EVE New Citizens Q&A

You have to understand a few basic things:

- ONLY orbit if your overall tracking/damage application is better than your opponent's. This depends on the base tracking of yours vs his turret type and any possible ship bonuses, drones and whatnot. If his overall tracking/application is better you mess it up for yourself by orbiting

- learn about damage application based on range (check my video on that). If you have more short range dps while you can control the range you want to get up close (and perhaps, but not necessarily, orbit). If you know that he has more short range dps then you want to stay at range and hope he doesn't switch to range ammo.


This means that you have to learn each and every ship you're likely to encounter, their basic/logical fits and their key tactics and you'll have to be able to recognise their fit based on looks/actions. If you see him do a speed that's beyond base speed but really not fast enough for MWD you know he's AB fit and that probably means he's going to try and range control you within scram range, if your ship and setup can't deal with that ship with that fit and tactic then you simply avoid the fight or adapt your tactics. You can view a hostile ship and recognise he's fitting long range weapons, or short range ones, you can deduce whether he's shield or armour fit based on his speed (not always). Generally you can deduce his tactic, if you wouldn't know this already, based on how he enters the scenario.

Fights are not won or lost based on pure dps or tanking numbers, they're won by having the superior tactic for that situation. So more than anything you need to learn understand and read the situation, before you start to fight, so you will know what to do AS the fight happens. As a starting/solo/frigate pvper your best chance generally is to go for a scram kiting setup because it can deal with both kiters as brawlers, increasing your chances. Also, most people being dumb/new they won't know what scram kiting is, how to recognise it and how to deal with it. The real trick is to figure that stuff out before you go out PVPing, using EFT, so you have a really good idea what a certain ship/fit can do against yours and how you should react.

Some good scram kiting frigs: Atron, Executioner, Rifter, Kestrel (in no particular order). Pick either, fit for scram kiting, learn about other frigates you'll run in to and even cruisers (some cruisers are viable targets, others are death incarnate) and make a plan, beforehand, for each type of target/situation you might end up in.


"Orbit all the things" generally is a bad idea.

Lets say that we're both fighting each other in a frigate, I have the better tracking, I NEED to stay on top of you because I'm a brawler and we're both webbed and doing similar speeds.

- if I hit the orbit button I'll have issues making the "up stroke", I simply won't orbit because I lack the speed advantage to do so meaning your weapons will hit me hard. Would I manage it anyway and then be on the "down stroke" I'd create such a massive distance so fast that before my ship turns around I'll be out of position and unable to get close again to orbit. So clicking orbit won't work

- if I hit approach then I go straight at you and as your tracking is worse than mine (and assuming I can't deal with your applying dps) then I pretty much run headfirst into a wall. So clicking approach won't help

- I'm the short range setup, so "keep at range" won't help


Thus neither of the AP options will get me a win and I have to do it manually. What I'll do is I'll snake/spiral really upclose to you, that way I keep the same speed and direction as you so I won't end up out of position. And the continued rotating, going left and right and whatnot at such a short distance will mess up your tracking more than mine giving me a better chance to win.




This is why brawler fits suck, you'll run into this every time you fight a scram kiter. A scram kiter can easily control most brawlers while it can easily brawl kiters.

Yeah, when I'm brawling I normally use blasters or I will be using neuts. This way, even if my dps is suffering from tracking issues, I will be suffering less than my opponent is, as blasters have the best tracking. If I'm kiting with rails or beam, then I often just hit control space to stop my ship, because as long as I'm outside their optimal I won't be taking much damage even if there is no angular, where as I will be smashing them with high quality hits.

It's not just a question of tracking, you need to take into account the impact sigrad has on tracking.

Lots of those close orbits aren't possible due to agility.

Every ship fit has its own minimum turning circle at full speed. It's meaningless to consider angular velocities higher than that as they cannot be sustained at all.

If you're still approaching a battleship from 50km+ by the time he locks you you're already doing it wrong.

Yeah I just made the numbers up. I was curious about your reply though so I stuck a few fits I had lying around into EFT. Here's the DPS graphs I generated. (Fits are a neutron atron with SAAR, AB, scram, web, and a plate + SAAR punisher with AB, scram).

The top plot shows the atron's damage and the bottom shows the punisher's, as a function of the distance between them. I'm assuming both ships are moving at max speed (with a web on the punisher but not the atron because the punisher's slot layout doesn't permit). They're moving in opposite directions trying to orbit each other. In practice this isn't very precise because the punisher can't maintain an orbit on the faster atron, but you can only be so realistic in EFT.

Wow the tracking is terrible at close range! Of course, as Sabriz said, in practice you can't maintain an orbit that tight at high speeds, so there will be a bit of damage applied as the ships slow and adjust their course to try and maintain their orbits. In general it will be very bad though. You'll notice the maximum damage for the Atron is at 4km, all the way at falloff! Similarly the punisher does best at 6 km, well outside it's own optimal, because of it's poor tracking at close ranges.

The damage difference between them isn't huge. We can assume the Atron pilot has range control with the web, so if he maxes his DPS he'll be doing 41 dps versus the punisher's 16 (at 4 km -this is of course neglecting his choice to reduce speed or keep at range instead of orbit). Both ships can easily tank that DPS for a while with their AARs but will eventually run out of cap. It's pretty hard to predict who will win.

I'm not sure if I have a point or if I just find this sort of thing fascinating. Of course, EFT graphs don't always translate well into the actual game. But I have found after several hundred frigate brawls that tracking plays a huge role at close range and shorter isn't always better for blasters. For example, if we substitute in a tormentor instead of a punisher, those two drones will be doing a significant portion of the damage, and it might be better to maximize atron DPS by reducing transversal, even if it means the tormentor will be hitting better as well. Of course it's all fit dependent.

Anyway. I don't want to pollute your thread with too much rambling. I'm happy to discuss it more if you want to shoot me a mail or hop in my channel though. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with parts of this because it's pretty difficult to get an accurate picture from EFT. You really need to go try it out in game to see what actually happens as the ships constantly adjust their trajectories. And back to the topic of the OP - no you probably don't need to worry about manual piloting most of the time while brawling. But there's plenty else to think about (whether or not you agree on the details with me ).