Warfare & Tactics

There are four of us, two of us have played a little before and kept training skills and the other two are brand new. We are wanting to do some pvp but we don't really know anything about anything and so I guess the point of this is to ask where to start.

My character has Minmatar frigates/destroyers/cruisers/bcs all to 4-5 and Caldari frigates/cruisers/bcs to 3-4, and about 4.5m total sp.

My friend has Gallente ships all the way to battleships and a ton of points in drones, with about 16m total sp.

We kind of know the basics of how webs and warp scramblers work and a our combat knowledge is basic as far as how ships of different sizes and with different types of weapons fight each other.

What ship makeup would you suggest for the four of us and what is a good way to get into some fun pvp without just getting destroyed by a veteran corp.

4 Derptrons until you figure out what you are doing. Consider joining FW so you can use the plexes to trap people as well as make some isk while you are at it.

Four folk should be enough to generate your own content IMO.

You can grind missions together to buy some disposable frigates and pest yourself a new roaming ground every week while your burn through your stock pile.

If you can ensure that everyone can afford the losses, you'll be in a position to start developing your own strategies based on how everyone is flying which will almost guanrantee your group making your own skill plans based on what your group dynamics require / want to try.

With four people, you can even get the initial hang of PVP just by joining/ starting your own corp and dueling it out without concord showing up. Biggest pain most folk face is the choice between 'lose ISK learning/ make enough ISK so losses are affordable".

Four people should be able to fit out plenty of disposable practice frigates with one or two level four missions being completed by the whole group and pooling the earnings and salvage.

Just start real cheap when your starting out and each frigate should only run a couple mil each on the high end. The focus during this development time is on mechanics, not min/max eft numbers, so you can safely ignore t2 gear when flying as a group at the start.

The derptron recommendation earlier is spot on for this type of thing. You can even have one of your buddies be the
Bad guy in your duals, stick him in a belt and have him try to evade the other three.

Best of luck, and welcome to Eve :)

As you develop your strategy, consider having one player train into a covert ops ship so that can they scout, probe and provide cloaked warpins to unsuspecting targets.

Since you guys are all ready friends and (I assume) have the same playing time it really shouldn't be hard to coordinate an organized roam. 4 organized people, even at low sp, are enough to take on much greater numbers in FW areas. You should consider viable gang comps that fit your play styles. Do you guys like kiting at range and picking off isolated members of gangs or having a massive tank and face tanking everything in a brawl? I suggest starting with t1 frigs and maybe some dessies.

If you want to kite, run 3 long range dps + maulus. For dps ships I suggest LML kestrel or talwar. The maulus takes about 2 weeks to get frig 5 + relevant ewar skills to 4. Maulus counters other ewar and prevents other ships with projection from locking and hitting your guys. Very strong.

For brawling you could run 4 RR tristans. They tank a ton and do decent dps. 2 guys have scrams and 2 guys have webs.

Now that i am done with my shameless recruiting message, i will drop a few thinks i would do with your gang.

The gangs i roll with tend to range from kitchen sink to strict specialized fits. Gods Apples touched on this with the RR tristans and ewar compliment and i would like to go further into this.

I would recommend as one of your gang comps to be 2 facemelting dps, 1 dps w/utility and 1 ewar.

So for example you could have 2 blaster cormorants, 1 brick tanked punisher and 1 griffin.

The main strategy is to bait with the punisher. so you have your gang hold on the ingate while your punisher scans the system for targets. say he scans down a caracal in a medium. He goes and as he slides into the plex, your gang jumps in and warps to the plex. Even if the caracal sees the local spike and decides to try and bail, the punisher should have landed and be locking it up. Once everyone piles in, the 2 facemelters start doing their thing, the griffin jams the caracal. its GG for the caracal.

you can change and swap your comp around as you see fit, like gods apples suggested a maulus is pretty good for kiters, the griffin is OP with its jam strength, tracking disrupters from a crucifier would be pretty devastating for a gunboat. You can also swap the Ewar for logi as you see fit. you would be surprised how many people wont change targets from the one being repped to the repper itself :)

This is just a small facet of small gang. Enjoy your time, dont get too butt hurt over losing ships.

I hope this helps.

Fly dangerously o7

If we are not all from the same faction, will that be a problem for doing FW? I think we are 2 min and 2 gallente.

Learn how to pvp while blowing up more than cheap frigates! Interested? Go from carebear to killer here! http://evedarklord.blogspot.com/2014/03/carebear-to-killer.html?m=1 where else can you pop a 500mil battleship in a solo t1 frigate?

Hisec carebear killing teaches you all the necessary skills for full time merc work. Yeah there's more to being a merc, but with mission flipping you are practicing probing, spiraling, micromanaging, and much more... All while flying cheap ships. Not to mention, the meta is delish!

Could we join FW as our little noob corporation with just the four of us in it or would we not be able to do anything?