The Quick Start Guide for
Complete Newcomers to EVE
The basic gameplay in EVE is straightforward once you overcome the
initial learning curve and get the hang of how
skill training, ship outfitting, and item purchasing works. The hardest
things to wrap your head around are:
character creation, skill training, getting around the place, looting
your kills efficiently, and some combat
basics.
This quick start guide is written specifically for complete newcomers
to EVE who are trying to get the most of of
their 14-day trial period. I'm not going to rehash too much information
that is already present in the various
guides that are stickied in the EVE New Citizens Q&A forum, but I
might quickly summarize the important bits.
This guide assumes most newcomers will want to experience the
"action/combat" side of EVE first, so the main
thing you'll be doing at first are missions rather than mining,
trading, or the more esoteric aspects of the
game.
OMG Character creation is so complex!
What is the best overall choice to try
during my trial period?
This one is easy. Do yourself a huge favor and don't waste too much
time on all the possibilities at first. Just
roll up a Caldari > Achura > Inventor > Military > Special
Forces character. Yes, the male portraits for the
Achura are the ugliest in the game (although the females aren't bad at
all), but this is a first character for
use during your trial period so it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
I won't go into detail why this is the best choice, but instead will
point you at this thread if you want the
gory details. Look at post 36 on page 2 of the thread for the reason I
specifically recommend the Military >
Special Forces career. Even though Akita T doesn't go into detail on
this recommendation, the main reason is that
you will be geared up for mission flying, which is your main source of
income as a true newcomer. The reason for
the Caldari > Achura > Inventor profession is that it gives you
the best overall set of starting attributes you
could possibly ask for unless you are an experienced EVE player who is
rolling a very specialized alt. You will
never feel gimped either at the beginning nor in the future (as long as
you can live with your player portrait
and the roleplay aspects of this recommended choice).
That said, if you really hate your portrait as an Achura, or if you
really would rather play another
race/bloodline/profession for roleplay reasons, you will slow down your
training and probably your initial money
making capability by a small factor, but it's not the end of the world
by any means, so do what
makes you happy.
If, on the other hand, you just want to try out EVE quickly and not
feel gimped right out of the gate, then the
recommended Caldari > Achura > Inventor > Military >
Special Forces character is what you want.
Some experienced players will argue that if your ultimate goal is to
PvP, Caldari might not be the best choice.
Caldari ships are really optimized for fighting NPC pirates, not real
player pirates. (This post explains why.)
Regardless, it never hurts to have your first character be a more
"balanced" character such as the Caldari >
Achura > Inventor because then your training times for skills in all
disciplines is roughly equal. Also, you can
fly any race's ships with the proper training, and all you give up is a
slightly longer training time for
non-Caldari ships.
Skill training is massively complex! Where do I start?
Do yourself a HUGE favor and go find and download EVEMon
(http://evemon.battleclinic.com/). Do this as soon as
you've created your character. Add your new character to EVEMon (File
> Add Character).
Next, in EVEMon, choose Plans > Add Plan to create a plan for your
character. At first the Plan Queue tab will be
blank. On the Ship Browser tab, set the filter to All Ships and then
search for "Drake". In the results list,
click "Drake" and then notice the "Required Skills" box down in the
lower right corner. Click the Add Skill to
Plan button, and all the skills you don't currently have, but need to
train in order to quality to fly a Drake
cruiser, are added to your Plan Queue tab. You can use this same
technique in the Item Browser tab to determine
what skills are needed to be able to fit any particular item on one of
your ships.
The Skill Browser tab works a bit differently. Here you can search for
a particular skill name (for example,
because you tried to fit some booty item from pirate kill onto your
ship but the game tells you that you're
missing a required skill) and the result will tell you what
prerequisites you need to learn the skill, etc. In
the little drop-down list just above the blue area, select the level of
the skill that you want to train, and a
pop-up will appear that enables you to add that skill and all of its
required prerequisites to the Plan Queue.
In the Plan Queue, you can select items and move them up or down in the
list as needed to organize the order in
which you train your skills.
Now here's the best tip: on the status bar at the bottom of the Plan
Queue tab, you might occasionally see a
"Suggestions" link. If you click this link, it will suggest some skills
in the Learning category that will help
you train some of the skills in your Plan Queue even faster. You should
always add these suggested skills and
then move them up and down in the queue to see which other skills they
will speed up the training for.
Occasionally you should try re-sorting your Plan Queue and playing with
the "Move learning skills to front of
plan" and "Sort By Priority First" options to optimize the order of
skills in the Plan Queue. You should also try
manually moving skills above or below some of the Learning skills to
see exactly how much the learning skills
will speed up the learning of all subsequent skills in the queue.
The golden rule for training
Try to
never have idle time in your training
* If you can't train the next skill in your Plan
Queue because you can't afford the book for it yet (or
whatever reason), move down the list until you find somethign that you
can train now, and have it training while
you're doing whatever is necessary to be able to train the first skill
in your Plan Queue.
* If you're going to log out of game (especially
overnight), look down your Plan Queue for the next skill
that will take a longer time to train than the time you'll be away from
game, and start training that skill
before you log out. When you next log in to the game, pause that long
skill and resume with the shorter skills
near the top of your Plan Queue.
* Finally, never neglect useful skills you need ASAP
to make money in favor of Learning skills. Always
prioritize useful and short-to-train skills like Mechanic and
Navigation and Targeting and Warp Drive Operation,
etc. ahead of things like Analytical Mind III or Instant Recall III and
so on. So even if EVEMon automatically
puts a bunch of Learning skills at the top of your Plan Queue, you
might still want to tweak the queue order a
bit to give priority to skills that are holding you back on your
immediate earning potential.
Getting
around
* Traveling to mission locations and back to your
agent:
When traveling to a mission objective's
location and back to your agent after the mission, the fastest way
is to use the People and Places window. On the Places tab, there is
always an "Agent Missions" folder. When you
accept a mission, bookmarks for the objective location and your agent
are both automatically placed in that
folder. You can right click each bookmark to set it as a destination,
or if it's in the same system you currently
are in, you can warp to location or approach or dock back at your
agent's station or whatever.
* Traveling to a distant station to pick up an item
you just purchased:
When traveling to stations listed in the
Marketplace as having the best price for things, the easiest way
is to purchase the item remotely before you actually leave your current
station. Then open your Assets window and
the station that has your just-purchased item will appear in the list.
You can right-click the station in the
list and choose Set Destination. Keep your Assets window open and exit
the station you're currently docked at and
engage the Auto-pilot. After you arrive in the system where the
destination is located, the Auto-pilot will turn
off. At this point, right-click the station in your Assets window again
and choose Location > Dock.
NOTE: Don't forget to move the thing you
just bought from the ITEMS window at that station into your ship's
Cargo Hold before leaving the station to go elsewhere!
* Traveling to your current "home base" agent after
you've been shopping:
When you are doing a line of missions
for a particular agent (generally a good idea rather than agent
hopping because it increases your standing with that agent), it can be
awkward to travel to the agent after
you've been running around picking up items that you've purchased at
other stations, because when you right-click
the agent and choose Set Destination, your auto-pilot will stop when
you've entered the agent's solar system.
(Auto-pilot never fully "docks" you at your destination if it's a
station.) So you have to look up your agent's
station location and use the Current location tool or the Overview
window to browse to his station and choose
"Dock". A much easier solution is to create a bookmark for the station
at which your agent is located. Then you
can just open your People and Places window, go to the Places tab, and
right-click the bookmark and choose Dock
when the auto-pilot has dumped you in the Agent's system.
Tips for
getting around safely
The only place you're ever 100% safe to AFK is when docked inside a
station. It is generally a bad idea to AFK
while auto-piloting unless you're in the highest-security space
(systems with 0.5 to 1.0 security ratings) AND
you do not belong to a corporation yet. If you belong to a corporation,
then members of other corporations that
are at war with your corporation can attack you with total impunity
even in high-sec space.
If your plotted course takes you into or through any low-sec systems
(0.1 to 0.4 security rating), you're in
trouble, because this is where player pirates like to hang out and gank
you either for kicks or for "ransom"
(destroying your ship and then threatening to kill your pod if you
don't pay them money). Stargates in these
low-sec systems are favorite locations for player pirates to camp
(called a "blockade"). When you travel via
auto-pilot through low-sec space, you're taking a HUGE risk for several
reasons:
* Auto-pilot always warps you to within 15km of the
next gate on the waypoint list. This means that you must
"approach" the gate at normal speed for 15km before you can make the
gate jump. You are extremely vulnerable
during this time period. (Tip: if you come under attack during this
time, you can attempt to "Dock" at a nearby
station in the system to warp away as fast as possible. This might not
work if a hostile ship scrambles your warp
capability.) Note that the reason for this default 15km approach
distance is to give your capacitor time to
recharge, because warping makes a big hit on your capacitor.
* After jumping through a gate, you are stealthed
for a short time but you're also sitting still. If your
stealth wears off while you're AFK, you're a sitting duck for any
pirates that might be camping that stargate.
You aren't safe again until you set course to "dock" at the destination
station in that system.
NOTE: In several ways, 0.0 systems (which are not referred to as
"low-sec" BTW) are actually safer than low-sec
systems. Player pirates don't tend to hang out in 0.0 because the rules
are different there. 0.0 is generally
where corporations claim territory and war with each other, and many
0.0 systems are just empty most of the time.
Still, 0.0 can be quite dangerous depending on many factors, but this
is something you need to research on your
own as you become more experienced. The main thing to remember is that
low-sec systems are *extremely* low reward
vs. high risk and if your mission takes you into low-sec territory you
should consider not taking (or dropping)
that mission.
Tips for
getting around safely (continued)
So before blindly setting a destination, exiting your current station,
and hitting the Auto-pilot button, try out
the following tactics for getting safely from point A to point B:
1. While you are still safely docked in a station, set
your next destination.
2. Press F10 to open your Map. If your Map colors are not
already set to show security status, go to the Color
Stars By tab, expand the Statistics folder and select "Security
status". High-sec systems are colored with cool
colors (greens and blues), while low-sec systems are colored with warm
colors (yellows, oranges, and some lighter
shades of red). 0.0 systems are always the darkest shade of red.
3. Examine the auto-pilot route shown in the map. If it
passes only through high-sec systems and you do not
belong to a corporation that is currently at war with other
corporations, then you can *probably* safely skip the
remaining steps and use Auto-pilot to get to your destination.
However, if your route passes through
any low-sec systems OR you belong to a corporation that is currently
at war, you would probably be well-served to follow the remaining steps
here.
4. While your map is still open, expand the Statistics
folder and choose "Average pilots in space in the last
30 minutes". If there are no orange/red blobs in your autopilot route,
then it's probably safe to just auto-pilot
your way to that destination. If there are orange/red blobs in your
route, continue with the remaining steps.
5. Close the map and undock from your current station. The
stargate that will take you to your next system in
the route should be highlighted in yellow at the top of your Overview
window. (If not, then open your Overview
Settings and on the Types tab, expand the Celestial folder and select
"Stargate".) Right-click the highlighted
(yellow) stargate and choose "Warp to > Within 0 M". This will drop
you right on top of the stargate.
6. Now that you're in jump range of the stargate,
immediately right-click the stargate again in your Overview
and choose "Jump".
7. On the other side of the jump, you are temporarily
stealthed and the next stargate in your route is
highlighted in yellow. Right-click that stargate and choose "Warp to
> Within 0 M" again.
8. Repeat this process for each jump in the route until
you arrive at the star system containing your
destination. For the final jump to docking at the station, you'll need
to open the original window from which you
set your destination and right-click the entry there and choose "Dock",
which will warp you to within docking
range of your destination station.
This might seem like a labor-intensive process, but it absolutely
minimizes your vulnerable exposure to
potentially hostile players. It also gets you from point A to point B
much faster because you spend very little
time out of warp. The only thing you need to watch for is whether
you're draining your capacitor too fast by
warping so quickly again after coming out of warp. If need be, wait a
little bit while stealthed on the other
side of a gate jump before warping to the next waypoint in the list.
Tip: You can make a custom preset for your Overview window that
simplifies this process. Open your Overview
Settings, click DESELECT ALL, then find and select only Stargates and
Stations from the list of filters. Then
save this preset with a name like "Travel" and use that preset when all
you want to do is get from point A to
point B as fast and as safely as possible.
Tip: If you are traveling only to pick up some item that you've
purchased through the Marketplace, and that item
will not require more than 10 m3 of cargo space, you can buy a Shuttle
craft (very cheap) in your current station
and use the shuttle for the shopping trip instead of your main ship.
Stick with your first real storyline agent to the end
When your tutorial agent sends you to your first real "storyline" agent
(Ranta Tarumo if you went with the
recommended Caldari > Achura > Inventor > Military >
Special Forces character), stick with this second agent for
all of his missions (10 in all--called "Cash Flow for Capsuleers"). As
a reward for one of the early missions,
you'll receive a free Condor frigate, and in one of the later missions
you'll receive a free Kestrel (both
assuming you're Caldari). Other races should get similar upgrades in
their racial frigate line.
Finding
your first non-Advisory agent
The game is frankly a little buggy/weak in helping you find your first
non-Advisory division agent once you
complete your intial "Cash Flow for Capsuleers" storyline.
So here's the real deal: When you're finished with "Cash Flow for
Capsuleers", your next move is to find a good
NPC corporation that has Level 1 agents who are available to you in the
division you want with the highest
quality rating. (Player corporations are another story-I won't go there
in this guide.) Once you find a good NPC
corporation like this, you want to stick with that agent and then other
similar agents in the same corp to keep
developing your standing with that corp. Better standings = higher
quality agents = faster access to higher level
agents = more money faster.
So just like you would in real life if you were figuring out whom to
work for, you start by researching the NPC
corporations available to your race. Use this link:
http://www.eve-online.com/corporations/ and click the link
for your Race's list of corporations. There are corps that are more
industry/mining/trade/courier-oriented, and
there are corps that are more combat-oriented. Which is which will
often be apparent from the name of the corp,
but ideally you will look at the information for every single
likely-sounding corp on the list to find those
corps with a high number of agents in divisions that give you a high
percentage of combat missions (85% or better).
These divisions are: Command
(97%), Intelligence (85%),
Internal Security (95%), Security
(90%), and Surveillance (95%).
To research each corp's info, in game open your People and Places
window and in the Search Type field choose
"Corporation" and then enter the Corporation's name in the Search
String field. In the results list, right-click
the corporation and choose "Show Info". Then on the resulting window,
go to the Agents tab and expand each of the
above-listed divisions and look for those agents listed as "Available
to You".
The ideal corporation to start with would be one that has most of the
above-listed divisions and a large number
of agents in each of those divisions. For example, if you're Caldari
some likely candidates would be: Caldari
Navy or the Corporate Police Force, but there will be others in which
you might find appropriate agents with an
even higher quality rating so it's a good idea to look at all of them.
If you plan to be a mostly
mission-oriented PvE player, however, you'll never run out of things to
do in either the Caldari Navy or the CPF,
so those are good choices even if quality ratings of the agents are a
bit lower at first. Find the
highest-quality Level 1 agent and start with that agent.
Tip: Upgrade to a destroyer ASAP for Level 1 missions, try to get into
a cruiser before doing Level 2 missions,
and try to get into a battlecruiser before doing Level 3 missions.
Every new agent that you talk to is automatically added to your People
& Places > Agents tab. Also, their little
person icon changes to an actual portrait of the agent. Once you've
found your new agent and plan to run missions
for them for a while, it's a good idea to move your current assets from
your old base of operations (the station
where your previous agent was) to this new station. It's also a good
idea to undock from the station and while
outside, select the station and add it to your bookmarks so that you
can easily fly back via the People & Places
window > Places tab.
Finally, it's usually a good idea to remove the old agents whose
missions you've exhausted from your People &
Places > Agents tab. Right click the old agent and choose "Delete
from Agentlist". This makes it easy to know for
whom you're currently running missions.
Damage
types and resistances for NPC pirates
When fighting NPC pirates, it's useful to know which damage type they
are weakest against and which types of
damage they're most likely to use against you. On average, the
following tables hold true. If you want more
detailed info about a specific NPC pirate group, use this handy
database: http://eve.grismar.net/rats/index.php.
** Main Damage type to shoot at the enemy **
Guristas - Kinetic
Serpentis - Thermal
Mordus - Thermal & Kinetic
Blood - EM & Thermal
Sansha - EM & Thermal
Angel - Explosive
Mercenary - Thermal
Corpum - EM & Thermal
Gist - Explosive
** Damage types ***
Guristas - Kinetic / Thermal
Serpentis - Thermal / Kinetic
Blood Raider - Thermal / EM
Sansha's Nation - EM / Thermal
Angel Cartel - Kinetic / Explosive / Thermal
Minmatar Fleet - Thermal / Explosive
Amarr Navy - EM / Thermal
Mordus - Kinetic / Thermal
Corpim - EM / Thermal
Gist - (EM)+Kinetic/Thermal
Tips for
fighting and looting wreckage
When you arrive at the final waypoint where your mission objective is
located, examine the overview for the
nearest station, or the jumpgate you just came through, or some other
nearby safe location and bookmark its
location. Then, be certain to keep your People and Places window open
to the Places tab while you are fighting or
investigating a suspicious object, etc. (Reduce the size of the People
and Places window to something unobtrusive
like the size of your chat window.) This way, if you get overwhelmed
and are taking too much damage, you can
right-click the bookmarked safe location and choose Warp to... or Dock
or whatever to help you run away from your
aggressors before they destroy your ship.
Don't carry valuable items with you into a mission. If you become
overwhelmed and your ship is destroyed, some of
your cargo will be lost entirely, even if you go back later to recover
the cargo from your wreck. Leave your
unused training books, for example, safely back in the Items locker of
the station that you're running missions
out of.
On that note, if your ship is destroyed out in some mission area, your
wreck will be very nearby where you end up
in your pod. Locate the wreck and be sure to bookmark its location
before you warp out to safety in your pod.
That way, you can easily find your wreck after you've gotten a new ship
and attempt to recover whatever cargo
might be left. Remember, you'll lose *some* cargo items and ship
fixtures, but not all of them, so it's
worthwhile to try and recover what's left from your own wreck. In a
similar vein, don't be eager to sell off all
of your extra missile launchers and turrets that you occasionally
receive as booty. If your ship is destroyed,
you'll be glad you had them around for outfitting your replacement
ship. Oh, and *always* buy platinum insurance
coverage for your ship--don't forget this if you need to buy a new ship
after limping back to station in a pod!
Pretty quickly you'll get into missions that have you fighting several,
if not dozens, of pirates in one big
fight. The fastest way to lock targets is to hold Ctrl while
left-clicking the pirate icons in your Overview
window. This technique enables you to quickly lock the nearest targets
without dealing with a bunch of pull-down
menus.
NOTE: You can lock only 2 targets maximum at first. You must learn the
Targeting skill to be able to lock more
than 2 at a time.
So you've just finished a big mission fight and killed lots of pirates.
Their wreckage is strewn all over the
area. A solid triangle icon your Overview window indicates the wrecks
with loot in their cargo hold. Use the
Selected Item window and click the Approach button. Once you're in
range to open their cargo, click the Open
Cargo button. The icon turns gray to indicate you've looked at that
wreck.
Once you trained Science to level 4 you can use a Small Tractor Beam to
speed up this process, but even more
important is training the Salvaging skill and equipping a salvager so
you can salvage extra materials from the
wreck after you've looted its cargo hold. Salvaged materials can add up
to a LOT of extra money so it's
worthwhile to do.
It's also possible to have more loot on the wrecks than you can carry
in your cargo hold. In this case it's
useful to bookmark the location of one of the unopened wrecks (or a
nearby structure of some sort) and dock at
nearby base to offload your cargo into Items storage at that base. Then
you can undock and Warp to > Within 0 M
of the wreck you bookmarked and continue looting.
Tip: Equipping an Afterburner on your ship can make it much faster to
approach all those wrecks, speeding up the
process. And of course a Tractor Beam lets you pull all wrecks within
20 K to your position, saving even more
time.
Tip: You might not successfully salvage on the first "attempt". Just
let your Salvager(s) run until you're
finally successful.
What's with
those crazy "Acceleration Gates"? My mission dumped me here
Some missions take you to a "deadspace complex", which is Eve's
equivalent of a "dungeon" in other MMOs. You can
tell when you have a deadspace mission because when you Warp to the
mission's location you end up at an
acceleration gate. You "activate" the gate to enter the deadspace
complex.
Some deadspace complex missions will have several "levels", each
separated by another acceleration gate. If you
try to bookmark an interior acceleration gate and return to a nearby
station to unload booty (or repair or
whatever while in the middle of a large mission), when you return to
that bookmarked location you'll actually be
dropped off at the *first* acceleration gate that leads into the
deadspace complex.
More about Deadspace Complexes
You can get to deadspace complexes outside of missions too, which can
be useful for "ratting" (hunting NPC
pirates for bounty and loot) without mission time restrictions. (You
can also rat in asteroid belts in systems
with 0.7 security rating and lower, BTW.) Deadspace complexes are not
instanced--other player ships can barge in
on you, although it's somewhat harder for hostile players to find you
via scanners and probes when you're in a
deadspace complex.
A complex is a string of "deadspace pockets" linked by acceleration
gates. You cannot warp directly from normal
space to a deadspace pocket--the only way in is via an acceleration
gate. The acceleration gate leading into the
first pocket of the complex usually has a "beacon" object that can be
seen in your Overview window (Overview
Settings > Filters tab > Celestial Folder > Beacon), although
some of these acceleration gates are hidden and do
not have beacons, and require special scanning/probe
skills/equipment/techniques to find.
If you go to a deadspace pocket and it is empty (no rats), that means
some player recently got there before you.
Rats can take a while to respawn after being killed. Finally, there is
the difficulty rating of a Deadspace
pocket to consider: 1/10 is the easiest, 10/10 is the hardest. For 1/10
through 4/10 complexes, only Frigates,
Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battlecruisers can enter (1-4 respectively),
and that should give you an idea of the
difficulty of the pocket and what type of ship will be successful in
the pocket. For 5/10 and higher pockets, any
ship type may enter but you might need other players helping you--these
might be difficult/impossible solo.
Which is better? Missiles or Turrets?
If you take the recommended character creation route of Caldari >
Achura > Inventor > Military > Special Forces,
you have the ability to fly all of the Caldari frigates right out of
the gate, and you're ready to learn the
other race's Frigate skills as soon as you can afford to buy the
training books for them. The better Caldari
frigates tend to emphasize missile use, but since you're not limited to
Caldari ships you have the option of
pursuing either missile-based tactics or turret-based tactics.
Generally speaking, missiles are more effective in most PvE mission
situations, while turrets are more effective
in PvP play. Since this is a newcomer's guide, however, we're going to
focus on PvE. You should experiment with
both missiles and turrets as soon as your first few agent missions give
you a shiny new Condor frigate to play
with and get a feel for how they work. As a general rule of thumb, use
missiles on your pirate targets when they
are still far away from you, but try to approach them directly and
close to a tight orbit range to finish them
off with your turrets. Shorter-range, harder-hitting turret ammo types,
such as Anti-matter, can be good for this
general tactic. An alternative tactic is to sit at range and plink away
at your targets with missiles until they
are dead, but the downside is that some pirate types will recharge
their shields in between missile salvos. This
is why it can be effective overall to soften them up with missiles as
you approach to turret range, and then
finish them off with hard-hitting turret ammo.
This is only a rough guideline, a starting point. Learning the
weaknesses and tactics of the pirate factions you
fight against, as well the nuances of your own preferred fighting
style, can come only through experimentation.
Do lots of research on the forums and you'll be able to figure out your
preferred ship types and weapon types and
overall tactics.
And again, as I mention in post #1 in this thread, this guide is
slanted for newcomers who are mostly doing
missions during their 14-day trial period to get a feel for EVE's basic
gameplay mechanics. It's a entirely
different story if you ever choose to PvP (many people choose never to
PvP, for what it's worth). For PvP,
missiles are generally inferior to turrets. See the link near the
bottom of post #1 for more information on this
subject.
How to
determine the best orbit range for turrets
The OPTIMAL RANGE for turrets is slightly misleading. Yes, at the
Optimal range or closer, you have 100% chance
to hit, but only if the targets transversal speed (angular velocity
relative to your motion) is slower than your
turret's tracking speed. If the target's transversal speed is equal to
your tracking speed, even within Optimal
range, then your accuracy drops to 50%. If the target's transversal
speed exceeds your tracking speed, then your
accuracy drops below 50% and can easily drop to 0%. (Learning the
Motion Prediction skill can effectively improve
the listed tracking speed of all turrets.) The problem is that small,
fast targets (like frigates) that are at
Optimal range can have a transversal speed that exceeds your turret's
tracking speed if they are changing their
velocity or the direction they are flying relative to you, so your
accuracy even within optimal range can vary
wildly from moment to moment. The larger and slower the target is, the
less that this is an issue.
As you move from the turret's OPTIMAL range out to its OPTIMAL
plusFALLOFF range, your accuracy also decreases to
exactly 50% at the limit of the OPTIMAL + FALLOFF. However, because
you're so much farther away from the target,
the target's transversal speed is much lower relative to your turret's
tracking speed.
Because of this accuracy trade-off between range and transversal
speed, the best orbit range for your turret is
usually somewhere in between the turret's listed OPTIMAL range and its
OPTIMAL + FALLOFF range. A good starting
point is to set your orbit distance for turret fighting somewhere
roughly in the middle of these two numbers. For
example, if OPTIMAL is 6000 M and Falloff is 5000 M, then your best
orbit distance for turret fighting is the one
that falls nearest the halfway point between 6000 and 11000 (in this
example, that would be 7,500 M).
Another good rule of thumb is this: if you can somehow make the target
reduce its transversal speed (such as by
tricking it into chasing you in a straight line), you can move closer
to the target and thereby increase your
accuracy.
How
to determine the best orbit range for missiles and rockets
Missiles and rockets (just referred to as "missiles" from now on) are
not affected by the same accuracy issues as
for turrets. Your target's transversal speed is not important, and
there are no "tracking speed" considerations
because missiles automatically hone in on a LOCKED target (FoF missiles
are the exception here, because they
don't need a target lock). All that matters is the distance that a
missile can fly before it runs out of fuel.
So there are no "optimal" or "falloff" stats on missile launchers.
Instead, it's the attributes of the
missiles/rockets themselves that determine the optimum orbit range at
which you should fight. Multiply the listed
MAX FLIGHT TIME by the MAX VELOCITY, and the result is your effective
maximum range. Note that as a whole,
rockets have a much shorter range and do much less damage than
missiles, but they also fire at a faster rate.
You probably want to set your orbit distance somewhere well inside this
max range because the target's movement
over the flight time of the missile can significantly increase the
total distance that the missile has to fly.
For example, if the target is directly chasing you (no transversal),
then your missile doesn't have nearly as far
to fly because the target is flying directly towards your missile. And
of course if you are the one chasing the
target while it flees away from you, then the missile has much farther
to fly because the target is flying
directly away from the missile.
Where
to go from here
Master Entreri has an excellent guide also in this forum that goes
beyond these basic tips and includes some
excellent detail about missioning, ratting, fitting your ship, and how
to "tank" your ship. Here's the link: A
Complete Newb's Guide to Starting Off in Eve-Online.
Conclusion
That should be enough info to supplement the in-game tutorial and help
you wrap your head around the basic
gameplay elements. Have fun!
Sapuri
Caldari
Perkone
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