EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello to you all,

I am a newborn capsuleer. One week ago i upgraded to the full game, and i am really loving it so far.

I have a question about pursuing a millitary career. If i choose the military path, i will try to work towards a specialist ship and role. This ship and role ,i will try to know inside out. I want to exist in some way or another. But is that still possible? Or am i lagging behind so much in terms of SP that i will never be able to carry specialist duties in the field?

Furthermore do you have some advice regarding the realization of this goal. Like : is it beneficial to engage in factional warfare? Or maybe there are corps that train new military capsuleers?

Greets,

Specializing in a specific role is a very good idea. In fact, that's the only way you can catch up to more experience players. The way this works is that there's a maximum level of skill you can have and a limited number of skills that affect any one ship. Also, if you avoid the very long train to level V until it's absolutely necessary, you can become almost as good as veteran players in certain things in a relatively short amount of time.

In EVE, specialization is the key to "catching up" to older players. They'll always have the edge of versatility on you, but you can become just as good as they are in certain roles.

In other words, your small investment in the Gunnery tree makes you 90% as effective as a veteran at the game. His 30 million SP bundled up in Science and Corporate Management skills will be USELESS in a fight against you and your frigate. Add a friend into the equation and suddently you have the advantage over such a player. Chosing a few paths to focus on at the start of your Eve carreer will quickly see you surpass years-old characters in those specific areas. More SP usually means more versatility, as pretty much every character has a few areas of expertise depending on playstyle and carreer choices.

As above poster pointed out, the best way to really know your role is to get into a Fleet with friends, spend some ISK on getting well fitted ships and just try stuff. The rules of the game change with updates, so there's really no substitute for first hand experience. There's inspiring stuff on the web but at times external sources are a bit misleading due to their age. As for FW, there are entire corporations dedicated to FW, so you shouldn't have much difficulty finding one. And if that doesn't work, you can always start one yourself ;-)

You will NEVER catch up in skill points with old characters.

You however can catch up in abilities to fly ships and in knowledge about the game.

All skills cap out at 5, for you as well for that 2007 character.
And only a certain amount of skills work for 1 ship and it's modules. A 2007 character can have maxed out his Large Beam Laser Specialization skill to 5, but if he is in a frigate, all those skillpoints used on anything other then small laser stuff will not help him.

More SP in EVE just means that the person has more choices to choose from.

Another example could be that you have 5mil SP in combat and fight a 50mil SP character who is only specced in Industry, which means you likely win.

Some people also don't know all the game mechanics, if you however do learn about them, this gives you another edge.

So, yes, although you are way behind on the skillpoints with older characters. You can still be competitive. Specializing in something will help with that as you can focus more on 1 or 2 things.

Ths is a recruitment ad, like several of your other posts in the new players forums and as such is not allowed as you well know. Putting something in brackets does not magically make it legal.

OP:

Plenty of really good corps out there that will be happy to train new players. Bare in mind though that some degree of personal study will greatly increase your chances of meshing with any more experienced players. Most decent pilots are happy to answer important questions, but if it degenerates into long drawn out explanations of things you should have read on google you may find yourself feeling a little ignored.

Best of luck capsuleer, get in touch if you need anything.

You probably won't want to specialize in just ONE ship; this game is set up for us to use ships like tools, whatever's appropriate for the task at hand.

Specializing in combat (as opposed to industry, trading, mining, etc.) means that you will have to train the myriad of support skills that make your ship fly better, to a higher level than the pacifist industry guys. Electronics, Engineering, Navigation, Mechanics, a bit of Science, those are support skills. If a skill has in its description that it improves armor, shields, speed, targeting, capacitor juice, and resistances, or lets you use modules that improve these things, you train it.

As far as what ship, CCP will change the lineup a little bit next week, to make it more balanced, so that you can better focus on a single race's ships and not have to multi-train. Unless you want to.

But, basically, you can start with frigates and move up the size category, to destroyer, cruiser, battlecruiser, battleship. As you go bigger you switch from fast nimble to slower, armored, and heavy duty damage.

Or, you can decide to stop at frigates or at cruisers, and then progress sideways into the Tech 2 (Advanced Ships) lineup; these ships are of the same size as their Tech 1 counterparts, but offer better resistances / survivability, or specialized roles such as Interception, Cloaked Ops, Electronic Warfare, Logistics (healing), Command, etc. The ships themselves are much more expensive (as expensive as battleships, or worse), but they have specialized roles that they perform VERY well in a fleet situation.

No matter what you decide, you also need to train, a little bit, some of the industry stuff. EVE is set up so that you can put a few quick points in some useful skills and get HUGE use out of them. For example, a few points in Trade and a few points in Retail won't take you more than a few hours, but will increase the number of orders you can put on the market from 5 to 29, so you can sell your loot better. You can put a few points into an Industrial ship so you can have a hauler to move your loot around. A few points into Refining so you can reprocess whatever ore you may happen upon. Mining skill lets you strap a mining laser and take advantage of some of the really rich ore that may be in whatever pocket / instance of space you're finding yourself in.

Do the tutorial missions and talk to each of the 5 career agents you get sent to, in turn. They'll give you an idea of what you may want to be doing in the game, and even what you can expect from PVP or PVE.

There are a lot of long posts here. in short: don't worry about your SP. Find a role you want to fill ie: fast tackle, heavy brawler, etc. and just get good at it. Dont waste your time training stuff you do not need or is not going to help you master that role. Once you master a role, then move on to another. This is the only difference between a new player who has trained one or two roles and an old player who has many roles to choose from.

Don't join any ****** half-assed corp or you will regret it. Do proper research on their Killboards, public channels, Eve who, etc. Best advice I can give you. Goodluck o7

You really need to decide what sort of combat you are looking for, then you can specialise to suit. If you wanna go into big 0.0 fights then you are best speccing into the fotm BS/BC fits, which will probably be changing next week. If you want to do more leet small gang orientated stuff then really speccing into a role like logistics or heavy tackle (minmatar/gallente t3/recon) might be better. A specialised dictor pilot is always very popular in 0.0 but is useless in empire. T3 combat fits are very popular in wormholes. So you see its easier to specialise once you know what game style you want.

All of those are more heavy sp roles and should be seen more as a goal though, but even at this early stage you want to be heading in the right direction once you have learned the basics of combat in your condor. If you want to fly caldari recons in gangs then you are best getting into griffins/blackbirds asap (though these are useless solo). If you want to fly logistics you should get into the t1 logi frigates/cruisers when they are released on Dec 5th (again useless solo. If you want to fly dps in 0.0 blobs then you want to get to cruisers and then bcs as quick as possible.

Okay guys, show's over...

We can show our true self again.

Yeah yeah... i am sure you'll kill me in the field, without ever showing the kindness you showed in this thread. haha