EVE New Citizens Q&A

Exploration will fund itself. The tutorials/career agents will gave you a basic starting ship and enough ISK to fit it, no need to mission unless you enjoy that too, however I would focus on one profession at first. Don't spread yourself too thin.

The income from mining and low level missions pales in comparison to what you can earn in a T1 exploration frigate in low or null sec (even if you take into account ship losses, you WILL lose ships...) . Once you get lvl 3 or 4 missions that starts to catch up, but mining will always be poor ISK.

There are no "mission running" skills. You can categorize the skills into the following broad groups:

- Ship skills (Spaceship Command) - these will unlock ships for you to be able to fly

- Weapon skills (Gunnery, Missiles, Drones) - train the weapons that the ships you like will use

- Support skills (Armor, Shields, Navigation, Targeting, Engineering, Mechanic, etc.) - these will make ALL your ships better by virtue of more armor, more shields, faster speed, more target locks, etc.

A combat pilot will end up with more than 160 different skills.

The skill system isn't like in other MMO's where each class / profession has only a handful of skills; in this game it's more like attending school and taking dozens of very focused classes - 5% armor, 5% armor resistance, 5% armor repair rate, and so on, with all the little 5%'s adding up to more than double or triple the performance when you add it all in.

Open the market and look at the Skills category. Read the descriptions of the skills and you'll find many that are useful. Prioritize your training from the 3 categories above: train each ship tier, then its weapons, then the support skills (the higher level missions will require bigger / tougher ships and you can't fly those without good support skills).

EDIT: Ship plans:

Mining:
Venture (frigate), then mining barges, then Tech2 barges (exhumers) and T2 version of Venture = Prospector.
Also you'll need some of the Resource Processing skills to be able to refine the ores you mine.
And you'll need Industrial ships to be able to move the ore around to the markets.
And possibly Trade skills to cut down some of the taxes and to be able to sell with multiple sales orders.

Missions:
Your limiting factor will be the standings with the various agents, so train the Social skills to improve those and the mission rewards.
The ships progress from Frigate (Level 1 missions) to Cruiser (Level 2) to battlecruiser (L3) to Battleship (L4), and you have to train the weapons and support skills that go with the ships, because the missions will get tough and you'll need solid shields/armor and performance or you'll lose the ships.

Exploration:
Initial ships: exploration frigates (look at the ISIS ship database in-game), they have bonuses to scanning or probing
Continue with CovOps cloaking device and Tech 2 cov-ops frigates and possibly cov-ops recon cruisers.
Possibly also train T2 heavy attack cruisers (HAC) or other heavy combat ships, as some sites require damage.
And also T3 cruisers, which are modular and can let you set up a ship with cloaking AND probes AND heavy damage.

Thank you everyone for your input!

The ship type progressions laid out are really helpful as well, because I think Evemon will let me select a ship and then calculate the most efficient order to train.

Also, how does everyone feel about the certificates in the game in terms of their usefulness to new players? So if my end goal is to get a Drake, should I bother altering my skill plan based on the certificates?

I did find out that that SoE epic story line offers the best exploration scanners/probes and that this epic arc is the "easiest" so do you all think that should be a short term / medium term goal for me? Putting my exploration foot forward as it were?

Thanks again,
Miyamoto Musashi

Any skill listed in mastery level III certificate is probably a good skill to have. The actual skill LEVEL recommendations are a bit nonsense, though. So, like, if you see a certificate recommendation for Navigation V, Navigation is a good skill to have but getting it to level V is probably not necessary.

Actually, general rule of thumb with skills: don't ever take something to V unless you have a specific reason to want it (e.g. it's a prereq for some module/skill you want) and have done the math yourself. If it's someone's recommendation, lay off on accepting it until you're 100% in line with the reasoning.

In addition, the mastery V certificates are a load of wishful thinking filled with skills that likely won't ever apply to your flying.

As for the SoE epic, do it, but it's not really a 'goal' so much as part of the training section of the game. You can only do it once every 4 months or something, so it's not like it can be your central Eve activity.

This is a game the important thing to do is have fun. If you like exploring then explore. If you spend some time in the market UI getting familiar with skills and ships and modules and such you will gain a better understand of the game. I think "window shopping" like that is a good practice for newer players to get familiar with what is out there.

As far as exploring goes it's not a huge mystery what you need for that. Each of the 4 empire races has a T1 and T2 frigate that is bonused for scanning. The scanning skills themselves are located in one section. Scan strength is important but you get if from so many sources. The deviation helps if you jump down a range on the probes and loose the signal or if you have it high enough sometimes you can skip a range on your way down. The scan time only helps with speed so while certainly not useless it does not affect you ability to get the signal to 100%.

After the scanning skills you will need to get archaeology and hacking up those will be very helpful. Then work on getting a covert ops cloak and T2 cov ops frig.

To make good isk you will want to start jumping into wormholes that you find in high sec as soon as you feel comfortable. Make sure that you are in a cheap clone and cheap ship as you will loose ships in wormholes. Read up on wormholing as there are some basics that can make you time in them easier and more enjoyable like not forgetting to bookmark you exit. Learn how to use D scan. In general just read up on exploration.

Mining is not good isk but if you enjoy it do it.

NPC combat like mission and anoms and the like can be decent isk and the skill transfer to PvP so it's probably decent to train into. Where exploration will take you if you keep at it is eventually wormhole life. That will involve PvP so training the combat skills will be helpful regardless of if you ever mission or not.

Just as a side note we don't really have "stats" in this game. That may sound like nit picking but it is an important distinction IMHO. As I am sure you have noticed there are more skills to train than can be trained in the time this game has been around so no one is "all level 5" everyone has different skill points and there are so many different ways that you can fit ships and just approach piloting in general. There is no one right way to do anything in this game. So get used to finding your way. Anyone that tells you that you must do XYZ or that they have "the ideal fit" for some ship or something like that is either lying or does not know what they are talking about. You will come across doctrines so that everyone in fleet can fit into a specific MO for that evening but there is no right way.

TL;dr
There are not that many scanning skills so train them up then work on combat skills.

I did not see this addressed in any of the posts.

Those implants you got through the redeeming system are proably not the bet things to use at the moment. Expensive to replace if you get podded and they are a somewhat limited give away in that each account only got one set of them.

But even better than avoiding getting podded ... is having a couple of jump clones around for all the riskier space and stuff. Being able to pod yourself back to your staging system for re-shipping without further loss is a real quality of life feature. So I have an expensive "learning" clone in highsec (for times of inactivity) and a couple of cheap PvP clones placed across all of New Eden.

That is a really good point about pods!

I just completed the Military arc tutorial where you must destroy a pirate leader's pod and it got me thinking more about. Once I finish up the Industrial/Business arc tutorials I will set up some cheapish clones. Hopefully I won't lose too many SP when I do! Hah!.

This thread has been so helpful, thank you everyone again!

Please add me as a contact, would love to chat more!

Miyamoto Musashi

A couple caveats on these things:

1. With the recent addition of T3 destroyers, CCP has re-introduced the old "insta-lock everything faster than a server cycle, including pods" mechanic that they explicitly removed from the game a few years ago. This is why you're going to get different answers regarding how much danger your pod is in in low/high-sec. Six months ago your pod was in basically zero danger so long as you spammed warp. Now certain ships will kill you literally before your client registers that you're in a pod.

So... basically, assume you'll lose a couple pods when you start doing PvP, and use clones without particularly big implants at first, etc.

2. You no longer lose SP when your pod is killed. Woo.

3. Setting up Jump Clones requires joining a corporation with 8.0 standing in a station with a medical bay, or getting that standing yourself. Remember that any corporation you join will show up in your employment history later, so make sure it's one that's actually known for having people temporarily join to make jump clones. Or preferably one you want to join permanently anyhow.

4. A specific implant you might want to think about for your cheap clones is Zor's custom navigation link. It's not exceptionally good, but it's reasonably useful and it's crazy cheap since it drops in a very common mission and isn't in high demand.

5. On the note of training implants (e.g. +2 intelligence etc): gained training speed is gradually being phased out of the game, so there's not a huge difference between a +2 implant, which you can probably easily afford, and a +5 implant which you'll basically never want to buy ever. What can make a substantial difference is remapping your stats; as a new player I'd recommend using one of your initial remaps to split your movable points between intelligence, perception, and memory. You can fine-tune it more than that, but that'll elevate how much you get out of the skills you usually train in your first month or two by quite a bit.

Sharpshooter mode with a Svipul. Double res on a ship that's already got the typical minmatar fast lock and plenty of slots to boost it further without reducing your alpha too much. Can lock a pod in 1-2 seconds without any kind of third-party boosting, meaning you can potentially be pointed before the server accepts any commands from you after your hull goes boom.

So technically it's just one of the T3 destroyers, the Amarr one can't do it.

Usually used at station camps in low-sec, since in null someone would bring out a hefty enough boat to just deal with your alpha and poke you back in short order, and it's a bit expensive for suicide use at the moment.