EVE General Discussion

I'm sure I am just missing something about the mechanics, but it appears that when you begin training a skill, you get a bunch of free starting points, which I assume are to offset for you current attributes. Are those extra points saved to that skills training right then, or only truly applied at the end of the skill training? Obviously if it is at the beginning as it sort of appears to be, that would mean that you should tick one point on every skill that you have maximized attributes for before doing remaps. This could end up saving months of training time for long train time lvl 5 skills.

The main thing leading me to believe they are added at the beginning is the Aura android app. It shows in yellow all skills partially trained, and seems to include that offset.

Thanks for any clarifications.

Skill level progression isn't linear. You still need to invest the SAME points, depending on the skill rank. If you have any free skill points, you can either notch up a number of low rank skills or spend it all on one skill - makes no difference, except in the former, you'd be spreading your training of skills all over the place. Depending on the situation, assuming one is a total newbie char, bringing up several core skills to a min Lv3 might be a good idea - especially if your current attribute mapping isn't ideally suited for the skill. tl;dr Spend free skill points for skills on opposite side of your attribute mapping.

Other than that, the only char optimization possible is through a) careful skill selection & specialization area and b) attribute optimization + implants that boosts related attributes.

I don't think any of this addresses my question. I'm not talking about free points from patches. I'm talking about the points you start with the second you begin to train a completely new skill level.

I think I just figured out what was throwing me off. the trained / total you can see in training queue must be the total points from level 0 to level 5 of that skill... True?

I was under the impression that those points were per level, since it seems silly to have two separate measures of the same progression. If this is true then levels and points trained are just different precision of the same measurement.

Think of each level as a milestone on the same path.

A skill partially trained to lvl IV will include all the points from the previous levels, and the progress to the next level.

Actually, skill points = how far you've trained.

Trained to level 1 = 250 points accumulated.
2 = 1,414
3 = 8,000
4 = 45,255
5 = 256,000

At each level you get another (square) dot in the bar, and the skill gives more bonus. So if the skill gives 5% per level, when you have 3 dots it will give 15%. Note that each 5% (each level) takes exponentially longer to train - you can spend several days trying to get that last 5% (from 4 to 5).

Skills also have RANK, and the rank is the difficulty of the skill. So a rank 8 battleship skill will actually require:

1 = 2,000
2 = 11,312
3 = 64,000
4 = 362,040
5 = 2,048,000 points.

You could spend months to get a high rank skill from 4 to 5.

Luckily, most prerequisites for T2 modules require the previous skills trained to level 3. For T2 weapons you need to train some lower rank prerequisites to 5, takes a bit longer. And for the specialized T2 and T3 ships, you need to also train several prerequisite skills to 4 and 5, also takes a bit.

EDIT: Other games have "classes" (warrior, wizard, etc.) that limit what "skills" you have. Here, there are no limits; do whatever you want, but you have to look at the benefits and stop yourself at "good enough" (level 3 or 4 trained).

Some skills are worth training to 5 (very few skills affect power grid and CPU for example, which are extremely limited on all your ships and prevent you from installing everything you'd want), and other skills must be trained to 5 because they are a prerequisite for some ship that you want. But otherwise, always stop at "good enough."

Thank you for the info. I did understand most of what was explained here. My issue was only with my interpretation of what the trained points started from. As mentioned, I see that they start from where they left off on the last level, and I understand now that the total points represents the total points to the next level. It all makes sense now.

Assuming you are looking at the in game queue:

What you're seeing is SP trained in the skill for the level you have / SP needed for the next level of that skill.

The first number starts from 0 SP and increases continually with the added SP from training time.

The second is the total SP needed in that skill for whatever the next level is rather than level 5.

Playing around with the queue it does look like it says you already have the SP for level 1 of a skill after adding it if you never put any training time in it when looking on the left pane, which is odd.