EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi!

This weekend I encountered some rats in a belt, which jammed me. Without being able to target anything, I am not able to shoot. As a Caldari, I assume that I can fight these rats with autotargeting missiles. But since, as an alpha clone, I cannot learn to use these missiles, how can I fight ships using ECM on me?

Fly safe!

If you fit a sensor booster with an ECCM script, it will increase your ships sensor strength. A higher sensor strength means that it's harder to get jammed. It can still happen, but since jamming is chance based chances are that the NPC will lose jam on you the next cycle.

Another thing would be drones (if your ship has a drone bay). Drones have they're own target lock, so if you manage to send your drones after the jamming ship they don't lose their target lock only because you get jammed.

Jamming/ECM in eve is chance based, meaning that a jam has a certain chance to hit on every cycle of the jammer. So only because the rat jams you once does not mean that you'll stay jammed indefinitely. If you can tank for the jam-cycle then just wait it out.
most NPC that jam you are frigates. Shoot them first, they should go down quite fast.

I've tried to wait out the jam, but the rats didn't miss a cycle.

Drones are tricky: when I launch them, after I've been targeted, I can't send them to fight (lock missing), when I start them early, they might get target by the rats. I've got the feeling, that drones, even when set to agressive, only start fighting on their own, when they see someone targeting me. When I launch them after I was targeted and jammed, they keep idling. Is drone agression supposed to work like this?

I will try ECCM the next time. I hope the boost to targeting strength will work.

But seriously: every other faction can fight their pirates just fine. Why is it so complicated to do simple ratting in high sec with Caldari?

You're seeing why electronic warfare (and ECM in particular) is so hated and effective. Being perma-jammed happens in PVP, too, and the ways to deal with it have been outlined above.

- Kill the offending frigate before it establishes a target lock or turns on its jammers.
- Bring a friend to kill the frigate that jams you.
- Use ECCM or sensor boosters to increase your ship's sensor strength and decrease the chances of being jammed.
- Use bigger ships (stronger sensors).
- Use drones on aggressive mode (but you have to have them deployed and set to aggressive BEFORE the enemies start shooting you).
- Use FoF missiles (they are actually so ineffective that most people don't bother).

In the case of Guristas and PVE NPCs in general, a few things are happening:
- The NPCs cheat (to simplify the load on the server) and have longer ranges and no capacitor issues with their jammers
- The devs have not taken the time to improve the NPC AI to make it "somewhat fair" so they stop jamming every now and then

So you're pretty much limited to "bring a friend" and "kill them before they jam you". For the second option, you can spoiler the missions by looking them up on EVE-Survival.org so you know when you're facing ECM jammers, and which ships to kill first.

While not strictly suitable in the OP's context, could target breakers be applied to a useful positive effect vs gurista ecm? (Much like eccm)

If you launch drones after the rats target you, they do not engage, because you were targetted before they were launched. I.e. the agression has already occurred. But if they go after your drones, just do some micro managing, and recall the drone that is taking damage, back to your drone bay, and then relaunch it after a few seconds.

And yes, every faction has their annoyances. Try the gallente rats, they decrease your lock range and targetting speed which can be annoying too. Or the tracking disruptors from amar that cause your weapons to miss. Atleast with jamming, theres a chance for it to fail.

Double post, so I'll make use of it...


Honestly, CCP probably just forgot about ECM. Alpha clones are brand new and they had a million players complaining about different parts of their proposal before release so things are easily missed. If you feel like it's not on par with the other races in difficulty/frustration you could head over to the Ascension feedback thread and bring it up.

In the meantime, just avoid guristas with ECM and see if you like the rest of the game enough to sub.

Signal Amplifier module in the low-slot will also help your sensor strength.

Using a Sensor Booster is probably the best option. It improves your locking time and adds to your sensor strength (without a script).

Larger ships generally have higher signal strength, particularly the T1 hulls.

You can warp to a BM on the same grid, as long as it is more then 150km from your current position. You may be able to BM a spot just after warping into the grid in question.