Heyo, currently skilled level 4 in every sub cap for caldari and gallente, with a hybrid turret focus. I’m looking at either funding my pure gallente alt or outright buying a >10m SP galllente character but just wanted to check how everyone else was diversifying their SP. Do people tend to train single empire’s ships and weapon types, or would I be expected to train basically all ships and weapon types to be useful in an NS corp? I’ve seen fleet doctorines of basically just one ship (with support), so i’d assume i’d be forced into training everything, which would be a real pain.
People over time learn pretty much any empires’ ships and weapons because you need to be able to fly everything eventually. You can focus on one empire/weapon system in the beginning as it saves you some time to get to bigger tools. However, eventually when you have maxed those skills out you can and should start branching out. At least for sub caps it is very handy to be able to fly all frigates, cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships and their T2 versions (at least up to T2 cruisers) as well as T3 cruisers.
I have one character that I skilled purely for gallente ships and drones as weapons but he is only being used for very specific activities. My oldest character can fly a wide variety of ships to be able to use doctrines from alliances I fly with.
That really depends on what kind of stuff you want to do in the game.
If you’re playing on your own and just want to fly whatever ship you want, train for the things you want to fly.
If you’re playing with a corporation or nullsec alliance, you’ll want to train at least for their mainline doctrine ships. Commonly used ships today are Muninns and Sabres.
If you’re in an alliance, you’re better off just talk with your alliance mates to figure out what you’re expected to train, since the general forum population won’t know what’s exactly expected.
Most people end up having multiple racial cruiser skills at 5 by the two year mark. Specializing too much in one race (at least for subcaps) is not very wise because it’s always good to have options, and pirate faction ships (i.e. the Cynabal, Gila, etc.) all get bonuses from two different racial subcap skills, and they’re expensive enough that it’s worth maximizing those skills.
another thing to keep in mind, is that most null-sec alliances usually have “support” roles in their doctrines (scouts, sabers, tackle, etc) that can require less SP than some of the mainline DPS doctrines, and also don’t generally change as frequently as the main doctrines do. so long as you can fly one or two of those support doctrines you can contribute to just about any fleet while you train up for the other ships.
Something to keep in mind, is that while it may feel like an annoying slog to train up a bunch of different ships (especially because it will always feel like doctrines change JUST as you finish training into one) once you have it trained, you have it trained forever (unless you extract for some reason) which means you now ALWAYS have access to that ship if you need it, or if it ever becomes doctrine again.
