EVE New Citizens Q&A

that is the route I started on.

my only advice really is I'd probably completely ignore the mining part, I tried going back and mining some stuff, and was rather pleased with what I had mined... then I looked at the value and was just put off from ever mining again. (okay might have done a little drunk noobship thera mining since but seriously mining, no)

some basic industry skills and perhaps invention and/or t2 building skills are nice to have. and I still use those. perhaps the processing skills so you can import (compressed) ore and refine that. mass production is nice for some basic t1 building, in many cases it is easier to move bpcs than ships.

the other thing is trade skills. nice to cut costs wherever possible. although pay attention, sometimes it is better to just flip the materials than trying to build something and selling that.

these days my "mining" alt has a whole lot of combat SP. the mining is mostly wasted, although if I get some sort of option to remap some SP I don't know that I would.

Try everything and train what you enjoy doing and / or find your self doing most often.

It would take you something like 20 years to train all skills to level 5 but you can do anything from day 1. This game is not a race to level cap. You play this game and you enjoy playing it and train to make what you enjoy doing better and grow as a player along the way.

I have 3 character over 100 million skill points. I pretty much only fly one of them and it's not the highest skill point one. It has been years since I have trained a skill that has made any difference that I can notice in my playstyle.

Two of my character's I trained up with very specific skill plans to get to an end goal as quickly as possible. One of them I just trained what eve I needed that day, she was supposed to be my temporary character that I just flew until one of the other ones was good enough to do what I had planned on doing.

The one that I wound up flying all the time because she is the most well rounded useful character that I have is the one that I did not care about her skill queue, or at least didn't spend much time planning out her skill queue.

Often when you feel the need to make an alt it is for a specific purpose and usually can be trained up quickly for that purrpose.
I have one alt that is strictly for trading. He has a few trade skills that gives him a significant amount of orders. That gives me a larger volume of sell/buy orders to make a profit.

Another quickie alt is a planetary interaction alt. Just trained up enough to work a few planets.

Industry is a full on profession, but you could still make a quickie alt in industry for producing low end items, such as ammo.

These are examples of same-account alts, that once you get your main stable in its profession, you can turn him off, or use a plex to train up an alt quickly on the same account.

A good second account alt is a scout.

But as others said. Only make an alt when you come to the point where you need an alt. There is a lot that you can do without an alt.

A second account can be useful in so many ways. being able to log in two characters at once has a myriad of different uses.

I started my alt account not long after I started playing. I was in RvB at the time and, after losing a Badger full of stuff to the ebwil Blue Republic, I decided I needed an out-of-corp hauler. That alt can now function as a hauler, miner, cloaky scout and can even sit in a Navy Vexor and go 0.0 ratting or provide some nice DPS via drone assist when I tackle some interloper in my wormhole (or when I bubble-camp in 0.0). The alt can light covert cynos, anchor T2 large bubbles, provide income via PI and has generally trained a lot of exceedingly useful support skills.

get alt account asap, ya want the sp

I started my first account in the summer of 2009, all I wanted to do initially was PvE and I raced him into a Drake, then eventually a Raven/CNR. I started this, my second account in October of 2009. I wanted an alt to scout for my mission runner, haul loot and salvage missions. These were in the days when 1500 m3 of loot dropped in a single L4 mission and T1 salvage was worth a fortune.

I decided Major Trant would be capped at 1.6M SP (the enhanced double speed training limit that existed in those days). I'd shove basic frigate / dessie skills in him along with the core skills and salvaging. Then I'd start a longer term character on that account who would train into a Charon Freighter.

Plans change, I joined RvB and got the PvP bug, eventually I switched to calling Trant my main. Trant is now a pure sub-cap PvP pilot with 105M SP and still loads of PvP and core skills needing the final level V train. My original main now has 114M SP and flies a Charon, Rhea JF, Archon Carrier, Crane/Bustard Transport ships, a Covop prober, Command Ship booster, as well as being a market trader. He is absolutely essential to my needs and still has loads of skills waiting to train.

I consider a second account almost essential in Eve if you can afford it that is. Like a second eye it gives you depth. There are so many things that can be enhanced by having two chars running simultanously. In many respects they are better than having a corp mate. Like when jumping a Rhea loaded with billions in goods, into low sec, I'd rather jump to my alt than the most trusted corpie. Other times just to scout a gate when running a BS between two systems it is more convenient than pestering a corpie to give you eyes.

I'd say if you can afford it, go for it, it does't matter if you're not certain what you want to do with it for now. You will find things to do and you can't just start an alt when you need it, it takes sometimes years to train the skills. But many skills are predictably important even if you don't know the exact directions. Core skills, cap management and fitting skills, the generic shield, armor and weapon skills, Navigation and Drone skills, Trading. Then if you have a slight interest in them, Probing, PI, Industry the list goes on. There are so many to choose from.