Playing the long game

My daughter was born a couple of weeks ago. There's a lame joke to be made about a frigate-sized baby requiring many years of real-world skill training to pilot. But, the more apt observation is that this noob is handily piloting a pair of Titan-sized tenders.

February 15, 2014, was my first day with Eve. Since then, my family has moved, we've had a baby, and my dog has doubled in size. In the game, I've churned through five characters, whittled down to three. (Yesterday, I briefly regretted getting rid of my stripminer, Rosy: picking at asteroids seems an easy, casual way to do something in the game while doing a 3:00 a.m. bottle feeding. But, then I remembered: I'd much rather sit in our nice corner rocking chair than this creaky desk chair. So, no sweat.) In that span, I've flown over a dozen types of ships, racing up to cruisers and battlecruisers, plateauing for a spell with a battleship, clawing my way into a marauder ... only to look around and wish for the speed and energy of a frigate. It's all been very exciting.

I wrote before about trying to squeeze in as much Eve as possible before baby's arrival, but alas that didn't happen. Spent more time playing X-Wing Alliance, plus a bit of Grim Fandango. All other things being equal -- or, unchanged -- I'd be jumping headlong back into Eve. While X-Wing games have been fun, their nostalgia and neo-novelty value is waning, but Eve is always fresh, and I have plenty of goals I've barely crawled toward. But: baby!

Soon after leaving graduate school, I made one of my first Adult Decisions: I took $100 and put it in a Certificate of Deposit. A year later, I'd made $6 interest! Well, Eve is about to become my next CD, with a minimum one-year term: no-touch (much), but with higher value when it comes out of the oven. And that's due to a big change in the game in November: CCP removed the requirement that all queued skills begin training within 24 hours, and players now can queue up to 50 skills regardless of when training starts.

Well, Eemiv has 50 skills lined up, training time to complete in about a year. (Technically, a bit sooner: in April, I'll realign Eemiv's core attributes to accelerate training.) Eemiv's core ship-fitting skills are pretty well maxed out; a year hence, he'll be maxed out in additional gunnery, maneuver, and ship types. Dengar's parallel queue isn't as long, only about 60 days: I've tightly trained her up for frigates and cruisers (around which she's well maxed out) and, more recently, logistics. In about a month, her parallel training (which costs extra money) will end; when Eemiv's queue is done, Dengar's remaining 30 days will wrap up. I'll continue to update Eemiv's skill planning spreadsheet as things tick off -- thank you, Eve Droid, for keeping me posted on these developments without me needing to log in or fire up Evemon in bootcamp. My final character, Talon, has a few market orders ending in about a week: I'll need to renew them, and that's kind of a blessing because it also means I can consolidate a few of them.

As I've thought about the changes that come with having a baby, I've realized that as much as I love games, I enjoy reading and writing more. Those two things are more compatible with being interrupted by an unpredictable child. (And, when there is time for games, titles kike Grim Fandango are a better fit than Eve in my current circumstances.) Still, I plan to continue to write about Eve -- I have a few draft entries begun -- but this may be coupled with a few other topics. I've given some thought to consolidating this blog with my blog on model-building, and perhaps just broaden it to be "a place to write about stuff" (such as the books I'm reading: I just finished Leviathan Wakes, which was pretty amazing). We will see.

o7, everyone.

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.

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. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

Day 13: Traffic

My first thought from before I wrote the last post managed to completely escape my mind when I actually composed it. And it's this: the game's presentation of ships rather than people reminds me of something I read in Traffic, a great text about the engineering and psychology behind driving and roads (cool companion text: The Big Roads). One of the earlier observations is that we have a tendency to dehumanize our fellow drivers by describing behavior on the road as that of the car rather than the driver, e.g. "the red Civic cut me off" or "the SUV is driving erratically." Just a thought.

Go figure: as soon as I posted about my ship, I promptly jumped into a different vessel. I've thought about what I want to do in this game, and my list looks something like this:

• Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
• Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions (those massless missions I mentioned before -- there are five difficulty levels, and I've only delved into level 1)
• Save up to buy blueprints for a cruiser
• Get proficient enough at mining that I can scramble enough materials together to make and sell copies of that cruiser

I own one of these -- but, I can't yet use it.
From Eve-Wiki

There are lots of things I need to do along the way to make that happen: skill training, purchasing smartly (i.e. weighing the time it takes to travel to a place for a good deal vs. paying a premium for a local sale), just making good decisions. One of the first things to do, though, is to raise capital: hence a change in ship. I hopped into a huge cargo ship, strapped on a mining laser, and very, very slowly made my way over to a bunch of rocks to mine. Took 66 minutes to fill the digital cargo hold, with a few moments trimmed off once I bought some assistant mining drones. Holy cow, I thought. This is going to take forever. It was nice, though, that I could work for a few minutes, then step away to be with my wife or get work done and still make headway in the game: this mining was all happening in "high-security" space, where I almost certainly wouldn't be attacked by other players or AI pirates.

Through this mining endeavor, though, I had my first real ship-on-ship action with another player: early on, I set my vessel to orbit an asteroid, blasting away with its mining laser, while I caught up on emails and the news. I returned to the game about 20 minutes later to check on things ... and discovered another player in the system had bumped into my ship, causing it to break orbit and veery off, quite far away from the asteroid field. (As an interesting gameplay note, there seems not to be any collision damage in this game.) I returned to orbit, went away again, and got bumped. Not an accident. I should've just kept the ship sitting still.

This wasn't the only thing I was doing wrong. I did some research, and it turns out another of the freeby ships I'd been awarded at the end of a tutorial strand was a far superior miner. I missed that this ship had a separate hold for mined ore much larger even than the cargo ship. It was also faster, could house an extra mining laser, and in general has been a huge improvement. What I'd been doing before was basically using a school bus to pick up packages rather than a smaller but better-fitted and more efficiently configured UPS van.

Making the switch vastly sped up my mining turnaround time; a few hours ago, I sold a whole bunch of mined ore, putting me over the top to buy that cruiser. I've garnered enough materials since then to sell in a second wave, and that should be enough to comfortable outfit the vessel.

And how about that new ship itself? Well, I can't fly it yet: the acceleration in raising money outpaced my training on the skills to run the new ship. Around 1:00am tomorrow, I'll be appropriately trained -- and then, I'll let you know. More on this whole skills and training thing later.