EVE New Citizens Q&A

I try to limit my Q&A to one thread per day, but I hope you indulge me with a second today.

When your ship gets destroyed, you obviously want to get your pod out of there ASAP (to save your implants and buying a replacement clone, from what I understand).

My question is: if you are the victor, you have your reward (a kill and a ship to salvage), so why go after the pod? Is it merely to be malicious, is it common to do so, and is there a gameplay reason for this (e.g., to make the defeated player spawn far away so he can't come back right away for revenge)?

When fighting a battle where one or both sides is reshipping, killing the pod, generally halts or at least considerably delays the reship. So there is a tactical reason.

At the strategic level, you want to generally encourage people to fly cheap pods, so it is up to the victor to add the risk element to the risk vs reward of fitting up a pod with all the bling going. Otherwise everyone is going to be in a High Grade Snake set with +6 Gunnery/Missile implants and Zor's Custom Hyperlink.

Isk efficiency is another reason. Check out posts 208/209 in the recruitment thread linked in my signature (the last posts at the time of writing). Where I describe how we fought a losing battle last night, lost 5 ships worth 390M but killed 2 ships and a pod worth in total 1.57B, largely down to the pod. We ran from the field, but easily won the Isk war.

Of course you don't know until after the kill whether someone blinged out their pod or not. So it's common practice to just try for every pod.

If people need to keep replacing thier implants I get to keep selling them for more isk...

Considering all the above posts I think a better question would be. Why not kill a pod? Besides for ransom of course.

not that big 8-9 ish (excluding my own , which i have for....reasons).

Thanks for the responses. It helps me to understand the prevailng mindset. The concept that I learned from this thread is that it seems that the true measure of victory is how much economic damage you inflict on an opposing fleet (ship loss, pod loss, implant loss) relative to what you sustain, not who has the last ship standing at a particular location.

I suppose taking it further, maybe it isn't an ISK:ISK comparison. If your opponent has a huge economic advantage (wallet size, ISK/month revenue), even if he sustains a higher ISK loss in a fleet engagement than you do, you might still be worse off edonomically from the exchange. Probably being too meta on this.

A little bit.

You have the right idea... but there are more measurements of "victory" that just outright "economic damage" (though that is a main stat).

There is victory by "holding the field"... which can come at higher economic and ship loss than your enemy. But because you have the field you now have access to all the loot which can mitigate the losses you sustained.

There is victory by "blueballing"... which means that you simply do not engage an enemy at all... making all their time and efforts to engage you wasted. This is a common tactic when your enemy vastly outguns and outclasses you.

They is victory by "morale"... where the enemy loses heart to the point where they do not fight as hard or well as you do.


In the end though... this is all just a game. If you see a target, shoot it. You do not need more rationale than that.

edit: here's a term that my guys use from time to time; "Moral/Cultural Victory." Basically it is a joke term for when we are so drunk/ineffective that we do not really achieve anything tangle or measurable... but we still feel like we have accomplished SOMETHING.

Example 1: We nuke the enemy fleet commander in a fight but are still slaughtered. Yet, we feel smug because the enemy fleet now doesn't know what to do without their FC and the FC has to travel all the way back to his/her HQ to get another ship.
Example 2: We are facing a vastly stronger foe and all my group can do is harass them using snipers or somesuch. Nothing really dies... but we keep the enemy on their toes and make them mad.

In your typical PVP roam, if someone pods you it's for the giggles/killmail. In FW or other tactical situations it could be beneficial to keep you out of space for a while.

This. I plan to pod every chance I get.

I pod every chance i get because the loss of implants tends to generate even more tears than the ship did, ESPECIALLY if its an un-updated clone and they lost a skill for their mistakes. Plus shiny implant killmails are nice to brag to friends about from time to time.

SMARTBOMBS!!!

Podding an enemy has the potential to do more financial damage than destroying almost any ship. Implants are terribly expensive compared to ships/modules/rigs. Unlike ships, they are often not covered by SRP, and are far more rare to find in quantity than ships/modules. For example- look at many of the ganks by CODE, and you'll often see a pod worth far more than the ship it commanded.

Capsules can remain as scouts/FC if not removed from the field. Podding takes a very fast, hard to catch ship off the battlefield. Capsules can also be used as warp in points that are much harder to catch than ships.

War, is total. Financial damage is generally the underlying goal for most PvP, whether it's taking moons, POCO's, or podding.

Often times, we DON'T pod, so as to keep the enemy from easily reshipping and rejoining a fight. Other times we do it out of courtesy. Especially when we vastly out-class another fleet. Despite childish notions of 'teabagging' we would rather provide a good fight so those people will come back and fight us again.

Mostly, they are just another ship, another target. We destroy the enemy in any form he takes.

Hey, remember what happened to the Death Star....all because some idiot let an escape pod go without destroying it out of habit!