Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 8, 2012

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:
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.

23 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't see any support skills here. Even if you don't plan on ever shooting at anyone, people will shoot at you and you will want your tanking (read: HP, damage mitigation & self-healing) skills to be decent. Likewise, skills that improve align time, reduce capacitor use, increase capacitor capacity or capacitor recharge rate are always useful.

Gevlon said...

I already have these skills on rank 3-4 and after I remap to 5 int 5 mem 4 cha, I can finish them. None of your mentioned skills have perception or willpower.

Steel H. said...

Logis and dictors are not the best advice to give out though in this particular scenario, despite being the most critical force multipliers. Dictors only work in 0.0, and are a complicated art form, requiring a ton of combat experience and intimate knowledge of tactics and mechanics. Logis need a ton of energy and support skills at 5, including the killer Logistics V, plus a lot of combat experience and general 'knowing wtf you're doing'. Warfare careers always start with basic combat and the omni present drake/hurricane before moving on to more advanced stuff.

One of the most common newbie mistake is to just look at a ship hull requirements and go - "I can do that". You also need proper support skills, fitting, navigation, tanking to be effective (and most of them to 5 when talking about T2 ships). Even if all you fly is haulers, you would still want to invest in navigation and racial tanking skills at the least.

Gevlon said...

@Steel: read up and yes, Logistics 5 is needed, list updated.

I know about the support skills but they have no perception or willpower. So during my perception-willpower period all I need to learn are the hull skills and I can learn the support later when I actually need them.

I know interdictors are 0.0 only but 0.0 is where the serious player corporations are. I see no point joining a lolcorp that owns no systems. The NPC corporations are better than them as can't be wardecced.

Gevlon said...

Oh dear, I recalculated with Logistics 5: 127 days. 121 with +4 implants. I removed Broker relations 5, the difference don't seem to worth it, getting down to 118 days, 114 with +4 implants.

That's some capital waste of time, but rather do it now with Perception/Willpower remap than without it later, or run with 3/3/3/2 forever and slow down my trading skills. Still it's 4 months, in this remap. EVE needs lot of patience.

Gevlon said...

OK, removed Mining Foreman since it's Cha/W so I'm better off doing it after I remapped to int/mem/cha. It means that I'll need to do Industrial Command ships with that setup, but since I'm OK with just rank 2, that's acceptable. Down to 107/103 days in Perc/Will

Steel H. said...

More about logis - it would be funny to see you in a logi since you like(d) healing so much. Most of the shit you are familiar with applies: you never have enough of them, you always beg for more of them, they usually decide who wins, you get in any fleet insta, they are 'boring' to fly since you don't pew-pew (made 10x worse in a game all about killmails), etc. Well, I haven't heard any 'wtf where's my healz' ever, it's only 'love you logi/ty logi'! While logi V isn't exactly required, the train from IV to V has the most numerical impact of any skill step in eve, due to the way the cap reduction bonus is calculated, and allows to fly vastly superior fits. In addition, a logi pilot should have the cap skills to 5, shield/armor/energy emissions 5, AB/MWD skills to 5, tanking to 5 (in PvP logis are almost always primary target), fittings to 5 - to truly be effective. It's true these skills don't need P/W, but it's not exactly an easy train, or an easy play. I would make sure yo actually want to do that gameplay and are enjoying it before you invest in it. Warning, fleets always and really require voice comms in this game...

More nitpicks:
- the Bustard is actually a T2 deep space transport. Intended as a tough version of T1s, with bigger resists and built in warp core stabs for 'the depths of lawless space', they are not that good in the actual real world, because the slow align time cancels out all these benefits, and EHP is no protection for any ship traveling alone in pvp space. Cloaky haulers are almost always preferred for high risk-value hauls.
- "less than 12 battleships in high sec." It's 2012, nobody ganks in battleships any more, tier 3 battlecruisers are now the weapon of choice. Same (or even better) damage at half the BS cost. They were made for ganking.
- I wouldn't call the Orca terrible, even in a relative way. It's an awesome machine that can do a ton of things. Apart from all those slick cargo holds, it can carry and deploy fully assembled and fitted ships, which leads to a ton of logistics uses. Even gankers use them to stage and reship in space and do all sorts of tricks.

Gevlon said...

@Steel: after 4 years of WoW playing nothing but healer, I can surely say that if I ever do PvP or PvE combat, it'll be in a logi.

I'm aware of voice comm in fleets and ready to use it.

Battlecruiser thing fixed.

Steel H. said...

"after 4 years of WoW playing nothing but healer, I can surely say that if I ever do PvP or PvE combat, it'll be in a logi."

-> http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2011/08/sons-of-bitch.html

Quicksilver said...

you started your blogging with posting ideas about the wow AH and attracted people to follow your blog with that, and then you moved to more general philosophy posts which could prove interesting to the same, intelligent audience.

my question is: if right now you are fully switching to posting about a new game which many of your readers haven't played (because most of your readers are wow-related) don't you feel that this will be detrimental to your blog?

personally, I have never played EVE and don't feel that your insight posts about EVE will ever be useful enough for me to justify learning the terminology of a game I have never played and never intend to play.

Gevlon said...

@Steel: this was hilarious. The guy went to an acceptedly very hard mission with a /trade pug that last for 3 hours from inv for lousy 90M? I mean I earn that money in 6 hours with a Badger II and a Condor with 1.5M skillpoints.

This is where WoW experience worth gold: If you go with /trade pug, the job must be doable with half of the team. Or better: DON'T!!!

Gevlon said...

Okrane S: You'd be surprised.

Steel H. said...

Well, I'm disappoint. And missing the point? That article was about the experience of playing fleet logistics in an epic battle of life and internet pixel spaceship death. I didn't even look at the money thingy. But then I'm not a goblin, and don't perceive the world in money signs. I guess it's why I'm (relatively) broke ass poor all the time...

Gevlon said...

@Steel: it was NOT an epic battle. It was a standard tradepug fail saved by an awesome healer. The whole reason why I started my WoW guild is that I don't like to carry retards who can't switch to an add attacking a healer. Now those tards went home with 90M that they couldn't make in a week and the strong belief that they are awesome while half of the healers lost their 150M+ ships (and I'm damn sure they did not receive compensation for it)

PS: according to the post the "mom" is some big nasty thing. Why didn't they bring a dreadnought to siege it down?

Steel H. said...

Constellations under incursions are cyno jammed - no cynosural fields can be opened, so no capital ships can be jumped in. Trust me, they would otherwise drop 50 titans on the poor Sanshas... Also in PVP cyno jammers are a major mechanic of sov and capital warfare.

Also, I view that whole thing totally different, but I will stop here because a) I know exactly zero about incursions apart from what I've read, and b) I don't want to go through more tl;drs like when I was debating vent and raiding ...

Péter Zoltán said...

Well I started to play EVE 2 days ago, mostly because Gevlon started to post about it.

Fade Toblack said...

He got 90m ISK and 20,000 LP (worth another 20-40m ISK) up-front from CONCORDE. The Sansha MOM they killed drops a Revenent BPC, which are worth somewhere in the 40-60 *billion* mark...

As far as bringing a Dreadnought (or some other capital ships in) you simply can't get them into the system. Capital ships can't use stargates, they use their own internal jump-drive to jump to cyno-beacons. Sansha incursion systems are cyno-jammed, you can't light that beacon. So unless they're already there, you have to use what you can bring in.

Anti said...

pro-tip: if you plan on grinding career agents you can loot many "Proof of Discovery" of each type the first time you scan them down, just keep opening the lootable container. that way you only have to go through the tedious scanning process once and can do the missions 12x (x4 factions x3 locations) and perhaps even sell them to market.

Care said...

Gelvon,

One of the most common new player mistakes is to rush into advanced ships too early. Specially those who train straight away into battleships will learn the hard way that there is more to it than just being able to fly the hull. Compare it to world of warcraft: a new level 85 tank, who has the talents and skills to play his class perfectly but not the gear to tank heroics yet. I recommend to put your logistics/interdictor plans on hold for now. In fact, forget about low-sec and 0.0 until you are running or participating in an active cooperation with assets there.

If you want to explore something outside your trade business I suggest you start with industry (which I expect you will end up doing eventually). I really recommend to look into planetary interaction. The skillrequirements determine capacity rather than efficiency, so you don't need to maximize them in order to be competitive. Your investments in infrastructures are safe from other players (how unEVElike). It requires a minimal effort in logistics (compared to other production) and they is always a demand since the products are used for construction and fueling components for the rest of the industry. A tip: Considering a very low skill requirement, this market is easy accessible, also from your other two character slots.

Gevlon said...

@Care: you did not understand me.

I did not say I'll be ready to fly a Basilisk in a month. I said I do all the perception-willpower skills needed for it. I know I have lot of skills to learn before I could do serious logistics stuff. But after I learned the hull, I can remap for 0/0 perception willpower as the further skills need none of them.

Casares said...

Minor points to consider:

1. Jump clone installation requires effective standing of 8.0 with the owner of the station. You will probably put jump clones into the isk category, but worth mentioning outside the broker fee (and access to missions).

Can be bypassed by joining a corp with appropiate standings though.

2. +5 attribute implants are doubtful not only due to their high prize but also because they require cybernetics V. It will take a long time (~ a year) to get this initial time investment back by faster learning.

Anonymous said...

1) Actually, I think if you are going to spend RL$ to buy something in EVE, skill points are arguably the best thing to buy. Regardless of how much you train, someone who currently has three more years of training than you retain their advantage. Whereas someone who goes to the character bazaar and buys a pilot can get years of training with a single transaction. And as long as you keep your clone up, there is no way to lose those skill points. Whereas a new player who buys a shiny ship will probably lose it to incompetence or briefing. CCP has things like Power of 2 to encourage multiple accounts. I think the accounts per person is much higher in EVE than other MMOs.

2) I also think you perhaps undervalued the Orca. IIRC, a non-AFK Orca can achieve more eHP than a Freighter (Charon).

IO said...

Gevlon, Basilisk is not used in PVP in 0.0. Scimitars are used. Basis are only useful in incursions.