EVE New Citizens Q&A

Cross train the different races,
early on I focused amarr and while that was great for me at the time I found that when I began PvP that often I was pigeon holed into certain roles.

Cross training will a) prevent this and b) give you a broader flavour of things you may enjoy.

I would however train drones up as almost every ship in the game uses them to some degree or another so sp put into drones will generally speaking always have some relivance

Every race has ships in every class that are useful in some situation or another. Gallente have a wide range of fantastic ships. The Thorax is vicious up close with blasters, pretty fast too so it can catch a lot of ships. It makes for a decent enough kiter too with the correct fitting. The Vexor, and it's Navy counterpart are pretty scary to fight too, they put out monstrous DPS for the price. Eventually you'll want to train into every race shipline because there are just so many useful hulls out there.

Now, when it comes to you and what you should train. You're flat out too young to be flying a Battleship, especially for PVP. PVE, maybe you can make it work in a few weeks, but it won't be that effective and it's a hefty investment for little payoff. Perhaps the mission runners here can give you advice on that. For pew pew though? Stick to frigates and destroyers at first. they're cheap and easy to skill into.

Absolutely do NOT fall into the 'bigger must be better' trap in this game. Someone like me or my friends will come along and show you otherwise.

Don't rush things, you're going to to need to get your 'core skills' up to a reasonable level (4 is perfectly viable, 5 takes forever) before you're ready for things like Battleships. I've been around for a year and a half, and can barely sit in a Tempest, let alone fly it well. I'm only just starting to finish up T1 cruiser skills (I can fly almost all of them at level 5), and getting into the T2 ones soon-ish.

Why do I say you're too young? Core skills. Skills that influence every ship in the game. You don't have them. Not yet anyway, but you'll need to get the fitting skills up to at least 4 soon (so you can fit a ship as best as possible). Things like Capacitor skills (Cap Management and Cap Systems Operation to 4 are great, I still don't have either to 5 and am doing alright). Navigation skills, going faster, being more agile, using less cap when running an MWD or Afterburner.

Here is a skill plan I followed when starting. The starting amount of SP has recently been changed, so it's a little out of date, but take a look through it. It will guide you through the basics, and how to set yourself up for combat in the short term:

http://blog.beyondreality.se/Newbie-skill-plan-2

Deviate to taste of course, but it's a good starting point.

Don't try and fly before you can stand. Start small and work your way up. It's a lot of fun, and what you learn early on in the small ships, will be indispensible when you get in to larger, more expensive, and difficult to use hulls. Good frigate pilots are rare, and they are without a doubt the most skilled pilots in the game IMO. Never, ever underestimate small cheap ships.

Stick to a loose path, ie look at a whole race ships and see which has the most you like and start there as then you can fly a solid fleet of ships then cross train more once you have your core enjoyable ships done, then you can fly about having fun while you train the others.
With eve it's not if you can fly something just when as given time you can fly them all, it's a nice feeling when you know you see a new doctrine or something flag up and know you have the skills to fly them all regardless of what the requirements are.

What do you want to get into?

PVP SOLO? I would stick with Gallente ships since you started with it. They have strong solo options.
PVP Group? I would crosstrain and get into the T2 counterparts of Frigates and Cruisers. Otherwise as mentioned before, you might not get group invites to certain roams if you cant fly a certain ship. Join a corporation and ask them about their usual fittings, that might give you a path of what to train next.

PVE Missions? Just go up to battleships asap, then start crosstraining. Frigates and Cruisers can only really run lvl 1 and 2 missions optimally (baring the T2 counterparts). Those missions have crappy rewards. Get to level 3 and 4 asap (Uses battlecruisers and battleships, respectively).

Exploration? Get into an exploration frigate and cruiser. That is the Astero and Stratios, which are Gallente/Amarr mixed faction frigates from the Sisters of Eve faction. In the meantime, stick with your Gallente exploring ship.

Wormholes? I personally like T3 cruisers (Tengu) for wormhole exploration. I dont know how viable the gallente version, Proteus, holds up in WH space. Someone else could provide more info on this topic than I would.

Industry/Mining? Just follow the ORE path, and get into a Skiff asap.



Hope this helps somewhat. There are sometimes exceptions based on who you're flying with, and what you want to achieve as a group.

Fitting Skills
Also stated above, but do not neglect your fitting skills. Make sure you have a T2 tank (for Gallente that usually means T2 armor hardeners), then make sure you have decent cap skills and weapon skills (hybrid turrets/drone skills)

Module Tech Levels:

T1 - basic modules, with minimal fitting requirements. Example: 125mm Railgun I. Manufactured in bulk by players.

"Meta" levels - improved performance, but with the same fitting requirements as T1. Example: 125mm Compressed Coil Gun I. These drop as loot from various NPCs, so they are sometimes rare.

T2 - improved performance, but require higher levels of skills trained. Example: 125mm Railgun II. Manufactured by players, but the manufacturing process requires salvaged materials and limited-run blueprints. T2 is currently the standard for PVP fights.


Ship Tech Levels:
Unlike module tech levels, where you just have better performance, ship tech levels offer different specialized roles:

T1 - regular ships; recently rebalanced to be better / nastier / tougher. Typically you fit these with T2 weapons and modules, if you can, and each ship has some bonuses listed in its description, which indicate the purpose for that ship. Most ships are suited for DPS, typically with 2 weapon types (hybrids and drones for example), but some are suited for ewar, remote repairs, probe scans, etc. These ships are very popular because they are cheap and versatile (can be fitted for most situations).

T2 - super-specialized ships. These ships are actually listed separately in categories on the Market, and are specialized to do 1 thing very well. They have "bonuses" and abilities listed in the ship description that are beyond what you can accomplish by fitting T1 ships with T2 modules. Cov-ops ships, for example, are the only ships that can fit the cov-ops cloaking device, allowing them to fly around invisible: you have cov-ops scout frigates, stealth bombers, cov-ops recon cruisers (long range jamming), and cov-ops battleships that can jump-bridge a whole covert fleet into enemy territory for stealth operations. These ships are very popular for group PVP, where a fleet can be formed with pilots having different roles for the win.

T3 - multi-purpose ships. Recently added to the game, these ships can either transform between DPS mode, Tank mode, or a special purpose mode while in flight, or the pilots can re-assemble them in-station from sub-components (hull, engines, etc.) and thus pick special characteristics (immunity to warp jamming, increased probing strength, etc). These ships are somewhat experimental and typically expensive, but you can get T2 levels of performance out of them, along with various immunities that are desirable. The basic idea behind the ships is to provide a "can do everything" platform to people who may be stuck or operating in wormhole space, far, far away from stations with ships for sale or re-fitting services.

Capital Ships - large ships, intended for groups. These ships are currently in the process of being re-imagined. Initially, they were the only ships that could put out enough damage to take out the space structures and outposts that are used in 0.0, but currently CCP is re-designing that aspect of the game. These ships are horribly expensive, and as a result require maxed out skills that can take years to develop (because you can't afford to lose your ship because you didn't have that last 5% shields, for example). In addition, they move by jumping, and you need to have friends (or many alts) to provide cyno-beacons to jump to. Finally, the big ones (super-carriers and titans) can only be built in 0.0 space, over 3-6 months, and the building facility must be defended if attacked. As a result of all these issues, they are typically only flown by large 0.0 alliances, and they are only applied to large-scale wars where outposts must be destroyed and territory must be taken.

Just pick the best ships for the purpose you want to achieve and focus train on that. So I started with the Tristan, then Corax, then Drake, then Raven ... switched back to Tristan as my first PvP ship, then Hawk, Enyo, Taranis, Thorax ... cross trained every T1 ship to lvl3 plus their weapon system to be able to use it, then focussed on maxing out my frig skills, bombers, cov ops, other ceptors, assault frigs ... finally training Minmatar destroyer to V to get into Sabre and Svipul. Now I'm on a one year training to complete my core and support skills, before I eventually train ships again next year.

After 2 years I fly almost exclusively frigs, destroyers or cruisers. Bigger stuff is not fun, if you are used to zip around in an interceptor ...

In other MMO's you build multiple characters if you want tank, healer, dps, aoe dps, crafting etc.

In this game, each ship IS a role, so with one character you can have the equivalent of tank, healer, dps, crowd control, scouting, industry, trader, etc., as long as you've trained to be able to fly the ships that specialize in those roles. Training one ship + its weaponry and modules takes less than 2 months. Training multiple ships can take 6 months - 2 years (depending on how many), but basically you're building an account-full of different roles that you can take, all in a single character.

This is basically how the game is structured. At any point in time you're only flying one ship, so only a subset of all your skills apply to that ship. Which means the new guy (who can only fly that one ship) can be competitive enough to take even a veteran out in a 1-vs-1 duel. The veteran, though, has the advantage of a wide range of choices when trying to answer the question "what do I want to do today?"

At that point, intel becomes important: is my spy telling me the enemy is flying a Gallente ship? Then I'll need a way to deal with drones, so maybe I'll install smartbombs. Also, resistances to Thermal and Kinetic, if he shoots me with the typical Gallente hybrid weapons. If I want to jam him, I'll have to use magnetometric ECM jammers, cause that's what the Gallente sensors are on all their ships. And so on.

Additionally, if you think you have some idea of what kind of corp you want to fly with, think about what their popular doctrines are or the prevailing PvP/Incursion/WH metas (or what they will be, if ship rebalances are inbound.)

THIS

This is pretty much what I did.

I want to reiterate something that has been eluded to here already.

Large ships and their weapons system take a long time to train. Also due to the signature radius and tracking mechanics large ships can suffer more from low support skills.

Also most skills are skills that are shared across all or most ships ( typically referred to as support skills or base skills or generic skills ). As a result you are typically better off sticking to small and medium ships and not moving on to large ships until you have good support skills.

Eve is not a min/max game. You can do stuff effectively with low skills. So don't get caught in the "bigger is better" or "must get to max level and get decked out in best in slot" gear mindset. I did this early on as well as lots of other players coming from other MMOs. Eve is a very different MMO and if you open your mind and try to learn the game you'll do much better than if you try to play eve the same way that you would any of the MMOs in the level cap genre.