EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi,
The purpose of this is two fold:
- Check the advice I am giving a friend... it has been a long time since I started from scratch
- Share it with others assuming it is good, or at least OK advice

A friend of mine is wanting to start Eve focusing on combat, and I gave some advice that follows along this outline. Please feel free to correct, or add good advice for him.

1- Get an idea of what you want to fly/how you want to blow stuff up. Focus skills on that.
1.a- Figure out primary damage, and focus on that: Turrets, Missiles or Drones. Train the base skills for these (i.e. the non size specific skills like 'sharpshooter')
1.b- Select faction based on the above for their hull bonuses
1.c- Select defense to focus on based on faction (i.e. Shield vs Armor)

2- Get skills and have fun while waiting on training.
2.a- Spaceship command, navigation, and targeting skills are important as well as offensive and defensive skills.
2.b- It is better to fly a smaller ship with good skills, than a large ship with bad skills.
2.c- If you focus Missions, you can rush with min requirements to get to a Battleship, but wait to flying it until you round-out some skills to fly it better (see #3)... fly something smaller in the mean time. The base skills (#1) will help with the weapons and defense regardless of ship size.

3- Fly the intro/tutorial missions and see if there is anything else that interests you as well. With minor skill investment exploration or mining becomes viable, and can make some starting isk while training skills

4- Fly the other factions' into/tutorial missions (at least their Security ones), and use the free ships they give you.
This is to get a rough feel for other weapon systems, and ships. If you want to switch factions/weapons, it is better to do it earlier than later

5- Read-up on the missions before accepting - decline any missions that pit you against one of the other 3 main factions (unless you are doing FW or something)... it can be a pain fixing standing.

6- There is no shame in warping-out of a mission if it gets too much, and coming back once you are repaired and have full cap

7- SUMMARY Try not to out-run your training and isk flow with bigger ships.
- This can be helped by focusing on base skills (e.g. getting "sharpshooter" leveled rather than getting "small projectile turrets" leveled all the way as sharpshoot impacts all turrets and will help all turret based ships from frigates to battleships).
- Fly missions and focus on flying them well in small cheap ships, rather than just getting through the missions/standing grind to L4. Collect isk from the lower level missions while improving your skills so you can manage range, setting up orbits and manually flying, not shooting trigger ships, agroing pockets, etc. These personal skills will help a lot when you fly something bigger, slower and more expensive.
- Look at alternatives (mining, exploration, PI, etc.) for isk while training... just grinding low level missions can get boring

Personal suggestion - try the Tactical Camera mode to stay oriented

To new players I typically strongly recommend not focusing. So when I see you advising focus I have to push back and say stay general.

Due to the exponential increase in training times with no increase in benefit for each level of a skill, IMHO focus should be avoided at all costs.

It's quick enough to reach 3 in all your support skills for turrets and missiles. Shields and armor too.
I did almost exactly what you, OP are describing except I went 2 orders of magnitude further in that I immediately remapped for intel/mem and put a few million sp into engineering, armor, electronics, navigation, and (thankfully) drones, because I wanted a "strong baseline."
I was bored out of my skull for the first 5 months of the game. Thankfully, the drones sp dump that I did was followed by tiericide and CCP gave me, a drones and cap warfare amarr pilot, a progression of drones and cap warfare amarr ships. Lucky me.

Shortly afterward I started recommending against implants, remaps, and sp/hr min/maxing. Fly T1's in every role, because you, as an inexperienced newbro, don't really know what you want to fly. How could you? You haven't flown anything yet!

I don't really recommend that anymore either.
If you don't know what you want to fly, by all means train a bit of everything.
If you see a ship that looks cool to you, go for that. If people tell you that you're doing it wrong: :parroto:

I<3pilgrims