Warfare & Tactics

My Yarr genes are starting to play up again!! If they get much worse I may just have to apply to satiate them!

It's simple. go to Nennamaila, yell at people in local, wait, shoot.

Have to call you out here, you lose a significant amount of small ship pvp by not being in FW. Trust me if I felt I could get more fights out of militia I would leave it in a heartbeat. But you can't, and all those that have tried have failed miserably and come back. You probably feel that way because you are 100% solo, should preface your claims with that as to not confuse the nubbins.

Removing any place with sentry guns as a location for a fight severely limits what you can do. Folks like me enjoy jumping into a wt gang a 10 on a system gate and trying to fight them. Couldn't do that in my coercer if I wasn't FW. The station lockouts makes it more interesting to, and waiting for your opponent to shoot first (thus giving you the clear to engage) can often lose you the fight.





This works in Nisuwa as well. Can also ask for a 1v1 and someone will oblige and honor it (or else we boot them from corp).

This seems like a good thread to ask in, seeing as my question is mostly on-topic:

I'm considering starting up an alt for FW for fun & games and maybe earning some LP (but mainly for something to do when my main's corp are all tucked away in bed). What's the minimum degree of character competence required for this to not simply be a massive waste of ships (and ISK)?

It sounds like you want to do with an alt, what I do with my main.
What i did, was to secure a steady stream of isk for me to plex the account and a little for ships. You will not really need much, depending on how and what you fly. I like to fly entirely solo, unscourted, unboosted and on a ****** gaming rig, so naturally 1/3 of my ships die to situations where I can not do anything about it.
Do not let SP amounts stop you from fighting! All you really need to shine in a new char is the knowledge about what ship is capable of what damage at which range, and if they can force that range on you.

For frigs there is basically three main engagement ranges.

0m-500m orbit in your face brawl.

Kiting inside scram range with afterburner web and scram.
The idea here is to keep out of the enemies close range guns but still within your range of damage application.
Usually this takes place at ranges of 5000m-9000m.

Kiting outside of scram range.
this ships are usually MWD fit with a warp disruptor and try to keep way outside of your damage range, as well as outside scram and webrange.
Usually this will involve fighting at 13+km as overheated (nonfaction/nonboosted) webs can reach out to 13km.

Know what range you want to fight in, see if you can fit a ship that applies damage at that range and can also force that range on the enemy.
Then know which ship will fight you on equal terms, i.e. your range is also their ideal range. As a beginner you want to stay away from these if the char is significantly older than you, as this usually comes down to who has the better SP.
Engage ships that you know you can force to your range, that do NOT want to be in that range. These you can usually kill even if you are at a significant disadvantage SP-wise(if they do not run, so if you actually catch them).
Run from ships that can force you into a range that you do not want to fight in.

A good start is to look at good frig pvpers and at their losses. See if you can understand what went into their thoughprocess in building the fit. If you understand the range the fit works in, you can adapt the fit accordingly to your SP, if the fit still works in that range (i.e. a slasher having to drop from 200mm autocannons to 150mm autocannons will usually just make the fit a little less effective but not completely ****, however a slicer having to drop from t2 pulse lasers to t1 pulse lasers will be useless as the scorch ammo is required to reach your combat range) you can go ahead, buy the ship and fittings 20+ times in jita, let red frog freight ship it to your desired starting system, set your clone there and just start heading out until all ships are lost. Chances are you will get some good kills.

Yepp basically. It takes roughly 3 days to skill for a specific t1 fit on a t1 frig. You could (and i highly recommend it as it saves a lot of isk later) already fit up about 20 or so frigs for 3mil each for a total of 60mil isk. You will loose all of them, but you would also loose all of them if you fit them for 6 or 10mil each and waited until you can t2 fit them and for the first 20 ships on a char with the mist basic skills, it will usually not matter a whole lot if you get a 10-20% performance increase by doubling or tripling the cost of the ship, as you can probably not utilize this performance increase anyways at first.
But I digress, what i actually anted to say:

Ca. 1 week of skills to get into the ship and get the support skills all up to 3 and the frig skill to 4.
Ca. 1 week after that to get to t2 guns
Ca. 1 week (a little more i think) to skill thermodynamics, as frigfights are usually so short, that you can overheat for the whole fight and get between 15% and 30% increase in performance, which would equate another couple of month if you just skilled support skills.

After these three weeks i would look into getting the support skills (mostly gunnery or missiles, whichever you chose) to 4.
After that I personally started crosstraining to other races frigs to experiment a little. But at that point you will probably get the hang of what you would like to fly (probably something to which you died over and over again :P).

TL:DR
Yeah basic skills for t1 frig and start shooting stuff that moves.