EVE New Citizens Q&A

That's pretty much how I'd do it.

The normal sales give you 6 months for $50.00 or 12 months for $100.00 - not half price. The sale is on now as an Alpha upgrade offer. I suspect that is the only way it will be available in the future. Last summer they offered a 3 month subscription + free 3 month multiple character training which was an excellent deal for those of us with ALTS. No idea if that offer will return.

Bear in mind that you only get 1 training queue per account and need to purchase multiple character training if you want more than 1 character on an account to train at the same time.

You want 1 main character on each account that will be high skill. The other characters are utility and need to be distributed so they don't end up on the same account as the character they are supposed to assist!

Train PI on all characters. Level 4 skills for 5 planets don't take long to to train and, if you live somewhere you can fly a carrier, the PI for 30 planets will make a nice addition to your wallet with relatively little effort.

PI in hi-sec is a lot of effort for little return.

In null-sec once you get yourself set up (properly) it can bring in some good ISK. It will take you a while to figure it out - there are plenty of resources out there to help. I found EvE Uni a good place to start.

I suggest that you view PI as something you do alongside your other EvE activities - really something to do when you're not blowing up stuff (be that people or rocks).

I would suggest something like this:

Main Account:
- Main Character (PVP, Exploration, Cyno)
- Cyno Alt
- whatever

Alt Account:
- Jita Alt (Trader, Freighter pilot, Interceptor pilot)
- Cap Alt (Carriers, Dreads, Cyno)
- whatever

Trading and hauling are well matched and this saves you a character slot.
On your hauler you want to be able to use the right ship depending on cargo. Freighter should be obvious. Insta-warp Inty is for small, but valuable cargo. Cloaky haulers are situational and not needed in hi sec, imho.

Also you want to be able to alt tab between your main and your trader. For example to update orders while waiting for the fleet to assemble. Therefore the trader needs to be on your alt account.

If you're new to PI I'd suggest to start small and try it out. Do some research on how to properly set up a base. Changing your colony setup will cost you money. You need an initial investment of 130m ISK per base, or so (afair). Besides core PI skills every PI toon should have Gal Industrial at least at L4 (because Epitahl). You also need an idea how to move your stuff to your customers (which includes knowing what to produce, of course).

Also I'd suggest to start PI on a dedicated PI toon, who can later also serve as a scout, if you need one. It might make things easier if you have your PI toon close to your colonies as a beginner. Plus it makes it easier for you if you decide to quit PI. (I used to run PI on 4 toons in a C2 with a HS static but ended up deleting all of them.)

PI = Planetary Interaction. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Planetary_Interaction

It is a form of income that, like mining, is more trouble than it is worth to many, but others enjoy it. One good thing about it is the relative low skill investment to be productive and make a decent profit, although I find all aspirations of "passive" income to be outright lies. Being truly passive with it makes the profit not worth it, and maximizing the income requires enough time investment you'd be better off doing lots of other things.

CYNO is usually referring to a "cyno alt" which is a character with only the minimal skills required to create a cyno beacon, generally for their main to jump too. Cyno beacons act sorta like jump gates, but allow ships to avoid a few systems. It does, however, require at least one ship to make it safely to the destination system before lighting the cyno beacon. So every cyno jump involves two characters on two accounts.

Cyno alts exist for two reasons. First, when someone lights off a cyno, everyone in EVE sees the beacon, and any enemy can jump to your beacon too.
Cyno alts have to remain in space and vulnerable while the beacon is active.
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Jump_Drives_and_Cynosural_Fields

Another noob question from me:

I know what a carrier is, but why do you keep referring to an alt JUST for said carrier? What about the carrier am I missing that it needs its own alt?

Also, someone mentioned above about the carrier alt in reference to PI. I don't get that connection, either. Wouldn't a hauler alt help with PI, since we're talking about moving decent amounts of cargo around, correct?

Thanks,

Tat (the noob)

I had several reasons to quit PI. The main reason was being disappointed by it. When you try to min/max PI as I did, you need to put quite some effort into it and make adjustments at least once per day per colony, which eats up more time than you might think. Compared to the ISK/hr I made from trading, PI felt like being a waste of time.

Also my EVE lifestyle changed. When I joined a very active PvP corp in a large PvP null sec alliance my focus shifted to attending fleets, preparing for future combat (scouting areas, setting up bookmarks, etc.), exploration (especially looking for shortcuts into interesting areas) and stuff like that. That left me with less time to do PI. At the same time I realized that certain alts (cyno, for example) are really helpful for certain tasks. I decided to buy one or two toons on the bazaar and had to remove enough PI alts to make room for the new characters.

Last not least there was a game change at that time. Customs Offices were changed from being NPC structures to player owned structures. The resulting turmoil messed with my hi sec factory planets and made PI unattractive for me at that time.

There are multiple reasons for an alt for capital ships. Carrier is usually just the choice for the first ship to train for.

Null sec PvP alliances relocate their staging systems now and then, to consider changes in their respective strategy. This means you need to move all your stuff occasionally, all your sub caps, ammo, loot, etc. While many offer to help out newer members, you are expected to be able to move your stuff yourself, sooner or later. The ship of choice for that is a suitcase carrier. This is a carrier fitted for move ops which requires less skills than a combat or logistics fit carrier.

Being new to a null sec alliance usually means, that you need to train a lot of things to catch up with doctrines. And more often than not the doctrine will change just when you finished training for it (at least that's how you will feel ). Doing sub cap training to catch up with your corp mates means to postpone the much needed training for capital ships and vice versa. A cap/carrier alt on a second account is the solution for this dilemma.

And there's more, of course. Capital ships are slow compared to sub caps. They move slow, the mods cycle slow, etc. This makes it very viable to multi box a carrier or dreadnaught. Multi boxing a cap could mean to bring two carriers to a fleet instead of just one. With other players also having cap alts, your FC gets the option to escalate while you are already in a ship with your main. It could mean to be able to log on dreads when you and your buddies have an enemy super tackled with your roaming fleet. And so on.

TL;DR
A cap/carrier alt is extremely useful, at least when in a null sec PvP corp.

To add to this: having your cap and subcap pilot split also makes managing jump fatigue easier because you don't have to balance between taking titan bridges and jumping your capital.