EVE New Citizens Q&A

joining a corp will provide people to lpay with, generally.
Corporation Icon on your neocom (bar on side of screen)
1 of the search filters you can specify is 'new player friendly'

if they have that that means they are prepared to answer questions, give advice etc etc


no it's not to late

Your plan is to have a plan, and you need help figuring out what that plan should be...

Ok.

First of all, how to build characters in general:

Starting over loses your previously-accumulated skillpoints, but if you don't like your old char you don't like it, shrug. In general, you can group skills into 4 categories:

- ship skills, under Spaceship Command, that unlock new ships for you.

- support skills, under Engineering, Electronics, Navigation, Mechanic, some Science, some Trade, etc., that make all your ships tougher, faster, easier to fit, etc.

- weapon skills, under Gunnery, Missiles, and/or Drones - you pick the weapons that fit the ships you're currently training for, and then also train the weapon upgrades, rapid fire, long range shooting, and so on, skills, to make those weapons do better DPS.

- non-combat skills, under Industry, Science, the rest of Trade, Social - these skills let you mine, refine, manufacture, trade better, do invention, manage a corporation or a corp's assets (such as player-owned stations), etc.

Pretty simple. The thing is, weaponry and ship skills usually use Per/Wil as their attributes, and support and non-combat skills usually use Int/Mem. For best skillpoints/hr you want to remap your attributes to Per+++ / Wil ++ and train some gunnery and ship skills, then remap to Int/Mem and train support skills. Unfortunately, if you want to get in a ship you need everything, ship, guns, and support skills, and the plan above might make you sit in station and get bored waiting for skills.

So, instead of that, you can try a Per/Int plan, and then just train whatever you need training and not worry about planning.

Second, making ISK, is currently done via mostly PVE (mining, missions, trading), and it's somewhat of a grind. You can make ok money, but the rest of the playerbase is bragging about billions, so don't get discouraged. If it helps, remember that if you pay just an extra couple months subscription for a plex, you can get your billion ISK from it, should you need it.

I would advise to do the tutorial and the Career missions from those 5 agents. CCP has done a decent job to kinda show you what mining, trading, exploration, PVE combat, and dying in PVP combat are all about.

Abilities that you'll need no matter what kind of pilot you're building:

- the ability to fly an industrial ship for hauling your ore to base, your stuff to sell, your minerals to wherever, the modules you buy to base, and so on. Every pilot needs an industrial ship, there's just too much junk around to not have a hauler.

- a couple points in the skill Trade and a couple points in the skill Retail will increase your ability to put orders on the market from 5 to 29, and 29 is more adequate than 5, and it only takes a couple hours to train.

- one point in the skill Cybernetics, so you can get some relatively cheap +3 implants and insert them so you speed up your skill training by a bit. In the long run, it helps quite a bit.

Otherwise, each race has its own line of ships, and CCP is re-balancing the T1 versions (which you'll have access to first) to make them more equal in capabilities. As such, you can probably specialize in one race rather than having to pick multiples.

Caldari ships are about shield tanking and railguns + missiles. They have ECM as their preferred ewar (and ECM unlocks targets, so it's quite powerful, as without targets you can't shoot). Shield tanks usually respond fast to damage; you turn your modules on and the repair happens pretty fast, so it's currently preferred for high-sec incursions and other PVE.

Gallente ships are about armor tanking, blasters (or railguns), and drones. Armor tanking is more sluggish to respond to damage, and you have to have nerves to let your shield go completely before you start defending yourself, but the advantage is that it frees up medium slots for better capacitor recharge or for PVP modules such as warp disruptors or webifiers. Blasters are short range guns which means you need to get close and have a solid tank to take the damage while you dish out yours, and the drones used to be very good for PVE but are probably going to be less easy to use now that CCP is upgrading the NPC AI to respond to and destroy them. As far as ewar, Gallente have dampeners, which reduce the enemy's targetting range or speed, meaning they're forced to come close to shoot you.

Minmatar ships are all about speed; they have the slots to either armor or shield tank, and usually use projectiles (short or long range) and missiles. Very versatile ships, very popular ships for PVP as you can really surprise your opponent with how you fit. Also, they're fast. The downside is that you have to train a lot more support skills to be effective: armor AND shields, projectiles AND missiles, AND some drones.

Amarr ships are armor-tanked and use lasers, and some drones. They have really nice armor defenses, and lasers don't need ammo so you can stay in the field for longer. They are, however, very susceptible to capacitor drains (energy neutralizer modules), but for battleship fleet warfare they're preferred / used very often.

The sub-capital ships progress from frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, to battleships. Frigates typically tackle, scout, probe, explore, etc,. but you certainly can do the lower level missions in them and/or PVP vs. other frigates. As you progress up the chain, the ships get slower and you must invest in some sort of defense (armor or shield) and pay attention to your juice (capacitor) and weapon usage (tracking, size of target, resistances of target, etc). The roles get narrowed down to DPS, unless you train for Tech 2 (Advanced) ships such as Interceptors, Stealth Bombers, Recons, Logistics, etc.

Not sure if you mean start a new character fresh.

If so Don't do it dude!

As has been said, those skills you already have will always be useful.

Exploration is very hit and miss as an income source. I can go through system after system after system and get nothing but wormholes and gravs (my patience to run gravimetric sites is limited to 1 or 2 a night) , and then in the next system get a combat site dropping faction and deadspace loot totalling over 200mil. Or find a couple of radar sites dropping 30mil worth of invention materials. The isk/h is very variable and, as long as you can actually scan and run the sites, largely independant of character skills and starting cash.

I wouldn't scrap your old character. It'll save you a couple of months training up valuable support skills, even if you don't use the race specific ones. For exploration, decent scanning skills (so train pinpointing and rangefinding to a reasonable level) and a scanning bonused ship (Each race has a T1 frigate bonused in scanning. Upgrade to a cov-ops or even T3 cruiser with emergent locus analyser in the long run) will help you scan sites faster and easier. Consider throwing in the skills for hacking and archeology to run magnometric and radar sites

For combat, in terms of exploration a cruiser should be able to handle most sites (check online for guides to see how difficult each site is). A heavy assault cruiser (or HAC) will clear sites even faster so upgrade to this or faction when you can. Your ultimate goal is a T3 to combine combat and your scanning needs. They're expensive but they're on par with a HAC for combat and have bonuses to scanning on the side. I wouldn't bother training battlecruiser and above until you're ready to start PvP or you want to move onto higher level PvE. A battlecruiser won't fit in most high-sec sites and when you start PvP you will lose a lot of ships at first. Frigates, destroyers and cruisers are much cheaper to lose then battlecruisers.

And it's never too late to join EVE. EVE needs new blood and a newbie with a few brain cells to rub together can become competitive with vets quicker than you might think.

Also, the people suggesting finding a player corp have the right idea.