Warfare & Tactics

Personally, I would go minmatar, there would be no real "wrong" choice but at the end of the day, you get far more options.

On the plus side, with BOTH races you will get a choice of ammo types making your life so much easier. With Caldari you get to pick 100% of the damage type of all four selections. With Minmatar, you will be able to switch on demand but it won't be 100% of one type but rather two types. Is that a problem? Not at all. However, with that said, you're going to do a lot more DPS with minmatar anyway.

Remember, Caldari utilize missiles, this is some what lacking in the skill department. What I mean is, Caldari pretty much use missiles and Caldari only. Well, not strictly true but most ships of the other races are turrets, so if you train for turrets and you ever decide to change from say, Projectiles to Lasers then you've already got a lot of the primary skills backing you up. If you change from Missiles to lasers, then you're going to have to start from scratch.

Also, since some Caldari ships use hybrids anyway, even if you do go minmatar and decide to later go Caldari, you can use your gunnery skills there, but Hybrids just aren't as good as other weapon systems for a lot of things (They are however, not as bad as many make out, and even pretty good in some areas).

Caldari has the drake, an easy to fly low SP ship that's good at pretty much anything, but do you want to be stuck to one ship? Minny have the hurricane which is also an amazing ship and will far out DPS the drake anyway, since while the drake can do so much, it does it slowly.

If your friend wants you to fly a Caldari for a drake to make isk, well, that's a silly choice. You'd make isk so much faster in a hurricane. I use my maelstrom for L4's, but if I ever take my cane to l3's for example, it does them in 5 minutes flat, a drake takes so much longer. Hell, my cane tanks super anyway for that sort of thing.

Minny ships are also the fastest ships in the whole of Eve. Fast is good. Whether it's got PvP, flying to the gates in missions, or just getting around you can never go wrong.

Also, missiles don't hit instantly like other weapons, so if you're in a gang, then you've often wasted your shots with the travel time.

Min ships also feel like there's just a variety, and a ship for everything. Like I said, hybrids aren't bad, but projectiles are just better. Sure, blasters can give a whopping smack on the ass if you can get into range, but again, Caldari ships are usually missiles. You got the Rohk and stuff, but rails pretty much suck IMO.

As for looks? PERSONALLY I think a lot of minmatar ships look better, at least those that count. Caldari has some butt ugly ones (so does minny but not as many imo).

Minmatar has the best frigate imo - Rifter, best BC imo - hurricane, best BS imo - Maelstrom and best faction BS - Mach. Also some decent (damn good) faction cruisers and amazing assault frigates (Well, Enyo is my favorite but that's neither min or cal).

Speed, damage, looks, PvP, instant damage...the list can go on. Caldari has the Tengu which is better than the loki but at the end of the day, the loki isn't far off. Caldari are better PvE tanks but none of the races have any issues tanking any amounts of damage in PvE if you fit right, so it's just overkill really...needed for the amount of rats you'll have on you since you take so long to kill them compared to other races.

At the end of the day, it's YOUR choice, and YOU shouldn't be swayed by someone else's opinions. No one can tell YOU what YOU want to fly. I personally just suggest you go minny because if you don't like it, you can fall back on so many more options while having the gunnery skills.

You just have far more options going Minmatar. I don't think their OP like people state, I think they just have a ship for everything which upsets people when their race don't always match up to it.

If you go minmatar and PVP, then I would like to give you many of my recommendations that I make to noobs. DON'T start out in a Rifter for most of your PVP.

WHAT!?!

That's right. Frig fights happen so fast and rarely ever last more than a minute. It can be very hard to learn from your mistakes when they all happened so fast. Fly the Thrasher to get started. The fights will last about the same amount of time (or less), but thanks to the high dps, the Thrasher will be a lot more forgiving just starting out.

For a T1 tackle frig - the Vigil is the best. Tackling in scram range (what a lot of Rifter do) will end up with a lot of dead Rifters. The vigil is super fast and fit the mids with MWD, Disruptor II, and TD. Fit it for speed and tackle out of scram range like a boss.

GL out there

Chat has it right a few posts up, feel free to enlighten yourself dipshit.

Rifter - who needs tanking skills?
Thrasher - shield tank works fine and in most cases better than armor
Rupture- see above
Hurricane- see above, although armor fits are nice to have option eventually
Cyclone- shield tank
maelstrom- shield tank
temptest- meant to armor tank, but is actually better with shield/nano

Also, every ship in that list is baller with nothing but autocannons and neuts in the highs. Seriously laughin my balls off that some idiot rookies still think minmatar is still intensive. Yes, in the long-run if you want to be the bestest little typhoon pilot ever in the whole universe, minmatar have a really high skillcap. But, for all intents and purposes flying the popular (read as: effective) newbie pvp ships/fits up the standard progression rout, minmatar has an incredibly LOW skill threshold ANND their ships are miles and miles easier to fit due to their excessively massive grid on ships that are meant to be able to fit artillery.

INb4 the heretic faggots troll me to death with "OMG DRAEK HARPEH HYBRIDZ TANGUZ ECM" spam and ignore basic facts like split weapon systems, stingy fitting stats on t1 caldari hulls, etc.

ps. pick gallente

Look newb, I know you can't read all that well, but it's painfully obvious what I pointed out: all you need to fly 90% of the t1 minmatar pvp ships are a small ammount of shield skills and autocannons. Ergo, you were wrong to go spouting the scrublord nonsense that minmatar has to worry about a high sp cap early on.

Yes, if a newbie wants to jam jam jam and nothing but jam they better train caldari, but I never denied that was an option, did I?

tldr; you posted garbage and got called on it. deal wiz it

AMARR FTW!!

With all the (extremely nebulous) changes coming up the pipe who can trully say, but a long running examination of nerfage and boostage evidence shows Mimmatar usually wins in the back room "ballance" discussions.

Btw, if you want a Drake for pve, think again. The CSM wants to nerf it's pve ability supposedly, so too bad up and coming Caldari n00bs.
When they take away the resist bonus and "add" whatever other bonuses, they will almost certainly buggger it up somehow by making it much slower, screwing the grid, or something.

But, If I had to choose only 2 ships for the widest possible range of roles involving pvp encounters with T1 ships then it'd be the Hurricane and the ultimate pve OR pvp swiss army knife of EVE, the Dominix (if you want to crosstrain at some point).