Best Starter Ships for Alpha Clones

Hello! wondering what the best starter pve and pvp ships are. Don’t have a lot of ISK.

Best to complete the Career Agent missions and you will end with roughly 20m in ISK and 8~ free ships.

See EVE Academy | The ultimate beginner's guide to EVE Online | EVE Online and Getting Started in EVE Online - EVE University Wiki for more getting started tips.

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As pointed out above, the Career Agent Missions and by extension the Sisters of EVE Epic Arc are pretty much integral to the starting player. You should end up with about 20 million ISK and a bunch of ships. An arty Thrasher, a rail Cormorant, and a blaster Catalyst for the really nasty enemies at the end is fine for the SOE epic arc.

T1 frigates, T1 frigates, and maybe a T1 destroyer if you wanna be fancy. Cruisers need a lot of skillpoints to be used effectively, mostly because of the engineering, drone, and medium gun specialization skills.

Of course, it depends on what you want to do with these ships. I suggest Faction Warfare defensive and offensive complexing, which is best when you have a nice T1 frigate to yeet around.

As an alpha account myself, you can see Flara Pediati’s zKill for some good fitting inspirations of the kind that I like to use. If you look back pretty far, you’ll see that the expensive stuff I tried (cruisers, pirate ships) didn’t work out well, and if you look back even farther you’ll see that I died A LOT at the beginning. That was after specialized training for a couple months and also some video watching about faction warfare solo pvp, so you really want to have a few tens of millions in the bank first.

If you don’t, there is luckily an easy way to make that 10 mil, and that is the simple Faction Warfare complex. If no one runs you out (which will happen a lot), you should make that 10 million in about 20 minutes. If you capture OPlexes in a good DPS ship (like the dual web blaster Incursus), you could make that 10 million in a little over 11 minutes.

In particular, I love the Merlin, Thrasher, Slasher, Breacher, and Magnate.

Depending on what your main weapon type is (do you have small T2 projectiles, rockets, hybrids, lasers, or drones first?), you’ll want to choose a ship that is completely dependant on those weapons. I suggest TD Slasher or plated Rifter, neut Condor or dual web shield Kestrel, armor-hull Atron or dual web shield Merlin, AB kite Executioner or dual web Punisher, and neut Tristan, respectively.

The truly spectacular ships use combinations of weapons like the laser-drone Tormentor, the rocket drone Breacher (which also has a rediculously difficult-to-manage double tank), the single drone and careful capacitor management of the Incursus, and the rocket-autocannon-drone Magnate.

To get a start in the complexes, join Faction Warfare for one of the empires, fly to a contested area, go to your side of the Frontline, and find a complex on the overview. The smallest ones (Scout and Small) will be the most consistent. Learn how to use DScan, and take careful scans of the area to make sure you don’t get caught.

You WILL die, a lot, so fit your ships cheaply. Even unfit ships will work, but people will not like you doing that.

If you want to offensive capture, fit your ship with cheap guns, a bunch of damage mods (heat sinks, magnetic field stabilizers, ballistic control systems, gyrostabilizers, or drone damage amplifiers for different weapon systems), and an AB with a bunch of webs. Sit at point blank range on the NPC and use your faction ammo against it (Navy Antimatter, Republic Fleet Fusion/EMP/Phased plasma, Navy Rockets, or Navy Multifrequency). Kill the NPC every three minutes until the timer runs out and you get a massive profit.

You could also try asking for help in the Rookie Help chat channel. There are very helpful dudes there. You could also send EVE-mails to people you want to learn more from. Getting into fights and dying, starting up a conversation with your attacker, and talking to them is a great way to get fantastic advice, ISK from friendly pirates, and practice.

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thank you so much for all the help, im already up a couple mil isk from SOE and other missions. I’m looking at buying a merlin and outfitting it with a few basic modules. (P.S im using a thrasher with gatlings and various types of ammo right now)

there is no “best” ship
no best pve ship
no best pvp ship
everything is situational
depending on what you plan to do

A Merlin after a Thrasher? You need different skills for ships and weapons. It’s ok to skill all T1 ships and weapons, but for a start a Rifter is better as long as your Projectile Weapon skills are better than your Hybrid Weapon skills.

Simple rules of thump:

  • Don’t mix weapons
  • Don’t mix tank

It’s tempting to fit all guns you have, but the results are way better when the same kind of gun shoots at the same time at the right distance using the same ammo.

Did you try the Slasher btw? Speed is fun!

Guess you’ve never flown a dual rep autos-rocket Firetail, Magnate, or Probe.

That’s a great start! Make sure your ship can eventually deal over 140 dps (or talk someone up in local and help each other). You’ll need it for one of the end fights. Also get a spare Thrasher, because there is a dude near the end that neutralizes pretty hard and deals a lot of damage.

As pointed out before, mixing weapon types can be very messy. Focusing on a specific weapon (like Projectiles, with drone and rockets/light missiles as support skills, or Hybrids and drones as another path) will help you get into T2 stuff faster. If you like Faction Warfare, I think the most helpful route is… projectiles? TD Slasher and plated Rifter are great entry-level ships.

not really sure how to word a response bc theres a lot of stuff, but thank you for the advice! ill definitely experiment with mixing weapon types and ill (try) to get my hands on a spare thrasher as well as upping my current dps. thank u!

It’s like a Damage Control: As long as you don’t know better, stick to it.
For me, the advantage was not clear at the beginning, so I reluctantly accepted these rules. But after a while I’ve realized why they insisted when I was a new player.

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https://www.thealphasguide.com/

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I like that!

This is fantastic! I don’t know how I’ve never seen this before! It’s so good!
The ganking section needs to be updated, but everything else looks absolutely top-notch.

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I think it’s still listed in the MotD of the Rookie Help channel.

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