Ships and remaps

There are two resources in EVE: skillpoints and ISK. You can buy anything from ISK except skillpoints and you need them for using the various items. Standings are saving you ISK, so they belong to the ISK realm.

Every skill, has a primary and secondary attribute. When you choose to learn it, every minute you gain 1 skillpoint for 1 point of primary attribute and 1/2 for the secondary. It's obvious that you want as high attributes as possible for fast training. There are 5 attributes and they affect the following skill families:

Group	Attributes
Corporation Management	Memory, Charisma
Drones	Memory, Perception
Electronics	Intelligence, Memory
Engineering	Intelligence, Memory
Gunnery	Perception, Willpower
Industry	Memory, Intelligence
Leadership	Charisma, Willpower
Mechanic	Intelligence, Memory
Missiles	Perception, Willpower
Navigation	Intelligence, Perception
Planet Management	Intelligence, Memory/Charisma, Intelligence
Science	Mostly Intelligence, Memory
Social	Charisma, Intelligence
Spaceship Command	Perception, Willpower/Willpower, Perception
Trade	Willpower, Charisma/Charisma, Memory

If you are a businessman in EVE, the important fields for you will be Trade, Industry, Planetary management, Corporation management and Mechanic (spaceship and station manufacturing). They use Charisma, Intelligence and Memory. Trade uses some Willpower, but if you check the details, and they are fairly simple (x1 and x2 training time modifier) and also they are pretty basic, so you probably have them already (trade, retail, broker relations).

Since your skill training speed depends on your points in the relevant attributes, you set Perception and Willpower to minimum (17) and distribute your 14 free points between the useful ones, speeding up their training. However there is a problem with that, you need ships to perform trading:

• Faction industrial (Bustard): the bigger version of the T1 hauler, having 2-3 more cargo space and 3-4x more HP to transport various stuff, running several T4 courier missions at once or supporting a small mining operation.
• Blockade runner (Crane): stealth ship that can travel undetected. Has smaller cargo space than the T1 hauler but the stealth ability and double speed makes it a good high sec shiny transporter and able to do trading in low-sec. Don't even think of entering low-sec without it or heavy corporate escort.
• Freighter (Charon): 850000 m³ cargo and 140000 HP with skills. Can carry anything and can't be defeated by anything less than 12 battleships/T3 battlecruisers in high sec. Easy target in low-sec.
• Jump Freighter (Rhea): 300000 m³ cargo and the ability to use own jump drive, traveling without stargates. Necessary for nullsec operations. Please note that it has an expensive tertiary skill Jump drive calibration, but its primary attribute is not Perception or Willpower so can be skipped for now.
• Orca: Smaller than a freighter, slower than a T2 industrial, can't stealth and costs 500M. Terrible transport ship, except one that makes it a must: it has a 40000 m³ "corporate hangar". Items in this hangar cannot be scanned and cannot be looted, making it 100% pirate safe (griefers are a different issue). You can use it safely in the NPC corporation too. (thanks to Steel, Care, Testarossa, Belloche, AureoBroke for the info). It is also a perfect place for a serious mining operation, and a must if you want to mine. Also, unlike the freighter it has fitting slots and can be turned into a nasty tank.
• Logistics or interdictor: if you are in a player-run corporation you might be expected to join battles. That would need learning extreme amount of weapon skills that require perception and willpower. However you can bypass this by learning to drive a logistics or an interdictor. Despite they are just cruisers and destroyers, they are extremely useful in battles as their role is similar to healing and CC in WoW, but most players hate them as they don't deal damage, so being proficient in these will make you welcomed in most fleets. I'll learn Basilisk and Guardian.
• Hulk: it's the top mining ship. Need two skills: Mining Barge 5, that should be learned during this remap, and Exhumers 3, that is cheap, but it's prerequisites are not, nor they are P/W, so skip it until you actually want to drive one.

So I will do the following: after learning the basic skills that I need for everyday use, I use one of my two free neural remap and go for perception and willpower and then learn:

• Caldari Industrial 5, 992K points (already have rank 3), P/W
• Transport Ships 3, 48K points, W/P
• Spaceship command 5, 248K (already has 3), P/W
• Advanced spaceship command 4, 226K pt, P/W
• Jump freighters 4, 635K W/P
• Caldari Freighter 4, 452K pt, P/W
• Mining Barge 5, 1024K pt, P/W
• Mining Foreman 5, 512K pt, Charisma/W
• Industrial Command Ships 3, 64K pt, P/W
• Caldari Frigate 4, 74K pt (already have 3), P/W
• Caldari Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W
• Logistics 5, 1536K pt, W/P
• Retail 5, 496K pt, (already have 3), W/Charisma
• Broker relations 5, 496K pt (already have 3), W/Charisma
• Amarr frigate 4, 90k pt, P/W
• Amarr Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W

I'll remap for 7 pt Perception, 7 pt willpower and with +3 implants I'll be done in "only" 165 days. Since I've learned cybernetics 4 already, I can put in +4 implants if I'm swimming in money (only after having a top insured Charon in the hangar), saving 5 more days from the remaining ones. After that I'm done with perception and willpower, and remap for +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha, and will never learn spaceship command again.

Don't be scared by the "165 days" part! It's the time of learning to use all of them. You can fly your industrial and blockade runner in 18-19 days!

Warning: you have 2 free remaps and 1 remap per year. Mess it up and you are stuck with stupid attributes for a year! Beware that some of the ship skills have non-perception-willpower prerequisites, like Logistics, which is a willpower/perception x6 skill, needs Signature analysis and Long range targeting rank 5, both intelligence/memory. Learn them before remap. If you want a blockade runner, don't forget to learn Cloaking skill 4 before! It's not needed for the ship, but needed for the covops cloak that makes it more than a terribly overpriced Badger I.

A few more words about implants: you can implant all 5 attributes, increasing their values by 1-5 pt. 5x5 = 25, so having top implants have higher effect than neural remap (14 points to move). However top implants are expensive (18M for +4, 100M for +5) and can be destroyed by destroying your capsule, so I'd rather not use anything that I would mind losing and for me now that's +3 (9M). Of course no point to improve the implant on attributes that you don't use.

You can use some planner software like EVEMON, but to do so, you need to know what skills you'll use in a year. Reading this blog and starting with me assumes you'll trade, but there are many ways. Some of you will go station trade, others go haul, some will manufacture, some turn to mining, others will be full time salvagers for a fighting corporation and you can't tell now, even if you claim so, because you don't know enough. I know only what we will not use: the ones affecting fighting power, so I dump perception and willpower after having my ships ready.

Important tip: if you are not completely sure, go with an even distribution like my +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha. To see why it's superior to any uneven, let's make a calculation. You have 17 base points and will use +5 implants for sure in a year. Let's say you have 8 points for attributes A and B, that's 17+5+4 = 26 if you distribute them equally. If you learn an A/B skill worth of 1M points, it will take 25641 minutes. If you remapped for 8 A 0 B, you finish in 24390 minutes, saving 1250 mins. However if you do so and it turns out that a B/A skill fits better to your playing, learning that will take 27027 mins, losing 1386 minutes. So the cost of a mistaken uneven distribution is higher than the gain of a well-chosen one. So if the fighting is not completely off the table, just don't remap and run with the starter, 3-3-3-3-2 distribution.


PS: faction standing affects brokers fee and there is a pretty fast way to increase it, faster even than chaining courier missions for a storyline one. And it pays much better: the tutorial missions. While you probably done all 3, you can do it to a friendly faction and enjoy the derived modification. Amarr and Caldari like each other, so do Minmatar and Gallente. Doing them is super fast... if you still have your civilian codebreaker and salvager (or can use the normal ones), have "friendly faction frigate" rank 2 or carried your own frigates for the suicide missions and have empty industry slots. Otherwise you wish you'd be driving a hulk during hulkageddon in goon 0.0.