Very broad question, since it seems to apply to so much of what I’m reading and seeing.
I’m primarily into indie games and story driven games as well as tabletop RPGs, but I am not afraid of crunching numbers (I’m just not very good at remembering them).
I have started my second character and am already further along than the first (post-tutorial), have 20ish days of skills queued and I find myself constantly having to drop one thing and stop training for it in order to train for something else. It seems like my progress in any one of the professions (mostly interested in explorer and enforcer but I’m doing them all) is always put on hold for something else. Is that just how people do this since you’re not losing progress you’re just spending time?
Maybe there’s some extremely minmaxxed plan to get into what you want faster and I don’t know about it. Want to make sure I’m not handicapping myself, if it can be helped.
Skills never seem to train fast enough, especially when you’re new and you’re already limited in what you can do.
First off, if you haven’t already done so, be sure to use a referral link to get your free 1M SP. That will help you speed up some of the initial training. If you need a link, let me know and I’ll give you one. (EDIT: here in case you need it.)
Second, start with small, near-term goals and target level IV skills as your cap, unless you need V to unlock something. Look at the ship tree, pick a ship or two that you want to fly, and use the Mastery tab on the info window for each to build a skill plan. If you stick with a single racial line (wise to do at first), you’ll find a lot of skills overlap between hulls.
Some skills to train early on that new capsuleers often overlook are Cybernetics and Infomorph Psychology. The former gives you access to implants, the latter access to jump clones. Once you’ve started earning some ISK, a set of +3 or +4 learning implants will help speed up your training. Just be sure to swap into an empty clone if you’re planning to do something dangerous.
Lastly, you can optimize your attributes with neural remaps. This is something you probably don’t want to do very early on, because you’ll be training a wide range of skills at first. But once you get into a long skill plan, with skills that all use the same primary and secondary attributes, a neural remap to optimize those attributes will significantly speed up your training. However, you are only allowed to remap occasionally. You get a couple bonus remaps as a new player, then it’s a once-per-year kind of thing, so use them sparingly. An ill thought out remap for short term gain can even hurt you long term.
I know I just threw a lot at you. If you have specific questions, let me know.
EDIT to add: I should have said this at the start, but as long as you’re having fun, don’t worry about being “efficient,” either with skill training or with ISK generation. Chasing efficiency can lead to burn out. Chase fun instead.
Also, you might find this a helpful resource (and the EVE Uni wiki, in general).
You can enjoy EVE staying small and evolving slowly, just as a beautiful space-environment with a ton of different activities to do. It is a common mistake to believe your game experience would get so much better if you could just fly or afford everything as soon as possible. That is not the case. Well, maybe except if you are a hardcore minmax player that needs to be top tier endcontent grinder else he isn’t satisfied.
There are of course some “general rules” you could stick to, to just help your progress without sacrificing much of the enjoyment. Like skilling “Cybernetics” and “Biology” pretty early to be able to use Learning Implants and Attribute Boosters.
In general, it is a good idea to stay at level IV for most skills for a pretty long time, because the cases where you absolutely need level V to unlock or perform reasonably are pretty rare. With Level IV skills you can take on most content pretty well.
However: The most important tip that will speed up your progress on all fields (skills, income, knowledge and fun) is: JOIN A CORP. Look for a group that is newbie friendly and willing to teach you how to do things. Make friends and profit from flying with Veterans.
Efficiency really comes into play later in the game if you go down the min/max route in terms of ISK/hour. As @Syzygium points out, how important this is really depends on your play style.
Depends on the type of efficiency you’re talking about.
I like efficient ship fits. Ships that can do the job efficiently but also at a low cost, so if I lose them it doesn’t take much time to replace one, so I spend my time efficiently earning ISK and don’t waste that time just to afford needlessly expensive modules (called ‘bling’ in EVE).
I also enjoy efficient packing of my ships. My alliance has had the habit of moving to a new region to live in about once a year for the past 9 years I’ve been with them, so I try to keep the number of ships in my hangar small and manageable, with enough ships to do what I want to do but no more, so I can pack and move efficiently when needed.
Efficient use of my character slots is another thing I liked planning when I originally decided upon roles for my characters. Every account has three character slots and all three of them will be Omega characters if you pay a subscription for that account so it’s efficient to make them all useful in some way. Besides my main combat pilot I also have a hauler pilot (in a different corporation that cannot be at war) to do my hauling trips, and a miner (because mining has zero overlap with other roles in the game), and all three are trained for planetary industry, which I like doing for a portion of my ISK.
As you can see efficiency can be part of many aspects of your EVE gameplay, there are many more things where you can optimize your gameplay if you think that’s fun and useful.
My idea of optimization and efficiency in games is to do it when it’s fun, but not to let minmaxing suck the fun out of the game.
For example EVE also allows you to minmax your training speed by doing attribute remaps and having training implants for higher attributes. It’s not a bad idea to look into how you can improve your training speed that way, I did that on my main.
I however could not be bothered to keep track of it when training my alts, or at all times. So I don’t!
Training all sorts of skills and swapping between your training plans is not bad at all.
I too am training a bunch of skills at all times and whenever something more interesting or more important comes through I put that first, as you’re not losing any progress in the other skill, just postponing it.
Besides the 1 million referral skillpoints that were mentioned, attribute remaps for long-term skill training and learning implants (+3s or +4s are really nice! I’d skip +5s, they’re expensive and a big loss whenever you forget them) and skill points you earn from daily challenges are a nice way to train faster.
Also do know that higher skill levels take much more time than the early ones. I recall you need only 14% of the skill points for level 4 skills, much less for level 3. So you could get a lot more progress in many different things by training a bunch of interesting skills to level 3 and some 4s than to train a single level 5.
Especially the higher level specialization skills (3-5) are to be ignored in your first year(s) unless you’ve really found the one thing you enjoy doing and want to dedicate all your SP to that one activity.
A much more fun start is to train a bunch of different activities so you can mine, explore, fight and try a lot more things pretty well instead of having perfect skills to do a single thing. ‘Perfect’ skills are overrated.
As a couple of others above me have mentioned, I don’t see efficiency in the traditional sense in EVE related to skill training, but rather isk per unit of time. Although one can think of effiiciency in terms of skill training, but then, it would translate to SP gained per unit of time. In which case you would need to start using accelerators, implants, and remapping in order to max out your efficiency. It’s more relevant in the first years in the game, when you’re very limited in what you can fly and how you can fit your ships. But once past a certain SP threshold, it will no longer be a concern.
As far as ISK efficiency in the game (i.e. ISK gained per unit of time) i never cared for it. That is not what EVE is about to me. I do PLEX my accounts, but luckily I’m comfortable enough not to have to hustle for it. The most important thing is that you enjoy what you do. If you enjoy an activity that doesn’t bring in a lot of ISK as opposed to another activity that would bring in much more but is unenjoyable, I will always advise you to engage in the former.
Okay, wow. That’s a lot of really well-presented info. Thank you very much.
I think the point about the 14% of skillpoints to Level IV is crucial. That stat casts a whole different perspective on switching back and forth training IIs, IIIs, and IVs, making the apparent “time lost” negligible. Planning and training skills kind of plays like a city builder: gotta work on my industrial and commercial zones, now I need to add green spaces and fix public transit, and as you go the options expand. I think I have an understanding now. I’m glad I asked.
@Hatch_Nasty thank you for the links, I am reading up now on wormholes and combat anomalies @Syzygium thank you for the encouraging words, I am looking at the corp window for options @Arthur_Aihaken thank you for helping me be patient, I will leave the “efficiency” for later when I’m training Vs @Gerard_Amatin thank you for sharing this experience, I will put it to use as I try things out @Meridan_Night thank you for this point of view with respect to time, I think it will keep me from fretting about “progress”
I find most of the skill training here to be very inadequate. They do open avenues to use ships and equipment. However the best skill rating you will get is 5% per level on a 5 level skill, giving you a min-max of 5% to 25%. Getting the skill will cost everyone (alpha or omega) time. The omegas get it the time reduced by 50%, but many of those 5th level skills can be a month to learn. This is where they tell you to buy omega to train faster, buy augments to train faster, or just buy skill injectors to train instantly. You could spend hundreds of dollars on one character speed training them with injectors and still end up with bad skills.
So when my friend John brought me here, I set up the training they suggested for one month. I didn’t even play for that first month. Much later when my 3 alphas hit the 5 million cap on AFK training, I stopped paying attention to my skill set. Every so often, when I have accumulated a lot of skill points, I spend them were I see fit. Any day I play, I get 10,000 SP on my daily without even trying. These events also help out.
I notice you bio here asks, is this a game or a space job simulator. It is only a job, if you make it one. Find something to have fun and as long as you can find the fun, it is a game.