EVE New Citizens Q&A

I like the old way of showing tracking better but still tracking in Eve is a hard thing to compute on the fly in your head, there are just too many variables. Your best bet is to just have damage notifications up and get a "feel" for when you are "in the sweet spot" and when you are getting terrible hits.

That being said I can give you some links to help make more sense of tracking:
http://www.hostile.dk/files/eve/eve-tracking101.swf
The above is a flash based tracking tutorial which helps make sense of the tracking mechanics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT8VqVcLDqc&t=115s

That is a video on how to make use of the tracking mechanics in your piloting. He talks about tracking using the old rads / sec but the concepts are still the same if the quantifications have changed.

http://evegateway.blogspot.com/
That site has a tracking 101 guide that might be of help.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=24359

EFT does have a way to compare 2 different ships, even given the pilots stats, and see what your hit chance is but I think that you can do the same at the end of the flash tutorial.

If none of that helps or if I miss understood your question feel free to correct or redirect me.

CCP went ahead and changed it to make it "easier to understand". ******* idiots.

Enable your Angular column in your overview, then for your weapon multiply the score by (weapon size)/40,000.

Where weapon size = the old sig resolution = 400 for large guns, 125 for medium guns, and 40 for small (frigate) guns.

So if you have a battleship weapon, divide the "score" by 100, if you have a cruiser weapon, divide by 320, and if you have a frigate weapon, divide by 1000. The result is then directly comparable to the Angular column.

**** you for this change, CCP.

EDIT: To be more clear, your chance to hit is affected by range, angular speed of the target vs. your guns tracking, and size of the target vs. your guns' sig resolution.

- if the target is at optimal or closer, you have 100% as far as range is concerned, reduced to 50% at optimal + falloff, and to 0% at optimal + 2falloff

- if you do the math above, and figure out the "old" tracking score that they've now hidden from the spec sheets of your guns, as long as the target's angular in the overview is smaller than this tracking score, you'll hit 100%, as far as orbit / angular is concerned

- and finally there's a penalty to size; battleship guns are designed to hit battleships at about 80-100%, cruisers at about 30-50%, and frigates at about 5-10% due to size. Cruisers hit battleships at 100% , cruisers at 80-100%, and frigates at 30-50%. And frigates hit everything at 80-100%, as far as the size component.

CCP tried to roll the last two stats into a single composite "score", but now there's no number in the overview to directly compare your guns to, so it's annoying. And they always half-ass new features and never reiterate them, so it's doubly-annoying; they'll never fix it.

Oh, and your "chance to hit" is actually rolled into the damage you do; i.e. you don't see more "you miss", you just hit for less damage.

I have transversal velocity on my overview, which isn't exact and has a few faults but I've grown used to it. In general it just took a lot of practice to get comfortable using that to know what to shoot.

and thanks for the update on what the new tracking numbers mean, as I had very little idea, other than bigger is better.

Yes. Because it conveys useful info, which transversal does not.

I like the change. I like that guns are now directly comparable to each other. The only thing I don't like is the aesthetic choice to avoid all those leading zeroes and basically add an arbitrary scaling factor (aka use a default sig radius of 40,000m) without allowing us the ability to add our own arbitrary scaling factor to the radial velocity column, so we can match it to our guns' tracking number without needing to do mental arithmetic as we fly. Let us change that, and I could even have 3 different radial velocity columns set for frigates, cruisers and bigger ships, that all directly compare to my guns' tracking of those ships, or lets me know if they're likely to hit me if I'm fighting something with big guns of its own.

*edit* oops, misunderstood, thought you meant angular velocity. radial velocity is sort of useful if you want to know if someone is running away, but I'd rather just keep an eye on range and if it's changing, a column that is essentially the change in range isn't useful enough to me to justify taking up more screen-space.*/edit*

i have the whatsit column on my overview that shows radians/s. a nice, rounded and universally understood measurement. combined with the range column it can tell you an amazing amount of information.

generally, it all boils down to what you're flying:
if using big/bad tracking guns, keep that value low. so, use keep-at-range when flying an arty Tornado, Thrasher or Svipul for example.
if using small/good tracking guns, try to keep value as low as possible while maintaining enough transversal to survive. This is especially true in small, fast frigate fights, knowing when to reduce transversal can quite radically increase your damage output while knowing when to maintain/increase transversal can help you stay alive.

Hey, thank you!

So let me see if I understand this right.

Say I have a tracking score of 130, frigate sized weapons. That means I have a tracking value of 130/1000 = 0.13
Now I also have to look at the target's sig radius which then further improves or reduces my chance to hit. For the sake of having less than 100%, let's say I'm shooting a shuttle which only has a sig radius of 25. And I'm in optimal range.

Do I now do 25/40 = 0.625 and then 0.13 * 0.625 = 0.08125?

So If I was shooting this ship and the value in the angular velocity column in the overview were to say 0.08 I would hit for 100%, since my tracking value is higher, yes?
If the angular velocity were to say 0.15 though for example I would only do 0.08125/0.15 = 0.54166666666 = ~54.2% of my damage?

Hope I got this right.

No, you can't really combine sig. and tracking. What I usually do is this:

Your guns have tracking of 0.13 and they're frigate guns. So enable the Angular Velocity column in the overview and shrink it to only show 4 digits, and then maneuver (orbit, approach, kite, etc.) to keep your target under 0.13 in the Angular column. This is the only thing you have control of; you can't change the target's size or your guns' specs on the fly, but you CAN maneuver to maximize that tracking.

You maneuver to keep the target in range, and to keep the target's angular low. But not too close, and not too low angular because then the target can also do good damage to you when THEY shoot back. Just keep it slightly under your guns' best stats.

You can't do anything about size, that's not a variable stat. If you're shooting at a shuttle, you'll do less damage because of signature / size. Regardless of how you maneuver, all your damage to that shuttle will be size-reduced. Only thing you can do about it is apply a target painter, which increases the target's signature, a little. If you have it fitted.

So the trick is to predict what size targets you'll be engaging, and fit your ship to match that. If you're going to hunt frigates, use a frigate or destroyer, or a RLML cruiser, or a drone cruiser with light drones. So that your weapon size matches the target size. Or a cruiser with medium weapons (of any type) and target painter, to make your bigger weapons hit the smaller targets slightly better than 50%.

Battleships using battleship weapons to shoot at frigates = useless, which is why all battleships have room for a few small drones, or may be fitted with smartbombs or energy neutralizers, or will have to otherwise have an anti-frigate escort fleet.

This is wrong, by the way. Ideally you'll keep the angular velocity below half what you can track, it is certainly not the case that it's 100% all they up to tracking speed. Never has been. Hit chance from tracking starts dropping as soon as ships are moving, in exactly the same way it drops for range as soon as you're outside optimal. i.e. 0.5^0 = 100% at stopped/inside optimal, 0.5^0.25 = 84% at half tracking/half falloff, 0.5^1 = 50% at tracking/falloff, 0.5^4 = 6% at double tracking/double falloff.



There's no direct size penalty like that, guns simply track big targets better. A cruiser is 3.2 times the size of a frigate, all guns track cruisers 3.2 times better than they track frigates.

Rule of thumb like you use works ok, but you can get a more accurate picture looking at the actual numbers. And your rule of thumb would work better if you're aiming to keep tracking to half your tracking speed instead of just inside the tracking number. Also lets you do things like directly compare guns, or work out how effective your speedtank will be based on what you expect from the enemy guns, or things like whether an artillery frigate or a cruiser with short-range lasers is going to be more effective at shooting you in close.



Nothing's changed except the display. Previously, you had a direct comparison when shooting frigates with small guns, cruisers with medium guns, battleships with large guns. For anything else, you needed to do some mental arithmetic. It's much the same now, you can directly compare with minor mental arithmetic anytime you're firing at frigates/battleships, and need to do similar mental arithmetic as before when firing at destroyers, cruisers, BCs.

Of course, the display should still be more customisable so you can set it up to avoid as much mental arithmetic as possible.