EVE New Citizens Q&A

You only need 1.

With skill injectors you can have max skills in days. The only requirement is isk.

But, if you really want to try every activity you will need friends. Things like moon mining/Holding Sov over space require groups of people to do the fighting with you.

Multiple accounts can make flying capital ships much easier, for providing cynos and scouts. But trusted friends can also provide those. Soon we will have citadels and then characters in super caps will finally be able to safely (ish) leave their ships, so you can soon have just the one character able to fly and own all the ships in Eve.

Don't get hung up on having multiple accounts, play with other people and make friends. Then further down the line you can start more accounts if you find it makes trying other activities easier for you.

I think it's a very admirable goal to be able to do EVERYTHING but I might suggest that you try it all before working to specialize. There is SO much to do in Eve that you'll undoubtedly find that you just don't like doing some things. This is how I have my characters split though for an example.


1) Main Character
- Flies all ships up to cruisers spanning all 4 factions with the exception of drone boats
- Perfect ewar and logi
- Basic PI skills
- Misc logistical skills like anchoring and salvaging and stuff
- Almost perfect scanning skills

2) Cap Pilot
- Flies all ships including battleships and two different factions of capitals
- Has perfect drone, gunnery and leadership skills
- Very solid scanning skills
- Also randomly has perfect mining skills

3) Industry Toon
- Has manufacturing abilities up to cap ships
- Refining and reaction skills

4) Hauler
- Flies any industrial including jump freighters

5 & 6) Trade alts
- Have maxed trade/commerce skills.
- One sits in Jita and the other sits in Amarr.

A few things to thin about:
I chose to divide my ship specialization based on class of hull instead of faction. I found this to be a little better because there was a good amount of overlap. If you have every faction of cruiser to 5 and then train up Logistics, that automatically gives you access to 4 ships that utilize the same skills (with the exception of tank which you should have both trained up anyway).
I also would suggest that you not devote one toon specifically to exploration. When you go exploring, you're going to want to have some combat skills to clear the better sites you'll find. Adding scanning skills onto a combat toon is very useful.

Hope this helps!

Me too!!! It makes me really sad that the average Eve player has to use alts.

Anyway - two is probably a good number haha! Have your main be everything pvp/pve and the other one focus on hauling, probing and trading to start.

As all the replies above, you only need 1 character. However, if you want more than one, that's up to you.

I'll just list the game's limitations, so you can make your own decision:

- Capital ships have a jump drive that requires a cyno beacon to be activated at the destination, so the ship can jump. You will need at least 1 alt that can log in at the same time as your main, to provide a cyno beacon, if you're thinking of flying dreads and carriers.

- Super-capital ships cannot dock (in the current version of the game; they may be able to dock once all the Citadel functions are released by CCP). So if you're at the point where you can afford to pilot super-carriers and titans, that pilot won't be able to exit the ship (because you'd be leaving an expensive ship unattended in space, anyone with the skills can enter it and steal it). This is why super-capital pilots create a separate alt that has the super-cap skills trained, as well as the various support and weapon skills, that is separate from the main playing character. This super-cap alt stays with the ship always. Typically, you log him in when the super-capital is needed in combat, and otherwise you keep him logged off and play other characters.

- Combat characters will need good support skills, in order to survive the fights, so if you're trying to create more than 1 combat character you'll probably double up on the support skills. Takes about a year to get them trained to a decent level. This is why most people train all their sub-capital combat ships on one character; adding a new line of ships takes a lot less time than re-training shields, armor, navigation, targeting, engineering, electronics, etc. on a new character.

- If you create your own personal corp, it's better to create a (mostly untrained) alt for the CEO position, and let the alt create the corp. This way your main characters can join and leave your personal corp whenever you want, and you won't lose the corp.

- Whatever trade alts you create may function best if they're near or IN the trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, etc.) They should probably have high trading skills and the ability to fly some sort of industrial or transport ship, with enough armor, shields, and hull upgrade skills to survive attacks. This can be achieved for under 5 million skill points.

- However, when CCP switches the taxes and broker fees to 5%, mission standings with the trade hub stations will make a much bigger difference, and so alts may not cut it, or you may have to train the alts into enough combat skills to be able to do agent missions and raise their standings.

- There's a limit of 6 planets per character that you can deploy Planetary Industry facilities on.

- There's a limit on the number of production and research slots that you can use simultaneously with a single character (10, I think). It's easier to train another alt to a medium level in PI and production than it is to train your main to the upper limit for slots and facilities.

my $0.02....

I have three accounts.

Main:
1: Main Combat Pilot. Specialises in Cruiser-Down hulls, combat, EWAR and Logi. Has PI skills to IV.
2: Jita Trade Alt.
3: Empty.

Second:
1: Miner/Hauler/Prober/Explorer/Cyno V/PI to IV. Can also sit in a Navy Vexor and go ratting or anchor a T2 Large Bubble. Actually has some PvP use sitting in a brick-tanked Celestis fitted with ReSeBos for gate camp asshattery, or using Drone Assist from a VNI. Will get him into a Scythe at some point for some next-level uber pimp gate camp asshattery. This character is actually a hell of a lot of fun to tool about with. He's compromised many, many hundreds of other player's tactical bookmarks simply sitting in an Astero with combat probes out. Currently training him into a Buzzard.
2: PI V Alt (CCU & IPC V, this guy runs the Factory Planets)
3: Cloaky camper alt.

Third:
1: Secondary Combat Pilot, has trained Jump Skills, will be a Battleship/BLOPs pilot and maybe into Caps at some stage. PI Skills currently at V, will get some extractors reduce to IV at some point, SP will probably go into my Main.
2: PI Alt
3: Empty.


This will be quite the challenge.
As mentioned, there are certain vessels, such as the Moracha and Chremoas, that were given out as prizes for winning the Alliance Tournament. They currently run some ISK100b, when they're available at all. Think about that, ISK100b for a frigate (the Chremoas is basically a CovOps Dramiel).
There are also some flat out unique ships, such as the Megathron Federate Issue. There is only one of these in the game. I have no idea what it would take to prize it from Entity's grasp, but it's probably against the ToU and EULA. Forget it exists.

I find that trying to manage 2 ships at once is just too difficult to be effective. I fail to see how 4 ships would do you any good other than giving your opponent 4 KMs instead of one.

One of the best things about EvE is the incredible amount of things to do. That being said; Dang, man, you planning on sleeping or eating in the next 10 years? EvE is fun, but...

When the skill injectors were introduced, one super-rich character spent billions of ISK to inject all the skills in the game and max them out at 5. Completely silly.

By my estimate, you can achieve your goal of unlocking and being able to fly every ship in the game, with decent support and weapon skills, with 160 million skillpoints or so. This would include quite a few skills trained to 5 because they are useful or because they are prerequisites to other skills, but most skills would be trained to 4, which is definitely sufficient in most cases.

The normal training speed is about 20-24 million points per year, so as you can see it would still take a long time.

Skill injectors will get horribly expensive very fast; the more points you have already, the fewer points you get from each injector, so if you're thinking of using injectors, the cheapest plan is to start with them and boost to about 50 million points, then switch to normal training.

With this type of plan, you'd be able to train the support skills (20 million skillpoints), prerequisites for T2 ships (about 10 million), and weapon skills to tech 2 (20 million), and then switch to slow training to gradually unlock various ships, and you fly those ships as you unlock them so you get combat experience with how to use them properly.

EDIT: This plan would cost $1400.

EDIT2: As far as collecting ships, too expensive for me. I collect fluff lore items.

Confirming 1 account is all that is needed.


But I don't do trade/industry so my p.o.v might be a little skewed.



[edit]
All 4 factions Frigate -> BS includes a lot of overlap in the other skill groups

2 factions Armour tank, 2 factions Shield tank
Propulsion & Core Fitting skills apply to all 4
there is only a small variance in support skills required for Hybrids, Lasers & Projectiles
All 4 factions make use of Drones

This said, if I was ever inclined to have an Industry focussed Alt .... It would probably be on a separate account
so that my combat focussed main remains unsullied by dirty mining skills

2nd edit
looking at your list ...

1+2
1+6
2+6
1+2+6
are all options for 1 character

3+4
3+5
4+5
3+4+5
are all options for a 2nd

It's better to set up a same-account alt when the purpose of the alt doesn't justify the cost of another subscription.

Examples:

- forum-posting alt
- trade alt
- planetary industry alt
- price-checking alt
- CEO alt

EDIT: Note that you can activate the ability to train 2 or even 3 characters on the same account, from Account Management. You have to pay in PLEX, but it's a good option when trying to create these partially-trained alts where you only need a couple months of training and then it's done.