Ships and Plex

New Citizens Q&A
1

I notice one of the smaller omega bundles on the sale offered like 500 plex. Isn’t that a bit powerful for a new starting player? That’s the equivalent of 4 billion isk.. which as a starting player sounds like its a LOT if you dont do anything stupid with it (like buying extremely expensive ships before you even know how to play). But other than that it removes all the other starting hurdles… i wanna level skills I dont have skill books for? About 5 plex solves that problem and you still got 495 left

With that kinda money at the start what would you really have to PLAY to achieve (aside from experiences) work for, grind towards other than waiting for your 90 day skill queue to finish lol

As for ships so since the general rule is dont fly anything you cant replace. I plan to farm/make all my ships from scratch instead of buying them from the market (at least my starter ships… once I get to stuff like a Cynabal or Ishtar Im DEFINITELY buying those… not gonna try to Ironman eve)

So my questions are if I wanna build a specific ship I know I need blueprints so first do I need specific skills to use blueprints and build ships or are the blueprints and ship ingredients all you need?

If you build a ship is the ship build time separate from you skill queue? (I hope so otherwise I got 90 days before I can pilot my first new ship lol)

Is it possible to get blueprints without buying them? If so is there like a wiki.or guide that tells you where to farm and what to kill for specific blueprints?

What’s the difference between an original blueprint and a copy? If I read right it looks like if I can get an original then I can build an infinite amount of that ship (as long as I have the ingredients) whereas a copy is one use only so if I wanted to let’s say build 5 of the same ship id need 5 blueprint copies and basically need to get a blueprint copy EVERYTIME I wanted to make that ship?

2

It’s only about 2.25B. In theory it’s fairly powerful I guess, but I don’t think too many new players leverage an unearned box of isk very effectively in practice.

Whatever you’d like? Go build an empire, take over someone else’s space, fight a war, 1v1 at the sun in Amamake, gank a miner, gank another one, gank a third, whatever floats your boat. Grinding is not a moral obligation and if someone doesn’t care for it, I don’t think there’s any great sin in simply skipping it and doing something they enjoy instead.

Strongly, strongly recommend against doing this. Please do anything else with your time, I promise you will be happier.

Yes. You can also have multiple build slots available to you and they all run concurrently, and build slots are also separate from research slots.

It’s possible to get almost anything in Eve without buying it. Theft, scamming, and violence are all allowed or even encouraged here.

Some are available through DED and exploration sites, LP stores, occasional drops off faction rats, etc. I’m not aware of an exhaustive list, but hopefully someone else will post one. These will be BPCs; BPOs are mainly sourced from NPC market orders.

BPOs can be researched to use less material and require less time to craft. They have unlimited production runs and can be copied. A BPC inherits the research levels of its parent BPO. BPCs have limited (though often more than 1) runs.

BPOs are generally expensive and BPCs are generally cheap. For instance:

-A brand new Covetor BPO costs ~2.1 billion isk (in Jita; less if you head out to an ORE station and fetch it yourself) and will still need to be researched before it’s usable. Research takes quite a bit of time, and the latter research levels can be quite expensive as well.

-An already-perfectly-researched 10 run Covetor BPC is available on contracts for 838,000 ISK.

Apart from that, some items only have BPCs. There is no such thing as Cynabal BPO, for instance.

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3

You say gank a mining ship or something? Explain to me how would would successfully kill ANYONE with zero combat/gameplay experience flying around in their tutorial Velator still outfitted with Civillian stuff and little to no combat skills in queue until about month 3?

If you say dont build your own ships then are you suggesting theres nothing to do in game thats productive while you wait on skills but Harrass and gank other players and make enemies? Surely the people selling the ships built them right?

Now I agree building Ishtars or Cynabals would be stupid and a HUGE undertaking… I’ve seen the Cynabal reddit post and YouTube video after all… nope. But sure more “entry level” ships like Thrasher, Algos, Stabber and Vexor shouldn’t be TOO crazy, right?

4

This was with regard to a scenario in which a new player has sold 500 plex and is relatively cash rich. They’re a jita run away from a Catalyst.

You’re the final boss of your skill queue and there’s no reason you can’t have combat skills in your queue today, right now.

Define what productive means to you. If you mean in the sense of literally producing items in-game, then my position is that most industrial play is a poor choice of activity for newer players for a number of economic and practical reasons.

Many of the people selling ships likely did build them, others probably bought them at a lower price and are reselling them. I am not saying “People should not make ships,” but rather, “You, a new player, specifically should not seek to make your own ships.”

It’s just very ineffective at every step of the way. Mining is among the worst per-character ROI in the game, and that’s AFTER you invest all the SP to fly around in a perfectly skilled exhumer. Realistically, you also need a boosting and compression ship - that can be flown by another player, but the common approach is to multibox.

You will also basically lose money every step of the way. Your raw ore will be worth more than the resulting minerals after you imperfectly refine it, and the minerals will likely be worth more than the market value of the ships you produce because other players have lower costs than you do through either raw scale or access to more efficient infrastructure.

I’m advising you against it because it’s ineffective and the ROI (on both time spent in game and SP investment) is poor, not because it’s too crazy difficult to accomplish.

All that said, there is no reason you should find yourself waiting on skills for months on end.

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5

Yes an isk rich newbie is a jita run away but remember I said “assuming theyre smart enough to not waste money buying ships they cant fly and losing them due to their inexperience”?

If you cant mine well and make isk without the right ship/fits etc and ship building is ill-advised then the magic question becomes, what IS there to do ingame (and feel like you’ve accomplished something) aside from pvp?

I get ship building isnt fun if you dont have the right specs, but if crafting basically sucks and throwing isk at all your problems is easier why even give other options?

In Albion Id gather and craft 5 sets of the armor and weapons im wearing before venturing into a full spot area that way if I get ganked, no big deal I got 4 more at home waiting for me thats what I planned to do here but doesnt sound like its viable

So if I can’t mine effectively, cant build ships, not gonna engage in fight I know im not currently outfitted to win. What’s left? I mean is there a way to actively grind skill points to get through a queue faster? Id call that being productive, maybe farming/making modules i might want/need in the future?

6

For those that dont wanna mine, if they get in with a good corporation, they can help out (plenty of new bro corps). They can retroactively use someones referral for 1 mil sp.

Pve running missions is a good way to play while skill training. Skills train in real time, so its not like they train when only the game is on.

7

Yeah missions sound good but what do i get/what do those missions reward to make them work doing if you dont need isk?

8

Catalyst is a day-1 ship even if you don’t sell plex. Pretty sure the Soldier of Fortune career agent chain will simply hand you one at the end, in fact.

2.25 billion isk is enough money for 150+ fully fit catalysts.

Mining isn’t a prerequisite for making ISK. It’s one of the worst ways available and that’s why I’m advising against it. That’s all. If you want to make isk, run missions or do abyssals or anoms → DEDs or exploration sites, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of PvE options and many are doable, in some form or another, on day 1.

I don’t know man, I think maybe we’re talking past each other here a bit.

This isn’t about it not being fun, this isn’t about crafting “sucking”. I am advising you, as a new player, with the resources and game knowledge that you have available to you right now, that it will suck for you.

Eve’s industry is a lot more, uh, industrial than Albion’s crafting. Albion is sort of built in a way where it’s a given that almost everyone will be participating in some form of harvesting and crafting and that isn’t really the case with Eve.

If you want to do industry as a career, that’s one thing, but just building your own ships in the manner of making 5 backup sets in Albion is going to add ENORMOUS overhead and effort to what is usually the very streamlined process of getting a new ship.

9

Past the first hour of gameplay, or unless you’re flat broke, there’s no reason you should be running around in a corvette. If you’ve finished the tutorial, you should immediately move on to the career agents for your chosen faction. After you’ve completed all five, you will have skill books, frigates, fittings, ISK, etc., to start you off on the right foot.

Your next steps would be the Sisters of EVE epic arc (The Blood-Stained Stars), as well as to start working through the AIR Career Program to get more rewards, including bonus SP. Once you’ve sampled the various career paths, you can start figuring out where you want to live and what you want to spend time doing. For some activities, like missioning, you’ll want to start thinking about standings and raising them with the npc corps and faction(s) you want to work with.

As for combat skills, they should be in your queue NOW, not in three months. Everyone needs at least the basics. Refer to the AIR skill plans to guide your training in the first couple of weeks and months.

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10

What skills are there in your skill queue right now? And how many of them level 5?

If you’re not going to train any combat skills in the first three months I get the feeling your skill queue is setting you up for a very uninteresting first three months in EVE.

My recommendation is to train a bunch of level 3 skills in various activities first so you can already start playing EVE in your first days instead of training level 5s in who knows what for the first months while you sit twiddling your thumbs docked in the station waiting for skills to complete.

What you describe sounds like you set yourself up for a very boring first few months.

Skip the level 5s at the start, instead unlock some scanning and hacking skills, some mining skills and/or some combat skills so you can start flying around, explore the universe and earn a bit of ISK while you learn how the game works.

You’re going to want to have game knowledge before you start something like industry.

Being self-sufficient is a huge challenge in EVE, even more so for a total newbie with no knowledge, ISK or skills. Personally in 9 years I never bothered, the market is always available with most of the stuff I need at a much lower cost and effort than I would spend building it on my own. The rare cases I do build stuff with industry it’s to add value to the items I already have so I can sell them better, not because I wish to use those items.

My only ‘self sufficiency’ is that I do my own logistics when it comes to exporting and importing goods to the market, but even that can be outsourced to players who specialize in that sort of gameplay in various ways.

More reasonable goals as new player are to unlock a few playstyles and to find a couple of activities that are sources of ISK that you enjoy doing so you can play while your skills train.

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11

Sadly true. I have over 150 fully researched BPOs that I rarely use, including some BS and BC. Mostly what I produce is T1 ammo to tick the daily goal when it comes up. :grin:

12

I still have a small BPO set from when I was an ambitious newbie and wanted to have my own blueprints. Bought a bunch of frigates but the bigger ones were out of my wallet’s reach.

Never used them.

I’ve used a few blueprints that I researched, most notably fuel blocks and nanite paste to process PI goods into something that’s either more easily hauled or sold locally so I save transport effort on the mass of PI I produce.

And a shuttle BPO that I used back when I tried caring about dailies for a month.

13

Well I can tell you I have 0 skills at 5. Im not leveling anything to 5 until I have EVERYTHING I want at 4 (unless what I wont requires a level 5 skill to unlock)

So I basically spent my first time skills leveling science, anchoring and Gunnery to 4.

Then I spent skills getting all the magic 14 to 4, followed by all the prerequisites needed to FLY the 6 ships Im interested in, after that since I learned all those ships and destroyers and Cruisers and that I would need battlecruisers and battleships to do level 3 and 4 missions I then train the skills needed to fly about 2 ships each in those categories.

That’s all done so now Im finally leveling the skills needed to effectively use/not totally suck when I have those ships and that was what was gonna take 90 days but I cut it down to 30-40 with injectors. Im up to like 15 million skill points total with 3.5 million in queue

14

you should have focused on actual ship skills and whats needed to be combat ready, and train the magic 14 in between all those… for entry level, you can do okish without the magic 14, but adding them little by little and continuing to fly and do combat is what make the difference… training the 14 first is a mistake a lot of people continue to push and it needs to stop..

example:
ok so i have 3 months before i can play the game because i was told that i needed to train these “magic 14” before i can even fly a ship… i quit this aint no fun.

  1. Ok so Im about to train into a kestrel, so i have caldari frigate training so i can fly it along with some missiles that i already received from doing the tutorial and career agents. in between training all this, i’ll train some of these “magic 14” so i can fly my ship better and within a month or so i’ll have mastered flying the kestrel and work on getting into the caracal.

see the difference… you train the magic 14 as you go and as needed, but get the skills to fly the ship and arm it first..

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15

6 different ships?

I would probably bring a bit more focus to my training. Maybe pick two or three ships at first, one at a time?

Also what types of ships are you training?

Are they similar with many shared skills, or did you pick them from multiple factions and multiple ship sizes? This also increases training time as it increases the amount of skills you need to train.

It’s good that you only focus on level 4 skills for now, but there also is another focus you can add.

If you train ships one by one you can fly a ship with decent levels much sooner than if you wait to undock until you’ve trained 6 of them.

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16

well my original and main focus was 2 (not 3 just checked) ships but apparently all those are cruisers and theyre allegedly only good for lvl 1 and 2 missions, if i want to tackle 3s and 4s I (again allegedly) needs battlecruisers and battleships) so thats where the other 2 (so its actuallt a total of 4 ships not 6 like i originally said) ships came in, otherwise if it werent for that Id only have focused on the initial 2 alone.

Also since the 2 initial ships are more expensive, Ive using much cheaper ships (like thrasher, stabber, Algos and Vexor) to practice and gain experience for the playstyle I plan to use until Im confident enough to start flying the ships I actually WANT to use by that time the training queue should be complete or close to it

17

theres a second option that doesnt involve quitting… how about “Ok this is gonna take 3 months, so Ill just go find something else ti play and come back to it in 90 days… after all its not like its costing me anything to play this, so my time and or money isnt being wasted”

18

Ah, you’re going straight for battleships?

This is yet another angle you can unnecessarily increase your skill training queue as new player, by skipping the fast affordable ships and going for the big expensive ships first.

I wouldn’t do that, at least not at the start.

As you have noticed destroyers and cruisers are much more affordable in ISK, but they’re also easier to train.

Start training a couple of small ships first before going big.

In EVE bigger isn’t always better, usually it’s slower, more expensive, more easily caught and as you have noticed: a much longer training plan.

Personally I much prefer the small fast ships and are cruisers the largest I fly when not flying fleet doctrine ships for my alliance.

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19

Yeah Cruisers will also be the largest thing I ever flau 95% of the time too. But correct me if im wrong… you CANT do level 3 and 4 missions with Cruisers right? That’s the ONLY reason battlecruisers and battleships are even in my queue and even then theyre at the very bottom so it’ll be the absolute last thing I train

20

You can do Some L3s with a cruiser you know what youre doing. But otherwise a battlecruiser is what you want