Thursday 27 September 2012

Day 98 : Guns Vs Industry


It’s the usual Friday job. I wait all week to get a swathe of guilt free EVE time and then do nothing. What is this all about? Is anticipation better than realisation? That can’t be true. Every time I log into EVE it’s like stepping into a time machine. I look up after around what I think is an hour later and somehow four hours have gone by.

I start the morning with a quick Jita run to start regaining some of the cash I spent on the Ishkur. For starters this is weird because I already saved the money ahead of time. It’s a poor excuse for rocketing between Dodixie and Jita. I think I’m actually looking for the next easy win and making the run because it’s a cheap thrill, Risk As Reward again. If I’m not careful I’ll end up falling into one of the market traps you occasionally see. They should be obvious, but obvious isn’t all that clear when you’ve just woken up.

I’m getting closer to setting up long term buy and sell orders but I haven’t found anything I can commit to 100%. Partly this is cowardice over the bank balance. It’s also due to the the best tactic for trade and industry being to start with what  you know, by which I mean what you have used. I’ve hardly used anything. My most expensive ships are a Myrm I haven’t flown yet and my fitted Ishkur.

Instead of setting up buy orders for trade I think I’m going to revert back to industry, use buy orders to get materials in and use sell orders to get the finished product out. Less trade thrill runs, more of a sense of achievement from production runs. I got started on this whole thing a few months back but aside from a small business in drone manufacture which keeps cash dribbling in I didn’t take it any further. Low sec excitement demanded skill queue priority for a while. I think the current plan is to boost my industry skills again and then revert back to combat skills.

The common wisdom about combat skills often seems to be to get to battleships as fast as you can. I like flying the smaller ships though, I feel the need for speed. So, I think I’m going to round off all the basics while working my way up through advanced frigate types. I already have Assault ships,  Interceptors are next in line. I wouldn’t be surprised to see bombers before battleships but I’ll see how it goes. The temptation to plunge a ton of time into autocannon skills is immense. This would enable me to strap the equivalent of huge machine guns onto the Myrmidon, which is now named “Keelhauler” after the shape, and get her out in the black gunning things down. I can’t help but think of the Lewis gun incident in Cryptonomicon. There isn’t any bonus for standard Gallente Hybrid guns on the Myrmidon hull so I won’t be losing out there, plus I nearly rolled Minmatar at the start and they have some cool looking ships built for the weaponry I’m talking about.


Reasons for getting a second account #5

Replay. In some sense whatever I did on the first character would be repeated. I’d get to be a proper Noob all over again.  Would I though? Would it be the same? It’s worth testing surely? Given the amount of cash I’ve saved over the last couple of months by playing EVE  the power of two is affordable. Would I be able to drop it after the six months though?


NOTE: This post 6 days behind actual events!

10 comments:

  1. So are you still enjoying the game or getting burned out? I just started a week ago and am so confused, so I don't really know a lot of the stuff you talk about.

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    1. Still enjoying it, though having an easy week atm due to RL stuff. I'll be back!

      I've found that a daily blog has become a bit too much pressure, so I'll tone it down. I'll still be out here though, blogging the Noobish things I did week per week!

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  2. The downward spiral commences.....

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  3. Just get the second account =). The longer you wait the more you will be kicking yourself later when you do get the account. The one thing we can't really just "get" is SP in the areas that we need them without going out and just buying a new character.

    Currently I am running two account. One for my combat main and one for my industry main. Because of the SP system and the fact that skills only go to V, a new player can be just as good, if not better, than a vet if they have focus trained for that role. This is one reason why "gunmining" was so popular and the big reason that the vast majority in this game make their livings by ratting and mission running. You can train up a combat character and still have an income on a single account. Doing industry really demands a second account if you want to get involved in PVP.

    It is also nice to be able to dual box and it is a good way to get alts in different places. Really, I have two mains and one alt with a the rest being cyno alts for transportation. My industry main can fly the JF, do invention, has near perfect trade skills and am currently working on getting all my ore processing skills to V. Of course I have a combat main but I also have an empire JF pilot who is in a newbie corp for when I have to haul in a war dec situation who also has near perfect trade skills for selling my goods in Jita.

    In the end, a second account will allow you to get where you want to be quicker. It will also let you play the 0.0 game AND the Empire game without having to choose between the two (although Jump Clones help with that as well).

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  4. A word of encouragement. I worked my way up, getting solid skills in small ships and weaponry, then medium and so on. I have found that while this takes a lot longer to get into that magical battleship, as a result when I did finally get one my skills allowed me to fly it much more effectively than I would have otherwise. Besides which, it is a really good feeling when you finally finish skilling a ship and can actually fit it full T2 right from the start. This is only possible with a sound foundation of fitting, tanking and gunnery skills.

    I would also advise that if you are looking at a second account, go for it. There is literally years of combat skills to train. If you are focusing one toon on industry and the other on combat you will be as skilled in one year as you would be in two years with only one toon. Not to mention I can count on one hand the number of EVE players I know who have been playing past one year and only have one account.

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  5. Getting into a battleship as fast as you can is NOT common wisdom. Oh, it's common enough, but it's FAR from wise.

    The way the ships are balanced, a minimum-skilled pilot buying a battleship, even for PvE, is just buying a spectecular, but rather expensive, explosion-waiting-to-happen. Besides, there's hardly anything a well-fitted myrmidon can't do.

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    1. This is correct - it's common for people to rush to battleships as quickly as possible because ~bigger is better~, but until you have all the skills to round them out (and access to level 4 missions, the size that actually includes battleship rats) you're often less effective in a battleship than you would be in a battlecruiser.

      In PVP, this is doubly so - battleships are incredibly vulnerable due to their low speed and difficulty hitting small targets. I have almost perfect skills for them, and still almost never PVP in a battleship - you're much better off rounding out your frigate and cruiser skills than rushing for the big guns.

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    2. Basically this. The mass limits on wormholes where I live may play into this on some scale, but I can count the number of times I've pvped in a battleship on one hand. On top of that, so many support skills go into them that, even when you can fly one, it'll still perform pretty badly for a good while. And *even then* they're slow, clumsy, and have trouble hitting things in the wrong situation.

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  6. I completely agree with your choice not to go for the Battleships. I personally settled on cruisers, and might make my jump to battleships properly (I can fly them on a basic level) sometime next year. I'm currently on 37M SP and think that playing the ships you enjoy is a far better than rushing towards the larger ships.

    As for multiple accounts, there are loads of things that it opens up, it's definitely worth doing with the current Power of Two offer.

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