culture, whereas minmatar has few but good: hound, talwar, cyclone, typhoon

Caldari missiles cannot go wrong, minmatar you need to know what you're doing. Both are represented in PVP, the pve endgame is golem/cnr/rattlesnake vs. typhoon variants. Typhoons are awesome but I quickly degenerated to picking golem because of missile flight time and brains free pve.

there is only 1 missile race and that's caldari.
minmatar have missile turrets on like 2 fairly mediocre ships, amarr missile ships are all pretty awful and you should feel bad about fitting missiles on what should be laser ships.