EVE New Citizens Q&A

It depends. What do you plan on doing? Close range brawling? Longer range kiting? Fleet? Solo? Small gang? Hisec? Lowsec? Nullsec? Do you want turrets as your primary weapon or drones as your secondary, or vice versa? Active tanked or buffer tanked? You must first know what you want to fit a ship.
Also, don't try to be equally good at everything, because then you'll be bad at everything. Pick one thing to be good at, and avoid things you're bad against.

Thanks for the answers fellas. My main plan is to solo through low sec and incinerate my enemies. I have tried abit of pvp and people tell me that larger ships have more damage and tank, so that fits my playstyle.

Be advised that larger ships have difficulty applying that more damage to smaller ships, and have a harder time avoiding fights they don't want to take. Smaller ships tend to be better for learners as they're cheaper.

Well... they are not wrong. Larger ships do indeed have more tank and damage potential.

Application is a different story.


See... in EVE it is completely possible that your shiny, 1000 dps battleship (that has been fit to repair 500 hp/sec) can be chewed apart by a pair of frigates.
No, really... I am deadly serious. It is possible. There is even a story about how a solo rookie ship pecked apart a sniper-fit Tornado (see: Attack Battlecruiser).

Now you may ask; how is this possible? Damage is damage, tank is tank. I should be able to nuke smaller ships with my superior firepower and outlast their puny damage!
Not exactly.

See... there are a bunch of mechanics in place that complicate how you apply damage.

Some examples:
1. Missiles are distinctive in that they will always hit their targets so long as the target is within the missile's range.
However, the amount of damage applied to a target depends on how big it is relative to the missile hitting it... and the speed of the target is also taken into account.
Example: if you are shooting at a Frigate, a light missile will deal more damage than a Torpedo. The reason for this is that the Torpedo is geared more towards hitting a larger, slower target.

2. Turrets utilize much the same mechanics as Missiles but are a bit trickier in that they take relative speed between your ship and the target into account (see: "Tracking").
To put it simply,
- if a target's trajectory is parallel to yours, the odds of scoring a hit increase (as long as you are in range)
- if a target's trajectory is perpendicular or "spiraling," the odds of scoring a hit decrease


What this means is that a small enough ship, moving fast enough, and close enough can potentially never be hit by your main weapons (or take negligible damage).


To compensate, a larger ship has to fit itself to slow down, or "pin," targets so that it can apply as much damage as possible.
But each thing you fit is going to take away from another aspect of the ship (it is very hard to impossible to have an "all-round-good-in-all-situations" fit).



Another thing to consider is that people in low-sec roam around in groups of 3 to 10.
This puts you at a disadvantage as you are slow and cannot pick and choose your engagements well.


So all this is why I tell pretty much every newbie I meet to start with Frigates and move up from there.
You can become familiar with different ships strengths and weaknesses

In eve there is no respawn mechanic that puts you back in the fight with all of your stuff still there. That means that all of your lessons come with a price tag and that price tag is the replacement cost of your ship. So cheaper ships will allow you many more learning opportunities.

Eve is very different from other MMOs and you will need to let go of any ideas of what is the best whatever whatever. Everything in Eve is situational. Each ship and each module has it's counter. It's a game about match ups not who has a higher gear score.

So I would say follow the advice of the posters before me and try some different stuff and don't make up your mind what your playstyle is until you've tried a bunch of stuff out.

yeah, something like that, tell you one ship i ****ing love is the Magus,
its somewhere inbetween a big Ishkur and a small Vexor.

The first year and a half that I played I had no T2 weapons trained.