EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi all,

Me and some RL friends are in the process of starting out our own little worm-holing corp (there's basically 4 of us who are active). We've never done it before but we've been playing EVE for a while now out in nullsec and we thought we'd give it a try.

Our plan was fairly simple - find a quiet C3, setup a citadel and use it as our base while we learn. We figured this could work out for us based on what we'd seen on zKillBoard - From that data we saw, there seemed to be a lot of empty Astrahuses going pop but not many manned ones and figured that once an Astrahus was online it would be a relatively safe haven as people don't seem to want to invest the resources needed to take one down unless the owning corp has done something to really **** someone off. We knew that we were taking a risk but we all agreed ahead of time that we needed to be fully prepared to lose the citadel in the 15 minutes following anchoring.

Long story short, this is what happened. We had a small gang together for defence but we were quickly overwhelmed by a fleet of 30-40 ships and they spent the next hour plinking away at the station till it went pop.

Now, we're reconsidering our options. We're thinking it could be a good idea to try again, but also we're wondering whether we should look to join our little corp up with an alliance and then learn from them. We're taking a few days to go over the options and come up with a solid plan.

Now, our questions - Were we just unlucky that our citadel was spotted during the anchoring process? If we were to try again, would it be potentially be better to have it so that the anchoring ends at a time that's just inconvenient to attack? Maybe around downtime or something like 6am?

Also, does anyone have any other potential tips for us? We've learned a lot already but we're always learning more.

This has been a great forum to me in the past, I look forward to seeing what people have to say!

Thanks in advance all!

Fye

What's the best place for this?

I know there's a wormhole forum but considering we're so new & our questions are very specific I figured this was a better fit - sorry if its not.

I wouldn't exactly say this is a bad place to ask for advice on this. The wormhole forum could give you another point of view if you ask around there. I will say, though, that without proper hole control you are pretty much at the mercy of Bob when it comes to anchoring your citadel. There are few groups who will pass up the opportunity for an easy kill mail if they roll into you.

If you want to dip your toes into wormholes and there are only 4 of you guys right now, it's actually not bad to setup a large POS tower while they are still around. They only take an hour to anchor and provide you with asset security, defense and even industry capabilities. Plus, anymore most people can't be bothered to siege out a properly fit POS unless it looks like there are a lot of goodies inside. But it's a really good starting point and at the very least, it gives you the chance to stock up on rolling ships and other combat ships before trying again for the citadel.

But don't give up! Wormholes can be very unforgiving for groups just starting out but it's worth it in the end, I promise ;)

You need to maintain complete hole control for at least 2-3 hours BEFORE plonking the Citadel down and then for the next 24 hours.

During the pre-anchoring phase you're basically cracking statics and keeping a very close eye out for interlopers.

What this involves: scanning out and then rolling ALL current entrances, if you happen to have a frigate hole in system, you'll probably want to wait until it collapses of it's own accord. Scan down the new statics but DO NOT INITIATE WARP to them. This will give you around three hours of relative safety where your statics can't be scanned out from the other side.

After 2h45m'ish, warp to your new statics. You have two choices, 1: Crack it and rinse/repeat the process, this is the best option if you have the numbers to keep doing this over the 24hr online period. Or, 2: Crit the statics. Slam enough mass through them to get them critical, but not to collapse it. Then bubble the hell out of the entrance holes and mount a set of cloaky eyes on the statics. A surprising number of bombers and T3Ds can fit through even a critical wormhole. Certainly more than enough to take down an unfitted Citadel.

Personally, I would also anchor drag bubbles around the Citadel in line with the entrance 'holes, the Sun and nearby celestials (you may need a heap of bubbles). This will slow down any aggressors when the vulnerability timer starts.

Again, someone needs to be in the hole actively d-scanning, probing out new signatures and collapsing wandering connections for the entire 24 hour online process. Take shifts if you must.

When the anchoring timer has roughly one hour to go, crash all your statics, probe and do not warp to the new signatures.

If everything's gone well, you'll be alone in your hole with your freshly anchored and onlined citadel, ready to be fitted with guns and fun things. Once the citadel is actually online and fit up, then taking it down is a whole new level of hassle for an invading force.

Yep, they were pretty brutal! They did compliment us on the aesthetic placement of the Astrahus though, it was a very pretty spot.

Thanks for the responses all, we're considering a few options right now.

Our first step I think is going to be joining an alliance so we can start by helping them out in their system and get some money being made via PI. Once we have that 'passive' income set up we should then be in a financial position to try again. Also, hopefully they'll be able to help us out.

If we try again, it definitely sounds like a staging POS is the best starting point right now. We'll base rolling battleships out of there, though unfortunately we're all quite a long way off from being able to fly HICs so we'll just have to use MWD frigates or something to finish the holes off.

A side question - we've been approached by several parties actually offering to sell us an Astrahus that is already set up. Is this a normal thing to do or are we potentially being scammed? Apologies to anyone who's mailed me who isn't scamming & I haven't gotten back to you yet if you read this, I've simply not had time to go through the emails yet as I got them all last night during a PvE op and I've been sleeping/working since then.

As with anything in EVE, do your research on the sellers. Maybe check forum posting history since they clearly found your thread. However just because someone has years of good posting history doesn't mean they won't scam you!

If you do go that route, make sure to minimize your risk. There are various ways to do that....trusted third parties, payment installments, etc. Try to have a convo or get on comms with the person, it'll be much harder for them to lie to you or you'll at least be able to tell if something's off.

There's generally more people looking to sell wormholes than to buy them so I'm not too surprised you have offers. I'd guess about 1/3 are trying to scam you somehow.

Try to sneak a covops ship into the wormhole they're trying to sell you and have a poke around. See if they have any carriers to "forget" to fly out of it.