EVE New Citizens Q&A

Ultimately that's something for you to decide on your own based on what you want from eve.

To help weigh up the benefits of a L5 skill it helps to look at what it enables (skills, ships or modules), how long it takes, and what % boost it gives to important attributes.

Then look at the L1-4 skills your thinking of training, do the same analysis. Then compare them both to how they will help you do what you want to do.

You can at times get the ', I NEED both!!' moment, then I usually prioritise by time taken to train.

hope this rambling helps

Eve rewards the versatile generalist more often than it rewards the specialist. The specialist will see a small edge in combat, or some other specific activity of the brief moment, but the generalist will see an edge at all other times. For this reason, you gain more power by picking out the 'low-hanging fruit' as soon as you can, which necessarily means skipping the lvl 5 skills for later.

There are exceptions. Some skills have a x1 multiplier, and their rank 5 doesn't take long to get. This can be considered relatively low hanging fruit. There are some skills that are important, and require a lvl 5 prerequisite. If the prereq is a x1 multiplier, it's likely worth training.... when it's needed.

Finally there are some highly useful, highly applicable skills to have - Frigate 5. And the prereqs to an interceptor, or assault frigate. That's one of the few exceptions to this pattern.

Else, lvl 5's give you some measly 5% bonus or whatever for 16 days played or whatever. Skip em.

Eventually...yes.

Current example, no.

I would prioritize getting all the skills you need up to level 3 or 4 first.
Why, because training any skill from 4 to 5 takes much longer then training another skill from 0 to 4, while the 0 > 4 has a bigger advantage then the 4 > 5 one.

Be it in same category (so say Rapid Firing 0 > 4 before Motion Prediction 4 > 5) or just opening up new things to try.

You could wait the days it takes to take spaceship command to 5...and then train that missile skill, but it will make you wait those days before you can try things out.


Only train level 5 skills when:

A. They are a pre-requirement for another skill you need (Weapon Upgrades 5 to train Adv. Weapon Upgrades)
B. You have nothing else to train at the moment or go away from game for a while due to RL stuff.
C. You have an understanding in what you do and know that the small bonus you get from that 1 skill level is going to make a difference.
D. They are core skills, which should be trained to 5 within a reasonable amount of time (just don't prioritize them above anything else, having them at 4 is good...try things out in the mean while).


Personally, what I did / do...is just occasionally train some skills to L5 partially.
So, if I know I eventually want skill "x" at level 5...I keep it in the end of my skillqueue and occasionally spent a day of skilling on it, then push other skills I more urgently need in front of it.

I'll add this to the discussion:

Don't get wrapped up in min/maxing training times. SAVE YOUR REMAPS. Obviously, you're already training and doing things, so it may be a bit late. What I do on new alts is not remap at all when I first start and just train up cybernetics to 1, basic frigate and industrial ship skills (less than half a day to get going), and then I look at what I'm aiming for. At the lower skill tiers, remaps don't buy you more than a few hours here and there. So why waste the remaps to get your basics?

Then there are things that you may want but that don't fall into the same attribute categories that your main line of training will use. For example, if I were to train a mission alt, which uses social skills, I will continue not to remap and then train social. Why? Because charisma is rarely a primary attribute. If I remap to max something else, I gimp my training time for social. I don't remap for any skills that fall into that sort of category, i.e. outside your main line of training, and that don't take more than a day or two to train.

To address your main question, other than the necessary spaceship command skills to sit in a hull, focus your initial training on support/fitting skills. Rank 1 skills in Engineering, Electronics, and those sorts of skills should be your first goal. Training to 5 with remaps on those will usually have a 3 day or so training time (5 days if not maxed to those attributes). Within 2 to 3 weeks, you should be able to fit most of the mods and have the skills necessary to proceed to T2 training. Once you've got a good selectoin of T2 possibilities for fitting, then go back to getting youself into bigger hulls.

Support/fitting skills apply to everything; spaceship command skills only apply to a few hulls. Even if you could sit in the hull, you couldn't do anything with it without the support skills.

Ill just agree with the general consensus here and say "not yet".

Ignore any of the "everything must be lvl 5 and you should have 50M sp before you buy your first cruiser" crazies you might come across.

The only level V skills that are pretty much universally accepted as "you must do this eventually" are -

CPU management
Powergrid management
Drones
Scout drone operation

The first two are the main fitting skills, which you are going to need more and more as you start cramming T2 gear onto your hulls.

The second two are so you can use T2 light/medium drones. I consider them mandatory for serious PVE, and they are a big help everywhere else. Most ships in this game have a drone bay anyway, so this helps regardless of what you end up doing in your EVE career.

After that, train lvl V skills as necessary for T2 mods, ships, whatever you end up doing.

the only ones I ever recommend to 5 are for miners, and that's refining and refining eff I recommend both thouse to 5 if you mine, as it will give you a greater yield with you refine ore.

otherwise as stated already, it depends. you don;t really need lvl 5 unless you want a certain mod or you need a long skill due to work or something at this time.

Each skill level takes 5.6 times as long (the square root of 32) to train as the previous. So if it takes 1 day to train a given skill from 3 to 4, then it takes 5.6 days to train that same skill from 4 to 5. And the time it takes to train a given skill from 4 to 5 is 1024 times (32 times 32) as long as the time it takes to train that same skill from 0 to 1.

Based on this knowledge, you should usually focus on breadth of skill, and wait with depth of skill until much later into the game.

There are a few exceptions, though, skillz that you'd want to train to 5 pretty fast, such as the skillz that give all your ship hulls more CPU and more powergrid, or that affect your capacitor recharge or maximum. Most of those have been re-named recently, otherwise I'd tell you what they are. Also Navigation, and Weapon Upgrades (if WU hasn't been renamed too).

I have (or had) a list of about 11 skillz, 9 of which should be trained to 5 pretty damn soon in any pilot's career (because they're of high value for anyone flying actual ships - everyone except station traders) with the last 2 only needing to be trained to 4 soon, because they're very high Rank, and it'd take a long time to train those from 4 to 5.

Beyond those 11, of course, there are more skills that are sweet to train to 5 soon, depending on what you do in-game, what kind of ships you fly, günboats or missile ships or droneboats, shield tanked or armour tnaked.

Back before they changed racial starting skills and the whole bonus remap thing, my first remap was to a balanced intelligence and perception setup. It worked pretty well. With the new bonus remaps etc, you can put together a pretty good first year plan and still leave yourself with a bonus remap. With cybernetics 1 and +3 implants, almost any plan is basically acceptable. No need to limit to once per lifetime!

I echo Sabriz sentiment regarding weapons upgrades and advanced weapons upgrades. Their value can not be overstated.