EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello,

I just started play EVE a couple of weeks back and I am having a really tough time deciding what race of ship I would like to fly. For example, I know that I want to get Cruiser to V for one race (at least) to have the option of training for Logistics, Covert Ops, Heavy Intradictor, etc. The problem I am having is that I have no clue which race to choose. I know that I would like to do PVP and high end PVP (incusions) in the long run.

Anyway, any advice regarding what ships to pick and why would be greatly appreciated. I have used Evemon to browse the ships, what type of weapons they use, what unlocks what, but I am still no closer to making this monumental decision in my EVE career.

Thanks a lot for any input and I apologize for the very general question.

-Arc Typ

depends on your prefered playstyle:

Caldari: slow shield tanks with huge range and lousy dps that are good for pve and mostly laughed at in pvp
Amarr: Even slower, brutish armortanks with lovely lazors that do good damage, but are limited to 2 damage types
Minmatar: fast and deadly ships, somewhat fragile and skill intensive, but very popular for pvp
Gallente: focus on drones, shortrange weapons and active armortanks. Their ships are ugly but good for suicide ganking.

hope that covers it.

Oh and that's another thing, due to the nature of minmatar training (we duct tape everything and the kitchen sink to our ships) you pretty much end up training every tanking method and weapon system, which makes it that much easier to cross train into other racial ships.

For incursions, the easiest to fit and use of the Logistics ships would be Amarr (armor fleets) and Caldari (Shield fleets). These are also the preferred Logis for PvP

For PvP, the easiest races to play are Minmatar and Caldari, due to primary weapons that don't use capacitor (thus, cannot be energy neutralized) and the weapon system with the simplest mechanics (missiles always hit and their damage is an algebraic function) respectively. The most _powerful_ ships and fits are scattered around the races randomly and depend on playstyle quite a bit

Heavy interdictors are, for most practical purposes, essentially all identical regardless of race

More generally, most people have two or three frigate skills to V before they put any of the cruiser skills to V, especially if they fly Stealth Bombers. This is because the training time for frig V is extremely short compared to some of the secondary training it takes to even access the T2 cruisers

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OK, on to the actual advice section of the post: base your decision of which race to focus on initially on T1 hulls, not T2 hulls. Even when you have the skills to fly T2 most of your time as a combat pilot will be spent in the T1 hulls that you have the most skill points invested in. This is doubly true in PvP, where flying a T2 ship larger than a frigate tends to just get you focus-fired because the killmail is good for e-peen

So, in my view, your choice for "first race" should boil down mostly to the ships' preferred weapon system and how it plays

Gallente: You either enjoy charging directly at people, forgoing most defense, to punch them in the face /or/ You don't mind micro-managing minions in RTS game

Minmatar: You prefer to set the range of the engagement by being nimbler than the other guy, and think the capacitor mechanic is stupid and should be ignored. Similarly, you don't mind swapping out ammo until you find just the right damage type

Caldari: You think things should die before they even get close, and are willing to warp in and out repeatedly to stay at sniper range /or/ you feel that if something is in the range of your weapon, you should be able to hit it for _something_, end of story

Amarr: You enjoy playing resource-management games in the style of most other MMOs using your capacitor. You don't feel the need for variety, just effectiveness, and will happily sit there absorbing damage if that means you can hit the other guy back even harder.

These obviously aren't absolutes, as every race has some flexibility, but this is how the basic racial differences tend to work out, at least for T1. T2 ships actually tend to be focused much more on their _role_ than their _race_ in most cases, race usually just sets the damage type or the repper type. Disregarding those specifics, there's little difference between, say, a Nemesis and a Hound. At least from the perspective of a new player, I'm sure with you're over 10m xp or so you'll have as big a stick up your arse about that one slot layout difference as the rest of us.

There are different ways you can figure out what ships to fly. I would do the following and that should help you narrow down your choice

1. watch some youtube videos that showcase pvp action for different ship types
2. look at what playstyle each race offers
3. look at a bunch of pictures
4. if you are in a corp/allinace, what ships do they usually fly?

I chose Amarr ships to train first as they have a good selection of powerful ships and they look sexy as hell. The Amarr battleships are the bees knees

As someone who is currently finishing up his fourth Cruiser 5, I'll throw my vote into the 'crosstrain' pile. In my opinion, more races == more variety/choices == more fun.

As to which one to train first, go for whatever sounds fun and lines up with what you want to do the best. When it comes to the races, there's no 'wrong' choices, just training you could have put off 'till later. I would suggest getting Cruisers/BCs in all four races and fly each of them for a while to see which one you like the most; then go with that one.

Thanks a lot for the replies, everyone! Some great advice in here.

I definitely hope to be playing long enough to cross-train multiple races, but for the moment I would like to focus on specializing and unlocking more variety, as opposed to having three racial frigates to V.

From the sounds of things I may be more of a Minmatar player. I have heard that Caldari are not the greatest (Drake and Tengu being the best two ships, but they get left out of Incursions and missile boats are not preferable for PVP). I am not horribly interested in a drone boat, so I believe Gallente are out (for now) and I don't like the idea of having limited variety and weak T1 ships (so we can nix Amarr).

Does that analysis sound accurate? Thanks a lot again, everyone!

I'd come to the same conclusion (see above post), but could you elaborate why you feel that way?

Train rifter, ransom carebears, make isk, be happy (oh yeah, and sell me the corpses).

oh, one more thing:

Try to train your prefered weapon system to tech 2 before you start to train for tech 2 hulls. T2 weapons make a huge difference.