EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello everyone on Eve. I am new on this game, first logging into New Eden on Jan 1st of 2015. Most of my time so far has been diving all around the Eve Forums, which lead me to the E-Uni wiki, and the Evelopedia. After finishing the starter career agents and moving onto Sister Alitura missions, I came up with the same issue that a lot of people do, "What do I want to do in Eve?"

This has been on my mind for quite a long time, the majority of time in this year in fact. I could see myself piloting tackler ships moving at crazy speeds and being a crazy pilot who has no concern for my clone's well being. Or a cartographer mapping out wormhole space for corp members to harvest the materials and shoot down sleeper drones. Being a stealth bomber remaining hidden and providing intel from inside enemy space. Or a Scientist spending my time researching data cores and constantly inventing T2 blueprints.

When considering everything that I want do, combat would be fun but the ships that catch my eye the most as, 'ships I would enjoy flying' are the space trucks, industrial ships. However these ships are mostly used for hauling and industrialist work. While I can daydream about getting cargo into and out of nullsec space, I'm very aware that I would likely be training myself to fly a Jump Freighter.

-My first question is: how useful are the T1 and T2 Industrialist ships and Jump Freighters for corporation operations?

But in between the movement of stuff, I imagine that there would be a lot of time before I would be doing anything. To take advantage of this time, I also want to have a secondary specialization. But one where I would be more involved with fleets.

-My second question is: Would focusing on both Manufacturing and Logistics ships as well as Industrial ships spread specialization out too far?

First, welcome to Eve Online.

For your first question, hauling services can be very useful for corps and group operations. Many corps will have their haulers on alts in NPC corps so that the hauler is at least immune to wardecs.

There would be a definite need in many corps for the more specialized hauling roles in Blockade Runners/Deep Space Transports, and Jump Freighters. For JFs many will have a cyno alt to assist in the movement of the JF.

As far as your second question you don't really get spread out too far. Once you've trained skills you have those skills trained and they don't interfere with you having any other skills. Your only limitations are ISK (to pay for skillbooks) and time to train up those skills. Currently, it would take something like 24 years to train all available skills to V, so not even the oldest active characters in the game have all the skills trained up to the maximum.

At some point you're going to want to get more of a focus on what you're training for simply due to the time factor involved.

It wouldn't take all that long to be a decent tackler for PvP and again it wouldn't take all that long to be a basic, well skilled explorer able to scan down sites in wormholes and provide bookmarks for your corp mates to use. It would take a bit more time to become decent at being able to handle Sleepers as you'd need to be at least be able to fly and fit cruisers (as part of a small fleet of friends/corp mates) to begin to handle Sleepers effectively. There are those that can solo some sites in the lower grade wormholes in T2 Heavy Assault Cruisers (properly fit). Many soloists will start in Battlecruisers, again, properly fit, and with decent support skills.

Getting into Industry and Invention is a fairly science skill intensive commitment to get to the data core researching and T2 blueprint invention. You'll also need standings and that will mean running missions to get your standings up.

My advice is to start with those things that are easily attainable. Many skills once trained up will serve you in many areas no matter what you end up doing.

Find and get into a player corp that can either help you learn, share the same interests, or ideally both. I recommend looking at the Educational organizations and because you do want to learn some things and you have some diverse interests I'd recommend you take a look at Eve Uni. They cover a lot of different areas to learn in and you'll find no shortage of fellow pilots to experience New Eden in.

It's fairly normal to feel a bit lost at this stage. What ever has your interest the most at this point that is easily attainable to get doing and going in is probably the best thing for you to get going in. Keep in mind that everything does take some time and skill to get proficient at it, those factors just grow the more high-end you are looking at.

Jump freighters are an extremely useful tool. As the skills required to fly one well have significant crossover with combat capital ships (such as Carriers and Dreadnaughts), some players train both of those ship classes on one character.

Just be aware that you are risking a *lot* of capital every time you fly a JF, often for quite minimal rewards.


As for manufacturing - I have about five million SP devoted to production (invention, manufacturing) and that's enough (you can get by with less). Piloting logisitics ships generally requires about ten million dedicated SP, a good deal of which will overlap with flying your racial T2 cruisers which are very good combat ships. You can fly the useful tech 1 logi cruisers with much less.

This is NOT a game where you can say the equivalent of "I'm a healer, looking for a guild" and expect to be invited. Because in theory everyone can train any ship, recruitment is more about trust and personality than about what ships you can fly that the corp can benefit from. Some corps are exceptions, of course.

But my recommendation would be to find a group of people (corp) that you enjoy playing the game with, and then figure out a "career plan" based, in part, on what they need.

Specifically about transports and freighters, if you spend half a year to train that freighter and THEN join a corp, nobody's gonna trust you enough to give you the valuables in the corp hangars, even if they do need transporting. Corp theft is a problem, so trust is low.

Hello Radimir Dvornikov,

Welcome to Eve, may you have a long and rewarding career here.

As for your plans - dream until your dreams come true, never surrender and above all else, have fun.



DMC

They are not? In bigger groups they are because there are allways people who want some stuff moved from null to high or high to null.

You're better off specializing in something and becoming good at one thing. Early on it's easy to get your skill points all over the place and get frustrated after a while that u can't do anything well. Although, u need to actually try different things to figure out if u like doing them in the first place. So it's a little bit of a catch 22.

Invention is gonna be a nice passive income for you though, IF you're ready to put the time in to do market research and constantly keep doing it to make sure u're inventing something that u can make a profit on. Everything is gonna be easier if you find a corp though. Yes, they're gonna have their own agenda, but more often than not u're gonna have an easier time having the advice of veterans at your disposal and using their resources to help you out and guide you, so you don't have to invent the wheel. That'll also probably limit the chances of you screwing up in a big way.

Outside of the haulers everything else you mentioned was frigate based which is a very solid plan especially for a new player but honestly for anyone. I recommend that you focus on flying frigates well for now until you get a better feel for the game.

Yes haulers and Jump freighters are very useful but I think most people have alts to do that. I doubt having it be your only skills will lead to full time fun game play. Also anything that you would use haulers for personally require a bit more knowledge of not only game mechanics but in game market trends which a new player just does not have. Also anything that you would want hauled around it is easy enough to hire someone like Red Frog for now.

In summary focus on small ships for now as they train fast and are lots of fun. Play around with different aspects of the game and specialize once you figure out what you like.

Mining is the worst activity you could consider.

You can start producing tech 2 modules with only twice the SP investment necessary to sit in a Retriever, and unlike mining, you aren't going to need to compete with thousands of bots.

Here is one suggestion for a sideline:

As you are heading towards hauling anyway, early on you could train PI to get some planets and also Gallente Industrial and some basic cloaking and get yourself some out of the way losec planets and run them with an Epithal, eventually upgrading to a Viator Blockade Runner when you have T2 skills. Meanwhile you could train up covops frigates and get some losec experience.