Goals update update

NB my mid-September note updating some gameplay goals -- or the short, short version below:

• Train up to use tech 2 modules on Eemiv's main mission-running ship
• Clone Eemiv and stick one copy amid the dangers of low-security space
• With Dengar, participate in two RvB weekend events
• Stretch goal, not time-bound: train Eemiv up for flying logistics (i.e., essentially, medic)

I gave myself a two-month window and should've added a fifth goal, to wit: post an update two months later so that I'd have at least one post in November.

I'm giving myself a 60% success rate on these. Here's the breakdown:

• Modules: done and on time. When I began Eve, I decided to wring myself an early advantage by cashing in (rather, ISKing in) Plex to buy more-powerful (than even T2) but easier-to-fit faction modules. However, faction and higher level modules just aren't worth the real or potential expense: the real cost being the much higher price tag without that much more power, and the potential cost coming from carrying around all that bling to become a target for gankers. (There's really no such thing as "solo" play; even if I'm content to shoot NPCs, anyone else can scan my Kronos, do a cost-benefit analysis, and decide to blow me up while compatriots raid my corpse.) Anyhow, I've sold back the faction modules, and it's nice to have back some of that ISK with which to play the market.



Typical jump clones
From Sony Movie Channel

• Clone: I modified the goal a bit and it's still in progress. The biggest hang-up here is that I just didn't invest the time to wrap my head around jump clone mechanics. I had an errant (mis)understanding that jumping between clones requires both the current and target clones to be at stations with medical bays. I was having a devil of time (indeed, utterly failing) at finding a good home base for Eemiv: a station with whose owners Eemiv had good standing, access to level 4 missions, and close to a trade hub to get loot onto market. But, just yesterday I carefully read up on jump cloning and got my facts straight: medical bay only required to create the jump clone; afterward, jumping can happen from non-medbay stations. Eemiv now has a jump clone with a ship -- but, rather than winnowing in on low- or null-security space broadly, I'm going to send him into a wormhole again pretty soon, hopefully better trained and equipped than last time. I like the exploration component of Eve. So, goal amended and delayed, and work continues. As an aside, I like the clone changes coming this week and am curious about the additional clone mechanic shifts CCP has alluded to.
• RvB weekend events: I tried. I logged in for a cruiser event, decked out in a Thorax, but there were no fleets. I bounced between three jump gates in the neighborhood and saw maybe one ship, neither friend nor foe, who promptly jumped out. Weird. I didn't log in for a second weekend event because they were generally free-for-alls, and those just don't interest me right now. Goal not met.
• Logistics: kinda sorta, in that I shifted it from Eemiv to Dengar. I initially envisioned Eemiv as a bit of a free agent, tacking onto missions in local chat as people requested. But, I figure this would be more useful if I did it with Dengar, where logistics piloting for a group can more readily be useful. Dengar is trained up to fly a tech 2 Oneiros logistics cruiser, but I'll try experimenting initially with a less expensive tech 1 Exequror. I definitely need to further investigate good fits for these hulls.

So, what now? By the end of the month, I plan to

• Have Eemiv run a hacking, relic or data site in wormhole, low-sec, or null-sec space.
• Have Dengar fly logistics in an RvB fleet once
• Train Eemiv to fly assault and covert ops frigate
• Assess Eemiv's skill training plan to identify when best to remap his attribute points, thereby adjusting the rate at which certain skills train. The character will be able (but is not compelled) to remap his attribute points come February.
• Report back to the blog my progress on the above!

And the stretch goal: have Eemiv or Dengar join a new corporation. I would like to be more engaged with other plays in blowing up internet spaceships, and I'm starting to feel the confidence now to do that. 

My initial anxiety at doing this was in-game, i.e. not being able to afford to get blown up a lot as I learned the ropes. Frankly, my anxiety about trying to get more involved now involves the real word: I'm going to be a father in February, and I hesitate to jump into a group I soon won't be able to do much for. But, there are large groups out there that I'm sure can absorb "real life" just fine. And, besides, there's only so long as I can go without kicking myself for coming up with reasons not to do something. If fatherhood is going to mean less time for flying around, well darnit I better get in as much flying and pewpew! as I can now.

New tool

Just sharing: the Oceanus release brought some tools to ease exporting/importing ship fits between the game client and third-party programs. The developer post mentioned to tools specifically: EFT (short for "Eve Fitting Tools") and pyfa. EFT has been running on my bootcamp partition since development on EveHQ halted, but I'd never heard of pyfa before. So I tried it.

Awesome!

It has a friendly UI and, thank goodness, is a native Mac application. Now that my characters' skill planning is pretty well set for the near and even long terms, I'm spending more time fiddling with fits and ship hulls; discovering this program came at just the right time.

I've jumped back into Vitality for skill-planning -- there's a pre-alpha out there that fixes some of my interface qualms and, though clearly still plenty buggy, is functional enough.

Nerd alert!

Everything is normal here

My first thought seeing Google's post about adding linear optimization tools to Google Sheets was to apply them toward skill training. Specifically, prioritizing my characters' skill plans based on skill-points-per-hour and the times in a few months when I can re-distribute core attributes; NB an April post about skill training in general. This mechanic is one of the most enticing aspects of the game for me, although I also agree with some ideas about revamping the system.

Anyhow, I have a distinguished history of being branded a "nerd" by my wife when I talk about Eve stuff (really, most things); hopefully, this post and my enthusiasm for the new tools will set a new high bar for spousal mockery.

Goals update

In March, I laid out goals that I ended up accomplishing two months later. Along the way, an underlying goal for myself was to figure out what gameplay styles I liked and to identify what, if anything, I'm playing for. Time, I think, to lay out some new goals now that I'm more attuned to the game. Within two months, I want to

• Equip and operate Eemiv's Kronos Marauder with tech 2 equipment. Tech 2 modules have a performance edge over basic "tech 1" modules, but they require higher levels of skill training. For example, to mount 425mm Prototype Gauss Guns on the Kronos, Eemiv needed to train the Large Hybrid Turret skill to level I. To equip the tech 2 425mm Railgun IIs, Eemiv needs Large Hybird Turret to level V and Sharpshooter to level V (about four weeks' additional training time) ...  and when that's done, he needs to train Large Railgun Specialization to level I (just an hour -- but, several more weeks if I decide to bump that up Level V, too). Not all tech 2 modules have such steep requirements; the ship already mostly has tech 2, but there are some holdouts. Tech 2 modules also generally require higher resources from the ship -- power supply, computing power, etc. Fortunately, Eemiv has already trained up most of the core "fitting" skills that affect these systems to level V. I did a quick sketch of the math, and it looks like meeting this goal will require at most a month's time if I plunge right through it.
• Create a jump clone of Eemiv and move one of them out to low-security space. I enjoy high-security space mission running, but it's time to get my feet wet living and playing, too, in riskier low- or maybe even null-security space. Jump clones are a carbon copy of the character and, once every 24 hours, you can swap from one to the other. Therefore, I can e.g. jump over to my high-security clone after work and fly a mission for some ISK, and then on the weekend set out for more lucrative looting in low-security areas.
• Participate in at least two RvB weekend events, including one that involves flying and fighting in cruisers. This is for the Dengar character, and a chance for me to get more comfortable with PvP. Two weekend events might not seem like much, but even this might be a bit of a stretch because of a few competing real-world priorities.

I also have one stretch desire, not time-bound so it isn't a goal per se: train up Eemiv for tech 2 logistics ship piloting, and get experience supporting other pilots. This is a career/skill track I'm increasingly curious about, and even leans toward my playstyle in e.g. Team Fortress II and Battlefield: Bad Company II, where I often was a medic. 

I'd like to buy a comma

Almost four months after creating my station-trading character, his balance has cleared three billion ISK. Huzzah!

There are lots of little asterisks, though. For one thing, when I started playing Eve, I bought and cashed in a few Plex to buy shiny ships and some ridiculous modules. The ships I couldn't fly right away. However, some of the very high-end modules have the advantage of not requiring similarly sky-high support skills to use.

Glad I kept the receipt for this monster
From CCP Hyperion toolkit

As such, a chunk of the money here comes from selling back those unnecessary modules. Their inherent value just make me a bigger target. I've also trained up my skills so that I can almost always equip the "tech 2" variant of a piece of equipment. Tech 2 modules have steeper skill requirements to use, but their performance stats are almost equal to higher-performance, easier-to-equip, and silly-expensive modules I started with. I've also sold back a ship: remember my hauling alt, Laung? I sold back his freighter.

The majority of this money, though, comes simply from buying low and selling high. It happens in increments: tiny little day-to-day fluctuations interspersed with big spikes. For example, I placed a 500-unit buy order this weekend for one particular widget, and they've trickled in one by one. Last night, though, 424 of them showed up in my hanger. I'll log in soon to start selling them off before the high-low sales points get too close (i.e. profit margin either diminishes or, at worst, I have to wait for the margins to open again).

It's feels nice to be comfortably self-sustaining in-game. Really, some of that stems from not playing very often and not putting high-value ships at much risk. But, I'm hoping the change the latter in the near future. It's also nice knowing that I have enough in-game currency to buy back the Plex I initially cashed in. The utility of buying it back is that 1 Plex can be converted into 31 days of game time. This will be useful to continue to train up Eemiv and Dengar in parallel (you need to use Plex to allow a second or third character to train in parallel with an already-training character). Indeed, one of the things I most like about Eve is that it's possible to play well enough in-game such that you can cover your game subscription.

Internet spaceships I have known and loved, lusted and hated

From CCP Rubicon toolkit

When you start playing Eve, you're initially asked a bunch of questions about what faction you want to play as. At first blush, this might look to be even less consequential that your actual avatar, and certainly that's what many new player advice-givers assert. I chose to play as Gallente, drawn toward the introductory text about democracy and freedom. The Caldari's corporate-centricity was too Ferengi, the Amarr's religious zealotry was off-putting, and the Minmatar ... well, I don't remember. Gallente it was!

This decision, though, actually does have one major impact: it dictates players' starter spaceship, and the type of freeby ships they get via the tutorial missions, and from there some of the particular skills (especially weapons related) you're encouraged to train. Certainly a player can pick up and train for other factions' ships and weapons, but there's a lot to be said about continuing down a particular road once you've started. In my case, I have focused a lot on hybrid gun sills -- but, I have virtually no skills trained up in laser weapons, missiles, or projectile guns. While I can still train up to fly other factions' ships, I do so at the risk of not taking advantage of those vessels' built-in weapon bonuses -- which, as we recall from Awful Loss of the Day bingo, is a bad thing. So, I have stuck mainly to Gallente hulls.

Still, I have no regrets. Here, then, is a gallery of what I've strapped into and sometimes had blown out from under me. All images save the last are from a database export published by CCP. I am, for now, omitting the various mining ships and cargo haulers I've flown; more on those later, perhaps.

Real basics

The old pod, the spaceship within a spaceship whence Eemiv and Dengar control their powerful vessels. I've lost plenty of ships, but I've only once had the pod itself (and the bod inside) destroyed.

The shuttle is a quick little dude. Had to use it for some airshow-esque mission in the styx. Held onto it, though. Not sure why. Perhaps because it's the only symmetrical Gallente ship I've found.

Frigates and destroyers

The Velator is the starter frigate. On those few occasions when I send a character in their pod alone to e.g. pick up a ship waiting elsewhere, I get a message from the in-game insurance company lamenting the "loss" of my ship, and telling me they've "conveniently" delivered a new Velator at my destination. I've owned and scrapped more Velators than any other hull.

The Atron is a sweet-looking ship, and my first heads-up that the Gallente really aren't quite into symmetry. Ordinarily, this would be kind of a problem for me. But, despite their lopsidedness, Gallente ships still look remarkably balanced and sometimes even organic. These ships should drive me nuts but they don't.

Eemiv has flown an Imicus for stealing salvage and loot. This ship also has some nice bonuses for other equipment that might make it a decent explorer, too.

The Incursus, which is apparently part narwhal, is Dengar's most frequent fighting platform.

The Tristan is an odd-looking ship with a cool warp animation. Not much else to say about it.

As you can tell from the distinct lines and color scheme, the Astero is not a Gallente ship. Instead, it was created by the Sisters of Eve faction. This ship is built for covert exploration. I took it out for a spin but was underwhelmed by some limitations on how it could be rigged up; after a few trips, I sold it back.

The Catalyst is a destroyer, meant specifically for blowing up frigates. This is a cool looking ship; it's breadth, outrigger pilot area, and generous engine mounts are reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon.

Cruisers and battlecruisers

I suspect for as long as I play Eve, the Thorax cruiser will have a special place in my heart. It was the first ship I had to wait to fly: not only did I need to train up to the larger hull, but I also needed to wait for some new gunnery skills. My Thorax is also the first ship I named after my wife. And, really, it is just pretty cool looking. I recently made an investment in five Thoraxes for Dengar to use in her Red vs. Blue PvP activities. I expect them to die quickly and gloriously; they shant receive any special names.

I just wrote quite a bit about the Stratios. As you can see, it comes from the same faction as the Astero frigate. Whereas the ships for the four main factions require training up only for those factions' ships, ships coming from the Sisters of Eve or various pirate factions require skills from two of the core factions. In the case of the Stratios, I needed to train up not only for Gallente cruisers but also Amarr cruisers.

The notion of bigger ships being slower and less agile really hit me with the Brutix battlecruiser. Like the Thorax, the Brutix receives bonuses to its guns; the Thorax and Brutix both have companion ships that instead offer bonuses for drone combat. At this point, I was neglecting drones and drone skills: that would surely change.

Not long after first sitting in a Brutix, I bought a more robust version of the same hull, the Brutix Navy Edition. Several ships have "Navy Edition" variants that offer better weapon and protection statistics, not to mention a camouflage-looking paintjob. Alas, these aren't enough to save you from not reading. The picture at right is of the Brutix Navy Edition.

Battleships and marauders

Most new player guides suggest stopping for a breather at battlecruisers if you're the type to race up to train bigger and badder ships. That surely describes and, despite all Eve advice to the contrary, I still itched for a battleship even after rocking around a Brutix. Indeed, pausing with the Brutix in a way was forced on me: in addition to the time required to train even to fly a basic battleship, it required a new family of gunnery skills. Additionally, fitting all the ancillary support gear (armor repairers, armor hardeners, etc.) required their own expanded skillset.

But, once squared away with the basics, I promptly stepped into a Megathron Navy Edition, and that's the ship I've spent the most time flying. It's a great mission-runner, though a bit slow both to track fast-moving targets and to maneuver itself around. I addressed the former by training up drone skills pretty handily. And for both issues, I used a micro jump drive to instantly move myself 100km from the riffraff to essentially become a stationary gun platform: all of a sudden, fast-moving ships lose much of their speed advantage when all they're doing is racing right at you for an extended range.

As much as it was a big step up to the Megathron, it's been a bigger step into the Kronos marauder (at right): a Megathron hull with a different color scheme and some special animation, among other things. While jumping away and becoming a gun platform was one of several possible tactics with the Megathron, it's very much the purpose behind the Kronos and other marauders. These ships carry bastion modules that render them stationary but provide big bonuses to weapon range, shields and armor, and electronic counter measures. This is a type of ship I eyeballed flying very early in Eve, and for a few weeks I've been happily flying one. I'll close this out with a great illustration (larger versions available) featuring a couple of Kronoses readying for an engagement.

From CCP Fansite Kit

Size matters: Go small!

A couple of weeks ago, I set about to reap reward from other players' pew-pew and hard work. During another salvaging jaunt yesterday, I ran into a bottleneck: the Imicus frigate can't target more than four wrecks at a time and it can deploy only four salvage drones at once. Eemiv is trained up to deploy five drones and handle six target: my small ship is quick as a bunny but, in a different regard, was slowing me down by 20 percent.

This morning, therefore, I tried a salvage & looting fit on larger cruiser hull, which supports more targets and drones. It was an interesting experiment, and if I use a cruiser for this role again, I'll need to make major changes to my approach. Here's why.

Definitely hit (the first) I5
From The Mittani

Not wanting to spend much on a new hull or gear, I decided to start with a cruiser I already own. My first thought was my Thorax, which after all was the type of ship used to ninja loot me. However, I went with my Stratios instead. For one thing, it already had an cryptically named gravity capacitor rig installed to boost sensor probe strength, and rigs cannot be transferred between ships. (Sensor probes are required for scanning down ships at long range, i.e. finding likely ships from which to steal.) Furthermore, the Stratios itself gives a boost to probe strength. This ship also sports a generous cargo bay (600m³ compared to 465m³ for the Thorax and 400m³ for the Imicus). It also has a huge drone bay. This last I thought could be particularly useful: the idea would be I would set five salvage drones off to work, and then I could use ship-mounted salvagers, too. If I stumbled into an active combat area, rather than rely on ship-mounted guns, I could save waves of various combat drones to deal with enemies. It would also save me from having to carry ammo in the cargo bay. For those paying close attention, though, that last is a flag: the Stratios has bonuses for laser weapons, which don't require ammo; if I'd equipped guns, then they would have been the unbonused hybrid turrets Eemiv is better trained for, i.e. the first "I5" in Awful Loss of the Day "bingo." This was not a costly choice per se -- I didn't get blown up -- but it was one of several fitting and mindset errors I made.

The beautiful Stratios cruiser

From CCP Hyperion Toolkit

Here's another one: I equipped a cloaking device. My thought was that I could sit invisible in an active combat area, waiting out the combatants and perhaps even staying in the shadows until a mission-runner jetted off to go get his own Noctis or other salvage ship. The Stratios, too, is one of few ships that can equip a covert ops cloak: this special cloak allows a ship to travel at top speed and jump to warp while cloaked. Alas, because of the ship's limited CPU output, I couldn't equip the covert ops cloak, an appropriate probe launcher, and various other basic gear. So, I went with a lame, lesser cloak that cut my top speed by 75% when activated and doesn't allow for warping while cloaked. Ugh.

Anyhow, I strapped on my weak cloak and salvagers, shoved  bunch of drones in the corners, and set out. I scanned down a battleship easily enough and warped to it. The first area had just four wrecks, and I targeted the first one.

Or, rather, I tried to. Here's where things get even more embarrassing in hindsight. You see, the Stratios is an expensive hull; buying it was an early splurge. If I actually planned to fill its big cargo bay, that meant having to loot. (Looted gear takes up much more space than salvage.) And that meant a higher risk of being attacked and, in the process, tackled. Tackling refers to retarding a ship's speed or preventing it from warping away. Being protective of this expensive hull ("Don't fly what you can't afford to lose," I remind myself), I equipped it with a warp core stabilizer to ward off another player's warp core scrambler. In the unlikely event a solo mission-runner devotes a precious mid-level equipment slot to a warp scrambler, they're probably carrying just one and my one warp core stabilizer will be sufficient to counter it. And, after all, most high-security mission-runners go solo; I probably wouldn't have to contend with a scrambler at all; two or more is super unlikely. For an academic treatise on this back-and-forth theory, see this seminal scene (warning: profane) in The Big Hit.

Ah, but ya know what? Warp core stabilizers also cut a ship's scanning range in half. So there I was in that first area, sluggishly ambling silly close to these wrecks. It took way too long, but I went through the acceleration gate hoping things would be better on the other side.

My cloak and these leaves offer about the same concealment.
Photo by Douglas Muth

Remember my earlier assertion about mission-runners being solo-types? Well, it was a pair of folks running this mission. And I discerned that because they were right there on the other side of the gate, less than five kilometers away. I activated my dinky cloak and started slinking away. You remember that cloak, right? The one I couldn't have activated before I arrived, and that cut my speed by 75%? Yes, that one. I don't know whether the other players did this deliberately, but one of their ships wandered close enough to fizzle out that cloak. They didn't try to target me, but I still put tale between my legs and warped out. So embarrassing.

It gets better, though: I hopped one system over just to try again. Despite superior probing stats, it took much longer to track down big ships. But, after a few stabs, I suddenly pinged on two battleships and a marauder: things were looking up! I picked one arbitrarily and warped to it.

Upon docking up
From Futurama, "A Big Piece of Garbage"

Alas, I hadn't noticed that this cluster of ships had at its heart ahem a big green space station. A remarkably familiar space station. Eerily similar -- nay, identical -- to the one where Eemiv resides. Sure enough, I'd scanned down just the usual coming-and-going traffic in front of my driveway.

I definitely made some fitting errors today, making compromises that let me do some things mediocrely and nothing well. I also missed the frigate's greater agility, a better defensive asset than a poor cloak. And I imagine I could address some of my initial bottleneck concerns with other techniques: for example, after setting a salvage drone to work at a wreck, untargeting it and using ship-mounted salvagers to work on something else. It's a few more keystrokes, but at least it keeps me busy.

Probably doing my next salvage & loot run back in an Imicus
From CCP Hyperion Toolkit

What next, then? I'm inclined to return to the frigate approach. It might be nice to take a spin out in a destroyer, what with its higher target capacity (even with smaller cargo hold), but I'll need to cobble a fit to get a bump in CPU output: out of the box, it's a tight fit for destroyers to handle the necessary probe launcher and ancillary gear. Maybe I'll set out again with a cruiser, but I seriously need to take a look at fittings and goals. And if I'm feeling sensitive about losing the ship in the first place, then I just need not to fly it in this capacity.

Perspective

For some perspective on my glee from my last post, what with a 15,000,000 ISK haul: check out this guy.

Ninja

In April and June, I confessed to a bit of incidental thieving. Last night, I set out to do it deliberately, although a bit circuitously.

In addition to running level 4 missions, I've also undertaken several of the Gallente COSMOS missions. Unlike most other missions, you only get one shot at COSMOS tasks, and there's a bit less hand-holding (which is to say, you need to read the text to know where to go). A couple of these limit the size of the ship you can take, so I slipped into a cruiser for them. Now, in the spirit of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie:

• Being in a regular cruiser made me think about training up to fly a Proteus Strategic Cruiser.
• Thinking about the Proteus made me wonder about which subsystems to install.
• Thinking about subsystems made me think about how I'd use the ship.
• Thinking about roles and objectives made me think about exploration.
• Exploration made me think about the difference between two pieces of ship equipment: probe launchers and expanded probe launchers. Probe launchers are easier to equip but can't use combat sensor probes.
• Thinking about combat sensor probes made me think about what, in turn, makes them different than regular probes: the former can scan down individual ships; regular probes can't.
• Thinking about combat probes made me think about the time a ninja looter scanned me down, blew up my remote tractor units, and with whom I did some fun, non-destructive sparring.
• Thinking about ninja lootting made me think about ... ninja salvaging.

Ninja salvaging and ninja looting both involve taking advantage of the ship and structure wrecks mission-runners -- like me, usually -- leave behind. Someone running a level 4 mission probably is traversing three or four "pockets" of space, each isolated from the other and accessible only via an acceleration gate. A ninja salvager swoops in to break down the wrecks, harvesting components that can be sold or manufactured into other goods. Totally legal; it doesn't raise a security alert. Ninja looting involves accessing a wrecks' innards and stealing equipment not otherwise destroyed in combat. Doing so raises a suspect flag on the looter for 15 minutes because the game sees it as stealing the destroying player's property. Other players can freely fire upon suspect-flagged characters.

Think of this way: a salvager takes peanut shells; a looter takes the shells and the nut inside. And the latter can get you shot.

I researched a few ships and fits. I briefly considered using a battleship hull for its large cargo space, but I've previously lamented their slowness. Ultimately, I equipped an Imicus frigate with some appropriate equipment -- salvage drones, a fast microwarpdrive, some salvagers -- and took off.

It took three scan cycles to track down a battleship in the same system where I pick up missions myself. I warped to its signature and found myself in a mission pocket with a couple of dozen wrecks. My intent was only to salvage ... but when I curiously opened a wreck and saw some good loot, I took it. The suspect flag activated: for the next 15 minutes, other pilots would be free to shoot at me, and that countdown reset each time I stole again. Still, I cleared out the area with room to spare in the cargo bay.

I swung through the acceleration hate, ready to warp out if I rear-ended the battleship whose loot I was stealing. But that area, too, was filled only with wrecks and a gate the a third sector. Again, salvaged and stowed. My cargo bay filled up, and I ditched a pair of bulky drones for a more precious-per-cubic-meter armor repairer. Sated, it was time to leave.

I picked an arbitrary planet and jumped 100 kilometers away from it: in the vastness of Eve space, I wasn't likely to run into anyone. I figured I'd wait out the 15-minute flag's duration before heading home. That certainly would have been most prudent. But, I got bored after a minute or two. That, and I wanted to pay a bit of attention to the movie my wife was watching next to me: clip at right. So, I just jumped (jump!) home.

I could have been shot and wouldn't've been surprised if I wound up destroyed: Eemiv lives at a busy station. But, no one shot me when I arrived, nor seemed to be shooting at the two other suspect-flagged ships. To boot, I landed within docking range and was almost instantly back inside. Once berthed, my ship and haul were safe from attack.

What fun!

From buying the hull and equipment to returning home, maybe 20 minutes passed. I scored about 15 million ISK in goods. This was faster than running most missions in terms of both time and also busy-ness: constantly directing drones, navigating between wrecks, and keeping an eye on the vicinity for my returning, unaware benefactor.

On the downside, I can imagine not as easily finding a ship to tail next time, or the complication of stumbling in while they're still at work in an area. But, ya know, if it's a battleship I could probably escape fine. And if I didn't, heck, I made enough from this first run to make up for what I invested in this looting rig in the first place.

Anyhow, remaining unaddressed is, What should I spend this money on? Ideally, it would be on keeping a combat, PvP-oriented character set with replacement ships and equipment. But I don't really have that character (even with Dengar) what with not spending a whole lot of time with Eve. But, hey, maybe when my wife is out of town for a week this month, that'll change a bit!

Wear a helmet

About to set out on my commute
From Wikimedia Commons

While pedaling my bike last month, it occurred to me that there are some parallels between riding a bike and playing Eve. I somehow managed not to get hit by a car while in reverie thinking about this:

• Pick a route carefully
• A shiny, expensive vehicle only gets you so far
• Fit matters
• Don't put yourself on "autopilot"
• Learn by doing

Routing: there are two reasonable routes between work and home, and each has a major drawback. One is a low-traffic route that has a hinky and awkward-to-cross T-intersection, and the other offers a more direct route but more lights and traffic. I've taken both and prefer the former: one awkward spot is preferable to lots of stop-and-go at lights (and more exhaust to suck down). With Eve, too, I'm paying close attention to traffic levels and loss reports when wandering into and through low-security space.

Spaceman Spiff's pricey officer and storyline equipment didn't
compensate for fitting mixed guns and low Frigate skills.
From Bill Watterson (panel cropped and flipped)

Buying success: I bought a nice bike, but certainly I didn't splurge for a carbon nanofiber über-cycle. Besides cost, I don't have the skill to take advantage of one; a better bike doesn't make for a better bike-and-rider combination. Similarly, as I've learned with Eve, buying an expensive ship and giving it gear with better stats won't me a super-duper space cowboy. Even after spending time training up the skills to fly a nice ship, an expensive vessel can be stymied by equipping it with superfluous stuff, not adjusting the overview or other UI pieces to suit your needs, not training up important ancillary support skills, autopiloting, etc. As you may have surmised, I bought a couple of PLEX soon after I started playing to lay my hands on a couple of nice ships I'd like to train toward -- but, I've tried to be diligent, too, to try my chops with all the other littler and less-expensive ships I can get my hands on, and always keeping to the essential Eve adage of not flying what I can't afford to lose. In a broader essay about ship loss, Nonnak Severin also points out that "equipping the best item ... does not" make someone the best pilot in Eve -- for more, see below.

Fit: one reason my previous bike rarely got used was I realized after a few bouncy trips down the C&O Canal bicycle path that it was just a poor fit for my body. Ladening the bike, too, with unnecessary gear made it a pain to get it up and the down my apartment stairs. In Eve, fitting refers to what equipment you strap onto your ship: guns, engines, armor plates, etc. You want to fit your ship with an eye toward the types of enemies you might encounter, e.g. a pirate hunter will equipment weapons and protection against the type of damage a particular pirate type deals out and is susceptible to. You also fit your ship in response to your skills: my main character has higher skills for armor than shields; I get more benefit from fitting gear that helps my armor stats than equipment suited to shields. And fitting also refers to broader guidelines and principles: for example, don't equip both short- and long-range guns (because then you bring only ~50% of your potential firepower onto an enemy) and don't mix armor and shield buffing equipment (stick with one). The folks at The Mittani have a BINGO card for poor fits as part of their Awful Loss of the Day; here's a recent one, also by Nonnak Severin. But beyond that, and back to my ill-suited previous bike: the ship and gear need to be a good fit for what you want to do. With Eemiv, I prefer railguns at long range over combat drones, hence a Megathron over the drone-friendly Dominix. With Dengar, I'm enjoying quick movement and rapid fire, hence sticking with an Incursus frigate and not catapulting to something much bigger.

Armor buffer tank
From Giro

Autopilot: an actual thing in Eve, which has the downside of depositing you significant distance from your destination, making you vulnerable to attack. Just don't do it. On my bike, this is the metaphorical state of not being mindful of my surroundings, spending too much time thinking (e.g. about this blog post). My bike has only the most meager of buffer tanks against damage.

Experience: it matters. I now know the traffic sensor by the mall will, in fact, detect a bike; that the biggest hill is early on the commute home, so maybe I shouldn't pedal full-speed until I cross the train tracks; that most drivers will yield to me at four-way stops. And I've learned that even the people who blow me up are also very nice and offer insight; I'm not the only person who sometimes needs to drop out of a fleet to tend to family; and that there is never a want of something to do in Eve.

Ctrl Alt ... Delete!

I've written about secondary accounts I've set up to experiment in Eve's various career areas. Since starting in February, I've created four alternate characters, most of whom I've written about here. Finally, I've settled on the three characters I'm going to maintain. Here's the overall breakdown of who and what:

• Eemiv Tivianne: plugging along since February, this is my primary character. At zKillboard, you'll see an inglorious record of losing flimsy cargo ships and a couple of embarrassing losses to NPCs (um, plus part of some kill I have no recollection of). Right now, I mostly run level 4 missions with this fellow, bringing in about 10-20 million ISK each. He just finished training up to pilot a Kronos Marauder, which is a heavy duty battleship well suited to running missions. Indeed, I'd previously lamented how slow battleships move -- well, the Kronos mostly sits absolutely still, but wow! it cuts through bad guys fast. Next up is firing off some skills to use sentry drones, and after that I'm going to focus on getting more gunnery support skills up from level 3 up to 4 or 5. After rounding out my generic gunnery skills, I'll probably take a close look at taking a cruiser into wormhole space. 
• Rosy Tivianne: my first alt, which I'd made as a female avatar in response to feedback from my wife. I set her up as a miner, and got her up to snuff piloting a Mackinaw, one of the higher end strip-mining ships. However, the ship so quickly shred through asteroids that unless I paid rapt attention, there was a lot of idle time. It was a less engaging way to net about the same amount of money (and even then hypothetically: I'd still need to sell the ore) as mission-running. I strip-mined the character of its money and property and sent her to the biomass recycler. Creating and using this character was an practical lesson in weighing ISK per hour vs. "fun per effort:" in the end, mining just wasn't fun and not how I want to spend my limited time; I'd rather play the game than do the game.



Not to be confused with Long Haul, a Decepticon

• Laung Haul: This poor space-teamster was on the receiving end of my penchant for puns. I've written several times about Eemiv's inglorious outings hauling cargo, losing lots of collateral, etc. I trained up an alt to pilot Eve's capacious, sturdy freighters. And then I put him in one. And, wow, freighters are slow and boring. I considered selling the character, but it'd probably net nothing after paying character transfer fees. Recycler!
• Talon Morda: my station trader, buying low and selling high. I haven't updated his clone backup because this milquetoast will never leave his station. Started with logging in a few times per day to set up competitive prices and make a quick score, but I've been doing that less lately and am still doing okay. There are some ebbs and flows during the week in preparation for e.g. big weekend battles; market orders a few weeks old will suddenly get scooped up. He's trained up enough that I don't need to pay for additional character training, which is nice. Now that my main character is generally equipped for running missions, in addition to earning ISK Talon is buying ship equipment at good rates to keep my third and final surviving character geared up.



The bounty hunter Dengar is my
frigate brawler's namesake.

• Dengar Morda: the character I wrote about last time, my frigate-scale brawler chipping in with the perpetual (but fun-loving) war between the Blue Republic and Red Federation. With only a few weeks of training done, you can see she has single-digit percent contributions to a few kills. Dengar's mostly puttered in an Incursus frigate, but I recently tossed in some skill training to allow her to fly and fight with a medium-sized cruiser: in fact, I just bought her a few (because I expect some attrition) of the same Thorax-class I bought in March.

So, that's it. I created a second umbrella account to help my try on all these angles; it expires in a couple of weeks, and by then I'll have Eemiv, Talon, and Dengar consolidated under one account. It was worth the three-month subscription (plus a little extra to train multiple characters on the same account in parallel) to jump in, try on some career hats, and then pick what to stick with. Depending on few in- and out-of-game factors, I'll keeping Eemiv and Dengar training in parallel but not pay the extra to keep training Talon.

Ctrl Alt

I've created another alternate character to train up and get involved with player-vs-player combat. As I train her up, I'm remembering another refrain I encountered when I started playing and reading about Eve: some folks rush to pilot larger ships, but there's a lot of fun and even wisdom to be had with smaller vessels.

I'm certainly seeing this now. My main character for a while has been running level 4 missions in a powerful Navy-issue Megathron. It's fun to blow up so many pirates and other NPCs, and the loot is good: my station-trading character has made good money on his own, and selling off the loot has been a nice bonus. I've been good, too, about training up support skills to make sure I'm not flying a glass cannon.

But, the Megathron is slow. And in larger missions, I get tired of alternating between grinding down on enemy battleships and then micro-warping away so my big, slow guns can track more nimble frigates (even with drone support). Some missions have taken two hours to complete, and my completionist personality doesn't allow for blitzing missions.

My first forays into PvP with the new alt have been mixed: I enjoy the swiftness of flying Atron and Incursus frigates. Now knowing what I'm doing, the tutorial missions (which I did for some money and faction standing) flew by. It's nice to have a skill-training plan with a notion of what I'm aiming for. And training for small-scale ships and modules will be speedy compared to working away for large ships and modules.

I jumped into Factional Warfare and promptly got blown up twice. First, I went to a friendly industrial complex where my dinky Atron was promptly blown up by an enemy tier 2 (i.e. more kick-butt) frigate. Got a new one, refitted, jumped back in and really screwed up: I flew down a friendly complex, thinking I should just fly around defending it. Alas, I guess anyone flying into a complex triggers the defenses: a "friendly" vessel started shooting me. Oh, well. I shot back for a while. And then an actual enemy arrived and blew up my ship. I warped out in my pod, which his corp-mate promptly exploded. Dang.

Both of these stemmed from some errors on my part: I should have just warped out as soon as I saw trouble in both areas. But, I didn't. I'll do better next time. In the meantime, I've also joined the Blue Fleet [Corporation], in constant (fun) warfare with the Red Fleet. Red vs. Blue has hundreds of members with lots of stuff going on; I could see this as my lever into really figuring out PvB and getting the most out of Eve, especially on the community/group-play front.

I'm reminded of playing Dragon Age: I finished the game with my initial character, a bulky soldier who carried a big sword. But, I got the most from the game -- accessing quests, garnering rewards, leveling up to cause the most damage for my play style -- with my second character, a nimble dwarven sneak-thief. There was virtue in not being a tank and also, in the second go-around, knowing what skills and talents to allocate level-up points to. Ditto my preference for speed over brawn in the X-Wing games: give me a nimble A-wing over the stronger X-wing or lunky B-wing any day.

It's the economy, stupid

This MarketWatch story about games that teach "crucial life lessons" percolated up on my Facebook feed. It highlights Eve's robust, player-driven economy, quoting CCP's economist, Doctor Eyj­ólf­ur Guðmunds­son. (Also remarkable: CCP has a full-time economist. His reason for leaving? Becoming rector of the University of Akureyri.)

From The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,
via dreamwidth.org

The article particularly caught my attention because I've increasingly turned my eye toward making money from the Eve economy. I started buying a bunch of widgets at a low price at station X, then hauled them a few jumps over to station Y where they're selling at a higher rate. Dealing with hauling stuff between stations was a pain, though, so I created another alternate character, have started training him up on trade and commerce, and parked him at a relatively busy hub. He is station trading: that is, looking for items that sell at a low price and then turning around to sell at a higher price. Station trading requires some patience, waiting for bulk buy orders to come through and then for the sell orders to trickle out. Also attentiveness: there's a lot of one- and two-cent elbowing to set the lowest and highest sell and buy prices, respectively. But, hey, it seems to be going okay. I'll let you know when I break a billion ISK.

Oh, and I stole. Again. 1.4 million worth of minerals. A miner ejected his haul into space, emptying his ore hold so he could continue to mine without having to deal with dropping his stuff off at home base. The notion, then, is to return later in a ship with a big hold (like the Iteron Mark V, several of which I've had blown up) or ask another player to get. Oh, well. I remember the game's tutorial warning against letting that happen to me.

What vexes me now is: what next? I generally still enjoy running missions, and those yield money. So, too, does mining with my mining character, and I'm seeing that happening with the trader. But, what to spend the money on? I've gone back to invest some skill training in smaller ships and weapons with a notion of getting into Incursions or Factional Warfare. Alas, my first foolishly solo stab at Incursions cost me a nice Brutix I'd named Ola T. Miza; its ending did not befit its namesake. There is some appeal in Factional Warfare as a chance to take a stab at player-vs-player combat; that may be something I take a swing at very soon.

Blowed up again!

Got blown up again a couple of weeks ago, and it was awesome.

I was once again flying an Iteron Mark V, a cargo ship with a huge hold but, as I learned a while ago, paper-thin defenses. It's been my workhorse for gathering up money from courier/cargo contracts.

Unfortunately, someone cargo-scanned my ship with one of their character accounts, then used another one of their characters a few jump gates away to pounce on me. Before long, my precious cargo -- and a lot of collateral I put up for it -- went poof. Well, kaboom and then poof.

But here's what's great: the guy who blew me up -- Paranoid Loyd -- sent me an innocuous IM wave: some taunt, some thanks, and mostly "it's business, not personal." I sent him a message back and for about 20 minutes got from him useful tips for hauling in high security space. Some things he pointed out:

• I was flying in a "pipe," a heavily-trafficked route between major trade hubs. I knew the journey between the Dodixie and Jita systems is such a high-traffic route, but not between Hek and Dodixie (my route). No wonder that he and his alt were parked along the way and knew that I'd (almost certainly) pop up further down the route.
• 20 million in cargo value is a frequent threshold for a pirate to attack you: they will lose a relatively cheap frigate or cruiser when the space-police show up to kill you for your aggression, but their other character or compatriot who scoops up the goods will enough booty to offset the loss. And, yeah, I had several times that amount.
• My cargo didn't nearly fill the hold. (This is not often the case, but in this instance it was -- and, then again, maybe it's a blessing I had only a marginally-full hold.) There are better-defended ships with enough cargo space that might've let me get out of that situation if attacked.
• He suggested two ships, one of which I've flown before and liked (the Nereus), as a vessel that can faster align to the next jump gate on a cargo path -- which translates into warping away to safety sooner. It has a smaller cargo hold, potentially reducing income -- but, if I'm losing gobs of money in collateral from lugging too much in a weak vessel, well that's no good, either.
• He gave a couple of suggestions for ship modules to increase survivability, particularly if I venture into low-security space to schlep cargo.

Very instructive; nicest pirate since Jack Sparrow.

Goal update

Today's developer updates, particularly the UI one, reminded me of the goals I set for myself a couple of weeks into playing:

• Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
• Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions 
• Buy blueprints for a cruiser
• Get proficient enough at mining to scramble enough materials to make and sell copies of that cruiser

Done.

It didn't take too long after I bought that Thorax cruiser before I could fly it. I did, and then moved up to a Brutix battlecruiser that got blown up two weeks later. I've moved up to a battleship, which I've decked out to run level 4 missions for more money and better standing with a couple of NPC factions. I had the money to buy an original (as opposed to a less expensive copy of a) Thorax blueprint, and carved out enough ore to provide most of the manufacturing material. This weekend, I popped the blueprint and the refined ore (plus some extras I had to buy) into the queue to manufacture at the Dodixie IX Federation Navy plant.

Overall, this operation still has me in the red, i.e. I haven't recouped the cost of buying the blueprint by selling enough of the cruisers. Heck, the first one hasn't even come off the assembly line. I need to do some poking around to figure out where to sell them: Dodixie has a pretty active market, but it might be worthwhile to put them on sale in some of the starter space stations, where new players (particularly some trying to get a leg up by cashing in PLEX) might buy an overpriced ship in exchange for not having to travel to a different market. I might also discover that I can make more money selling copies of this original blueprint rather than spending the time mining (or the money buying) materials to build them myself.

From eveonline.com

This summer, Eve will get a significant overhaul to its industry mechanics. Some of the changes seem more like they're rearranging and combining columns of figures rather than adjusting their values, so to speak. Simplifying rather than changing mechanics -- and I'm all for that. Something I appreciated from the UI blog is the graphic at right, which visualizes exactly my thinking around taking these first few steps in the industry gameplay. I look forward to the overall UI changes, ditching some of the tabs with tabs and making language more consistent. We'll see how it all plays out.

Thieving

Well, I stole something. I hadn't planned to, and thieving's never really occurred to me as something to do. A few times in the high-security space I usually fly in, I've seen and poked at others' wrecked ships or dropped cargo containers, but I've been warned about thieving and have always just sauntered off.

Not earlier this week, though. Fiddling with scanning down "cosmic signatures" -- isolated spots that contain pirate sites, relics, other neat and valuable stuff -- I found a wormhole. Wormholes connect to areas with no laws, the figurative wild west. They tend to have lots of valuable loot and dangerous opponents. So, I popped in and looked. Scanned a bunch of interesting stuff that I might've gone after if I'd been in a more appropriate wormhole exploration ship.

From tiefighters.com

And I also found a secure container. Except the password to secure the container wasn't set. Curious, I flew over, considering along the way that it was bait. But, no: opened the crate, saw a bunch of mjolnir heavy missiles. About 200,000 ISK worth. Just sitting there.

But not for long. Not a huge fortune, but more than I'd had a moment before. No warning from the game about being vulnerable to violent reprisal, no risk of the space-cops coming down. Just there to take.

One of the undercurrents of Eve how-tos and tutorials is, "You'll make a mistake and learn not to do it again." It's happened to me already. I suppose this missile stockpiler will be more diligent about setting passwords.

For myself, I've learned that stealing is easy. Later, I might learn that that stealing isn't easy, and more often than not is a trap. We'll see?

Calling Senator Clay Davis

From Kleinmania.com

Relevant, for those who've not seen The Wire -- and delightful for those who have.

In all my "look what I can do with VLOOKUP!" enthusiasm from the last post, I made a pretty huge mistake.

I incorrectly asserted that it'd take over 22 years to level up all 100 or so "important skills" [to me, now] to their maximum level. Not so much: just 3.8 years. I'd forgotten to filter the important skills from all skills; the latter is whence the two-decade count. I've since corrected the spreadsheet.

Looks like I may be level 4 VLOOKUP, but my SUMIF is only at level 2. Ahhh, spreadsheet humor.

Make good decisions

[I made a pretty bad spreadsheet error before I posted this. See the next entry for the correction.]

I made a few additions to the skill-planning spreadsheet I created and shared with the world. It was easy enough to have it calculate how long it would take to train all the 105 skills I've identified as "important" up one level from their current state. Today, I plugged in the math to calculate how long it would take to max out all those skills to level 4.

22.5 years.

Yes, it would take over two decades to train all the skills useful to my capsuleer to their maximum level. That's almost twice as long as the game's existed. Among registered users at Eveboard, the character Drahcir Nasom has the most Level V skills: 286, developed for almost 11 years. In that time, Eve has made lots of changes to how skills and skill-learning work. In fact, this summer they will make some tweaks to skills affecting resource processing and drone operation. Those seem relatively miniscule, though, compared to a massive 2010 skill-learning overhaul and another affecting ship piloting last summer.

Last week, I wrote about how this spreadsheet has helped me make decisions. One specific example is the Cybernetics skill. This skill allows the character to use increasingly potent implants, some of which increase core attribute values. There are five attributes, and their values affect the rate at which the character learns skills. Therefore, more powerful implants allow for faster skill training. That said, the accelerated rate is relatively small, perhaps shaving a few hours from a skill-training time that otherwise takes days. Thanks to the spreadsheet, I ascertained that the time up front to max out Cybernetics and install the most powerful implants will save much more time from future training. It's a good investment.

Currently, my Cybernetics level is at 4, and the math above is based on how rapidly my character trains with current-level implants. Maxing the skill to level 5 and plugging in the appropriate implants does, in fact, shave some time off that 23-year figure.

It brings it down to just under 22 years.

Removing the implants and their bonus? Over 27 years to max those skills. If, after looking at the spreadsheet, you're curious: my VLOOKUP skill is about level 4.

These numbers, though, are kind of red herrings. My "important skills" cover a lot of territory, and only a few of them are so important that I feel an urge to max them out: Cybernetics for one, plus a few that are prerequisites for ships I want to fly or more advanced skills to develop. In truth, right now there are fewer than a dozen that I'd prioritize maxing out.

I wrote to a friend last week that in Eve, "you can be fair to pretty good in multiple areas of gameplay, or truly superb at one." It might've been more apt to replace or with and: I'll take most of the skills important to me up to level 3 or 4 and, in the course of trying them on and getting into a groove, decide on a subset to get really good at, i.e. max out. Given enough time, maybe that group grows. What I didn't think of at the time is that there's a whole area of skills and experience I right now don't plan to delve much into, e.g. frigates and destroyers and their commensurate small-scale weapons, missile-heavy Caldari hulls or laser-happy Amarrian ships, or stocks and market manipulation. Put another way: I've tagged 105 skills as important, but the game offers close to 400. And, of course, anything can change.

It occurs to me that this openness of pursuits, with a vast timeline and squirrely to-do list and no due date, reminds me of another project I'm involved with. I've edited Wikipedia since July 2005, and one of that project's tenets also seems relevant when thinking about Eve skill training: there is no deadline.