EVE New Citizens Q&A

OP, be very sure you understand the weaknesses of battleships before getting in one. Very sure.

A battleship takes around ten times as long to acquire a target lock as a frigate does. It simply can't do any damage at all with guns to a frigate that is close to it unless the frigate is nearly stationary (or if it is using missiles, it will deal terrible damage to a frigate at any speed).

If you start your EVE career in highsec missions, the frigates will be the biggest danger to you at all mission levels (other than other players). In a battleship, you are somewhat better at killing hostile battleships than other ship classes, but the price you pay for this is being TERRIBLE against those very frigate rats that are the biggest danger to you.

The same caveats apply to the battlecruisers that fit battleship sized guns, although they aren't used for missions much at all.

In missions, I'd rather deal 1000 DPS to battleships and 900 to frigates in an Ishtar (or 300 less in a Vexor) than deal 1800 damage to battleships and literally less than 50 to frigates.


But feel free to ignore our advice. When you do, please EVEmail me links to your lossmails, so that your expensive battleship losses can serve as expensive warnings of what NOT to do for future new players.

Beat me to it :)

Also, OP: To effectively use a battleship will take you weeks or months of training. You'll need, at a minimum, racial battleship III, large turret III (or missile skills taking even longer), drones V plus associated drone skills, and that doesn't even touch on the many fitting skills you'll need.

Don't expect to effectively fly one before March. Maybe April. Next week, barely maybe; next month, badly at best.

Regarding small ships, I can fly battleships (and unlike you, I can fit them - barely). I can also fly BCs, cruisers, and so on. Despite all of that, my favorite ships are frigates. Currently my favorite ship is an assault frigate PvP build I am also running L3 missions in.

I really, really dislike anything larger than BCs. I dislike some BCs as well. They just feel stodgy and slow. I have much more fun in cruisers and below. For now anyway.

If you do this, please let us know so we can ga.... ....protect you! In your nice new expensive ship.

Don't turn EvE into an isk grind. Running L4 missions is a good goal, but it's better to think long term what you may want to do for 'fun.'

Take it from someone who loves to run missions, they get boring real quick.

I've also heard no mention of group play. Solo EvE is not the best EvE - in my opinion.

Incorrect assumption. I don't think you realize how long it will take you to actually be effective in a battleship, or how much a well fit battleship will cost to fit.

I just did a minimal skill plan from a new pilot and we're talking more than 20 days to just put guns in the thing and be able to fly 5 drones. That's with no other skills trained at all, just battleship, large guns and drones.

Glad you're having fun fitting though. And good to see you're using a fitting tool to experiment.

If you mean the Drake, no not really. Level 2 missions are better done in a cruiser than a battlecruiser typically. If you like missiles, try a Caracal.

What is Mastery Level Certificate? What is difference amongst 1-5 levels?

I'm going to toss in my 2 isk worth of opinion.

I started playing Eve in May last year so I'm almost 9 months into the game. Still new enough to remember fairly clearly what it's like to be a new player still learning how to get started.

Algebar, it's one thing to have the skills to fly a battleship in Eve, it's another thing to have the isk to buy one and equip it, and yet another thing to be able to fly it well. When you look at the stats of different ships and see the "training time" information, that's basically the time it takes to train the smallest set of skills necessary to get into a ship and launch it out of a station into space.

That training time is just for the bare ship itself. No weapons, no defence equipment, no other skills. You'll be sitting in a ship that can't shoot and can't protect itself. All of the other items that make a ship effective, weapons, defence equipment, drones, etc, will all take extra training time on top of the training time for the ship itself.

There is a core set of skills which apply to every ship you fly, from a frigate to a titan to a mining ship and to a cargo hauler. Every ship in the game has the following. A capacitor for storing power, a powergrid to get power to the weapons and other modules, a cpu to run the weapons and other modules, shields, armor and a hull. Each of those has a basic skill associated with it (capacitor has two core skills, one to increase it's power storage size and the other to make it recharge faster). Every ship you can fly in the game has those features and every ship you can fly in the game will benefit from training these core skills. I'm not saying you have to get them all to level 5 as fast as possible, but those skills should be fairly high priority. In my opinion, by the time you think you're ready to fight in a battleship, you should have all of those core skills to at least level 3 and possibly level 4. You can certainly equip and fly a battleship with those core skills lower than level 3, but you'll be slower, run out of power sooner, have weaker defences and do less damage in a fight. Your battleship will be easier for others to blow up while you're inside it.

There's also the issue of affording a battleship. You're going to need to fly something else that is smaller and cheaper in order to earn enough isk to buy a battleship and all it's modules and remember that insurance will never cover the total replacement cost of a fully equipped ship. Insurance won't even cover the full market price of a bare unequipped ship.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to fly a battleship as soon as you can, play the game in a way that makes you happy. I just want you to be aware that all ships have their strong and weak points, and a battleship can be very vulnerable to a group of smaller ships like frigates, destroyers and fast cruisers, especially when the battleship is flown by someone with skills still at a low level compared to pilots in smaller ships with skills at a higher level. Small ships can put some real hurt on bigger ships when those small ships are used in the right way.

This is all just personal opinion, play the game your way and ignore everything I said if you like. I'm just trying to help you avoid making an easy target of yourself by getting into an expensive ship that will be vulnerable while you're still fairly new to the game.

Incorrect.

A T2 frigate takes less skills then a T1 battleship to have all the needed "core" skills on the level you need to use it effectively.

Yes.

Those Malkuth's are just named Heavy missile launchers (so Meta level is not 0, can't remember what Malkuth's are, IIRC it's Meta 3).

Thus it needs Heavy missiles.

How much...well, that depends on your exact fit (so how much DPS), what you fight (how many shots it takes to kill it) and the amount of enemies you need killed.

So it's hard to say, but you will use a fair bit of missiles in a while, so what I personally do is buy in bulk (aka buy about 1 million missiles and then use that stock till it's nearly empty).