EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello there,
I have a question. I start play eve with my girlfriend and i dont know nothing about this game.. so there is my question
I want play with a blackops ships and my gf is interest for the hauling..
so can u give me some start advice ? what shut we start skill etc ? :-) you know smth for first month-two playing.
Thanks u and sorry for my english i hope you can understand :D .-)

Black ops are an extremely specialist ship. In EVE you don't just pick a ship and say "that's what I'm going to do." It's more a matter of looking at groups, seeing what they are doing, joining in and training into the specialist roles to help the group. I wouldn't call "black ops" a goal, but I would call "finding a group that uses black ops" to be a goal. After all, training skills is just training skills, not really much to it.

As far as mixing black ops and hauling, yes you can bridge a hauler, but it still comes back to "does this work for the group I am a part of?" I've never been part of a group where that was a useful combination, and as far as I understand the tactics, I wouldn't call it "hauling" in an industrial for-profit way that usually gets associated with hauling. More a matter of keeping jump fuel on hand for the fleet. But that still comes back around to the idea that training skills is easy but finding a group to use them with is hard.

What you can do in the mean time, while you're (1)looking for a group, is to (2)get your bomber skills up. There will be a lot of overlap with covops ships, which suggests your most convenient source of (3)income would be exploration. Start (4)spending time in nullsec figuring out how to survive without support. If your girlfriend wants to take on a fleet support role for a blops fleet, probably do the same progression.

If she's looking to do highsec hauling for profit, you may have nearly zero overlap in careers. After she's got established income you could use all your badass covops skills to scout routes for her through null and low, but she should still have her own survival know how.

Blockade Runners are commonly used to haul jump fuel for Black Ops (isotopes), as well as bombs & torpedoes for Stealth Bombers, and fuel for Covert Cynos (liquid ozone).

That's about the only synergy between the two.

It is typically the job of an alt account, as it has very low activity, requiring little attention.

Hello and welcome to Eve.

There's actually a third aspect for using Black Ops which would incorporate both of the roles already mentioned earlier. Years ago I had this idea for a Low Sec Null Sec Covert Exploration Fleet :


Covert Ops Frigate
This would be the Probe Scout for the fleet checking systems for players and exploration sites. At least 1 per fleet.

Force Recon Cruiser
This would be the Cynosaural candle for the fleet and EWAR provider. At least 2 per fleet.

Black Ops Battleship
This would be the Jump Portal Generator for the fleet and backup DPS. At least 1 per fleet.

T3 Covert Ops Cruiser
This would be the main DPS for the fleet and backup probe scout to help search large areas. At least 2 per fleet.

Stealth Bomber Frigate
This would be the second main DPS for the fleet and backup scout / lookout. At least 3 per fleet.

Blockade Runner
This would be the Supply / Loot Hauler for the fleet and backup lookout. At least 1 per fleet.


All ships have cloak ability allowing them to hide quickly if needed and would act as backup for secondary roles within the fleet. As I said this was just an idea I had years ago which should be refined now due to the addition of SoE covert exploration ships and the ORE covert mining Frigate. Obviously some of the roles within the fleet would be changed if those new ships are in fleet.

Anyway, good luck to you and may you and your GF have a long and rewarding career.



DMC

I'd still suggest the rough outline of my progression:
1) find a corp that can make use of you in the roles you are interested in (cloaky combat)
2) train for the more basic versions of the role you eventually want to fill (i.e. covops as a cloaky scout and bombers as cloaky combat)
3) get working on your income stream (in this case exploration would be most compatible with the roles you want to fill)
4) work on the more specialist know how you'll need (cloaky combat happens almost entirely in nullsec, so knowing the nuances of nullsec would be the most important thing to accelerate how quickly you can contribute there at any level.)

The core of your goal seems to be combining the more intense PVP combat stuff with the more laid back industrial stuff. How well you can get that to overlap would depend on the two of you. If she wants to live in highsec full time and avoid all conflict, you might both be out of luck, limited to sharing chat channels. If she's willing to do her industrial stuff while under constant threat of being blown up, well then you've got more options. Maybe it's time to look at a wtd guide. It doesn't exactly go deep, but it goes broad.

Triggered so hard right now

Basically keep asking questions and hassling every player you talk to for tips

EDIT : The Stealth Bomber idea above is really good advice. It's fairly quick to get into, has LOADS of uses and Frigate 5 will do the world of good for the other frigs you're flying. Having a ship that can warp cloaked early is a massive step up a lot of players miss out on due to grinding for battleships.

DO NOT attempt to fly the stealth bomber before you have skills for the Covert Ops Cloak. Fitting a standard cloak on a covops ship will get you killed and made fun of

One thing yet to be mentioned is the mechanics of how BLOPS gangs go about their shenanigans.

A bunch of hideously expensive battleships and sundry covert bridgeable ships sit twiddling their thumbs either docked up or cloaked up at a safe waiting for their fleet's Hunters to find something suitable to drop on.

The Hunter role is where all the actual *fun* happens, at least it's the bit I enjoy. You need to scout systems, probe down targets, set bubble traps and pull off all kinds of tricks to catch someone and then needs to stay alive long enough for everyone to get through the cyno. Proteus and Tengu Strategic Cruisers are the ships of choice for this role, note that Prospects and Bombers have been used to great effect by many.

The actual *blops drop* itself, when it finally happens, should be more along the lines of a drive-by firing squad execution style gank than a standup fight. BLOPS battleships have T1 resist profiles to go along with their ISK1b hull pricetags. If you're expecting a standup fight, you should seriously rethink using BLOPS battleships. For this reason, many hunters like to fit a Ship or Cargo Scanner to check for pesky counterdrop potential before burning into scram/web range to get hard tackle and blaze the beacon.

Check out Martino Fabbro's excellent youtube videos. Solo black ops is certainly possible, as you can see, I'd suggest you get some experience with gangs before attempting some of the stunts this guy manages to pull off. Take particular note of how he finds and catches his targets.

This huge disparity in actual *effort* between roles is why most BLOPS groups have an 'All Loot To The Hunter' policy.

As for hauling: Not my area of specialty beyond personal use of an Orca to haul large amounts of gunk for personal consumption. A friend in a webbing ship is not a luxury for ships that can't MWD/Cloak their way through highsec. I'd never fly anything bigger than an Occator through gates without one (a Vigil Navy Issue is almost the perfect ship for this task).

EDIT:


It's a pretty powerful synergy nonetheless. Doubly so if your Blockade Runner pilot can light a Covert Cyno.
But yes, it's normally done on an alt account in the background rather than as a *main* activity.

I would consider BLOPs'ing a Blockade Runner around more of a side benefit to BLOPs in general than a main reason to train for it.

You can absolutely use one to get a BR around hostile space, but as has been noted- it's an expensive way to do so. The BLOPs battleship is a long train, really expensive to buy, and you'll also need another account capable of flying a CovOps or Recon and lighting a CovOps cyno. So pretty much three accounts (trained with a bunch of 5-8x skills and flying snowflake ships) to move one hauler.

You'll have to weigh for yourself whether the cargo you are moving is worth all that compared to one of you just scouting ahead, or running much less valuable cargo at a time, or using a hauling service, etc.

Whooa.

One of the biggest sale pitches is that you can do anything you want in Eve.

Except the things you want.

First 3 months is just being worthless at everything unless you join a corp
and become a flying Kamikaze pilot.

That said, just fly around and have fun dying while trying out different tactics,
missions, regions and occasionally hook up with some other noclues.

YES, go for those covop cloaky hauling ships. Its your time and money.

A good thing is to download some basic skill training programs from different
corps (took mine from Brave Newbies):

https://wiki.braveineve.com/public/dojo/wiki/dojo-skillplans

You can read about skills here:

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/User:Redeemed_souvenir/Skill_Plan

A good site to explore what skills a specific ship needs is here:

https://www.eve-skillplan.net/