EVE New Citizens Q&A

Just train them on your current character. There are several general support skills you'd have to train to fly the ships well anyways. Think skills like electronics, gunnery, mechanics, weapon upgrades. You'd have to do all those twice.

You it's only a few thousand ISK and couple hours to catch up to what a new Amarr character would have really.

Eve's unique training mechanic means it's never really better to train an alt to do something. Your main will have the core skills already done that would need to be repeated for each character. The Nav tree for example is universal. New toons mean retraining this whole tree needlessly.

Just train it on your main.

Solai, I have to disagree. Unless that alt NEVER undocks, then you will need to retrain all the basic skills all ships use. Maybe not to the levels of a PvP toon, but you must duplicate some of that effort with any new toon. Given that you can only train one toon at a time per acct (ignoring CCP incentives like paying a plex), it is just wasted time to retrain those skills.

This toon for example has piddling industrial skills in favor of intensive combat skill training. If I needed to do industrial tasks for some reason, there is no benefit to creating a whole new toon to train those skills.I would have to suspend combat skill training on this toon just the same whether I put indy skills in this que or create another toon to do it in.

So- if I suddenly wanted to become a miner, I would be far better off training those skills on this toon and undocking a mining barge with max agility, hull EHP, resists, and fitting room- than creating a new toon for it and either having to retrain all that, or accept an inferior toon in every other regard. Like the adage goes- you can't really catch up to an older toon in Eve. No real benefit trying.

Unless......

Alts tend to be used primarily to dodge game mechanics. Low sec status, war decs, getting more research slots to benefit the main toon.....while I'm not going to cast stones at the practice, I am saying that an honest appraisal of almost any alt will be that it's working around some game limitation.

Lastly, your advice of making an Amarr or Caldari combat alt because everyone does is flawed. PvP does not reward dabbling with in Eve. To train a combat toon to be much more than cannon fodder requires a heavy investment in skill training (not to mention actual experience on your part). Thus, you negate your own argument. Anything but a throwaway scout alt for your actual PvP toon will require lengthy training to be average at best.
In six months you can have one excellent toon ready to branch out to most anything in Eve, or have three toons that can each do one or two things as long as it doesn't include undocking.
Your game, play how you want. But Eve's class-less skill system specifically removes the incentive for multiple toons.

But Solai, the normal training mechanics mean that on a single acct, I would not be training combat skills anyway if I were training indy skills, regardless of what character the training is being done on. By training anything else, on any of the three toon slots per acct, I have to either stop training on this toon or train the skill directly to this toon. I can only train one skill at a time per acct, not per toon I create.

Eve doesn't use a class-based paradigm. So there is little point in having a 'PvP toon' and an 'indy' toon and a 'hauler alt' unless you need to get around game mechanics. They are convenient, but by definition every moment training one takes away from training the others.

For example this toon's career is PvP pilot, but I can also do PI to pay the bills and do invention, plus haul my own stuff around. It wouldn't benefit me to have another toon to do the same. In fact, if I'm ever caught out in my PI hauler, I have a better chance of survival with this highly trained toon than a mediocre alt. This guy will have a full T2 tank, rigs, ability to OH in a pinch....this toon may well escape where a poor cousin alt gets podded.

I didn't misread you, what I disagreed with was forcing a class system on Eve toons. Having a 'combat toon' and an 'indy toon' and a 'hauler toon' flies in the face of the entire system Eve is based on. Beyond that, a great many of the skills you train are not mutually exclusive like mining and gunnery. The entire Nav tree and core engineering skills for example. You'd be better off with one toon that has max cap in every ship versus three toons that cap out trying to warp across a system.

You CAN have both indy and combat in one toon, it just takes time. I think it'll take longer trying to cook up multiple toons to only do single tasks.
But like I said, it's just a game, so whether you are training at max efficiency is for nerds. Just have fun with it.

That would be a different situation entirely. A whole other acct is not the de facto method of playing Eve. It's common, but is not the paradigm I'd default to when talking to a new player. This is new citizens sub-forum after all.

I do not believe the OP was talking about creating an entire new acct, but cross training his one and only acct main character. That is a very common question in the new citizens forum, and rarely is it in reference to other acct's.