Solo player tech 1 fleet - taking on C1-2 advice

Exploration Gameplay Center Wormhole Space
1

Hi.

I’ve been living in wormholes recently, favouring low end C1-2 content and really enjoying it. I started out on a day trip on a single character and now have 5 or 6 characters across multiple accounts in the same hole.

So I’ve gotten OK at scanning down and watching holes whilst I hack away. I’ve had success clearing gas sites and clearing them out.

What I struggle with is mistakes on my end of course along with roamers in powerful ships. T3 cruisers and little groups.

For example I was not careful enough watching a chain and sent my drake through three holes to a HS exit and got caught on the hole by tackle, with only T1 heavy missiles (this is my battleship pve char who is t2 cruise trained for lvl 4’s) but nothing else I was just unable to kill the tackle before another tackle and a drekavac turned up.

I have tried to develop a super cheap and low sp fleet to attempt to, if not to win brawls, to make people move on for easier targets (my alts have low sp, slowly building on them).

I’m sure the following is fairly pointless but here’s what i’ve got due to what I had in the hangar and my alts only having caldari boat and missile skills:

  • main is in an astero but has completed tengu training, waiting on building up for isk before buying one as don’t want to feel the loss when I lose it.
  • second main (pve battleship pilot) is in a gnosis training t2 hvy missiles and cruisers/battlecruisers
  • low sp alt in a moa 3 X damps, 2 X nuts, 2x nosfaru with the intention of stopping the spooling or neuting out an amarr laser boat
  • low sp alt in light missile T1 corax
  • low sp alt in gas huffer venture
  • my porpoise pilot sat in a venture gas huffer atm whilst another alt trains for gas huffing

My core activities are:

  • Relic sites
  • Clearing gas sites inc. NPC’s as I can’t get far enough from rats to avoid them on the smaller low level gas sites
  • Combat sites if all other sigs have been cleared and no relic or gas sites within a couple of holes

I’ve found that I prefer a c2 with c1 or c2 static and low sec static. Holes with null sec statics tend to receive annoying little groups roaming from null, hi sec statics are like a highway.

When the hole is quiet and not full of k162’s I can watch the statics confidently for traffic and zone out if there’s trouble.

What I struggle with is:

  • Loan T3 cruiser exploring
  • A small gang of 2-3 people (tackle plus dps) coming in the hole and sniffing around for content
  • Lack of covert ops on most of my ships
  • Moving holes, having to be very careful with slow lumps like the gnosis that can’t covert cloak.

With a small investment of say sub 500m isk, is there a better setup to give me more confidence and control?

I’d love to be able to annoy a T3 cruiser enough to not bother and leave me alone by decloaking a certain lineup of ships or fight off that annoying drekavac plus raptor and tackle.

Am I living in a fantasy world and should just wait for sufficient isk and sp to fly 3 X T3 cruisers or is there another path?

Would.i be better off saving to get my main in a tengu and then the others in asteros for example. Should I avoid combat altogether and just log when there are visitors?

Any thoughts would be welcomed

2

  • there is barely a thing you can do to “scare off” or “annoy” people who spotted you. If they want to kill you, they might just leave a cloaky alt in your system and watch you doing stuff for an hour. And once you get sloppy, they jump on you to finish you off. And you will never know if they are truly gone or not. WH people sometimes are willing to go a long way to get a kill in the end, even if it is just your cheap Drake or Gnosis.

  • the more “scary” you try to look by showing them T3 Cruisers, CommandShips or whatever, the more likely they are willing to increase their efforts to kill whatever you show them. Any organized WH corp or alliance is easily able to form a gang that can bust any of your 3-alt-combinations of ships and for 3 shiny Tengus most are willing to send a squad down the chain.

That depends entirely on your mindset and your skills. Alone vs. a Gang will often end in a loss of your ship if they know what they are doing. But you can use a fast ship with good application, that can kill anything that is fast enough to catch it and outrun everything that is strong enough to kill it. Your goal would be just to bait them to jump on you, kill of their Ceptor/Dictor and then kite their heavy guns or leave if they bring too much support.

3

Cool, great feedback thanks.

4

There is no such thing as a fair fight in Eve Online.

With your attitude almost everyone you meet who has friends in this game is going to be a „bullying coward“. Maybe this is why you prefer solo play: making friends in this game would make you one of them.

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5

Thanks for the advice. I’ve been a lone wolf in RL and every mmo i’ve ever played :slight_smile: Any tips on fleet composition?

6

Thanks for the advice. I’ve been a lone wolf in RL and every mmo i’ve ever played :slight_smile: Any tips on fleet composition?

7

Obviously unable to use basic forum functionality lol

8

I don’t typically try to triple box my PvP so take that into account. I’ve seen people do 2 DPS and 1 EWAR/tackle.

You mention nothing of interdictors nor T2 frigs/cruisers so your toolbox is quite limited. Your DPS is probably going to be lacking compared to the target you wish to kill, so the usual way to address this is to upship for poorer application (maybe — you can mitigate this with multiple accounts applying extra webs plus good piloting which is harder when multiboxing) but higher raw DPS and larger EHP buffer to last longer. You only maybe have a praxis available for upshipping if I read it right. Maybe a battlecruiser can do OK but highly variable. So that’s also limiting.

Praxis, T1 Cruiser, tackler+EWAR. Landing and maintaining tackle (or baiting) would play an important role.

This sort of activity will attract attention, but will be fun, so GL out there!

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OK thanks for your advice. Yes DPS will be massively lacking, with cheap T1 ships I can probs get a total dps of 1.2-1.5k at best. I’m kinda hoping to pop a tackle and put some damage on the tank so that they go bother someone else. Yea, I have an interdictor training but it’s a long way off at present. I think that would be an awesome tool just to put people off if I bubble attackers, might make them think there is a larger group coming in to support.

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Well, you can always play the ISK-war game. Use 3 Gank-Hecates, full yolo overheat direct from the beginning and melt down their most expensive ship before they even have decided on a primary :). Works pretty well at WHs when they jump right into you or you into them. Makes fun too.

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That does sound fun but I’m more of a defensive player. I don’t want to pester people, just protect my exploration and mining interests. Maybe decloaking s couple bombers on someone trying to sneak up on my ventures would be enough to spook them though.

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I’ve lived solo in c1, c2, and c3 wormholes for awhile now so these are situations I run into a lot. In all honesty you’re probably not going to scare off a group. Most groups are looking for content, and will likely just be more interested if they see more ships. What you might scare off is the other solo explorer or maybe a solo t3c. If you have a decent t3c pilot you can probably kill the solo explorer or initial scout of a larger group and then cloak up. I’ve seen some people have decent success multiboxing a dictor, a force recon and multiple T3Cs but that’s outside my concentration level. If you haven’t yet check out the “Nomad Tale” YouTube series. He’s doing exactly what you want to be doing.

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OK, thanks. Yea, i’ve seen the series, he’s amazing but way more experienced and skilled than I will ever be. To start, he skipped over obtaining several billion isk in episode 1. I mean, that would take me a year to achieve lol. Perhaps one day i’ll be confident enough to fly an orca (which im skilled into on a character) but right now I can’t face losing expensive ships. My goal is to cautiously roam C1-3’s, grow my experience and funds and then perhaps move into ships worth more than 100-200m isk. I suppose I am flogging a dead horse but wanted to see what can be done super cheap T1 level. Everyone seems to just blow big bucks on expensive stuff because everyone does it, but wondered if there was another way.

So my best defence is to keep moving and stay cloaked and avoid interaction and my best approach to isk is to stop getting distracted, knuckle down and try to grow funds through exploring lots of relic/data sites across the chain vs protecting a few spawns on the hole i’m currently in.

I am therefore re-thinking my strategy. It may be better to just have my alts in buzzards for better scouting and completely avoid interaction or turn my venture pilots into scout / miners by upgrading to prospects for the covert ops cloak.

Get my main in a T3C to clear rats from sites (instead of my combat battlecruiser pilot doing it) and explore but expose this ship carefully and only to small scout engagements.

14

Yeah I think that’s probably a real good strategy for what you want to do. Even if you want to concentrate on one well fit buzzard, you can hit dozens of sites across multiple holes pretty quick, dump it off when you find a k-space hole, and dove right back in. If you want to set up for gas huffing, which is pretty decent money, you can put down a small pos in a c1, put some fuel in it, and have a pretty secure little base to store some ventures in for a week or so while you huff. You’ll make hundreds of millions way faster than you think you will.

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15

“Not being there” is something you could consider also. You mentioned earlier, you trained heavy missiles. What people in unknown space usually do, is a preliminary d-scan of their surroundings and when there is “nothing” on d-scan, they might move on and don’t bother looking at the combat or relic sites.

They are expensive ships, but a Rook could be a ship to look into, since you have massive shields with long range heavy missiles, and you don’t appear on d-scan, so in a sense, you are not even there.

That and a cloaked Buzzard may be, what you would like in a c1-2 class wormhole. I have not tried it yet, so I cannot be entirely certain, that a Rook can also do the c3 wormhole sites - maybe try that on the test server first, whenever it goes online again.
Maybe a Rook and a cloaked logi-tengu may be able to do the c3 combat sites, but don’t take that as given. Murphy’s law states, that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong at some point.

Happy hunting!

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16

Yeah, totally forgot about that. We used to farm up to C3 holes on the chain in Curses. Yes, one could possible see the Drones on Dscan, but realistically most scouts don’t have Drones activated in Overview because they would clutter the scan results. And even if, which tackler can hope to hold 3+ Curses that move around on full speed all the time?

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Yea, I like the idea of this and have actually started saving for a 500m isk small setup. I want to have several times the cost of the setup put aside so that if i get ganked hauling the stuff in then I won’t worry about losing it and trying again, I also want to get past the holiday season to en sure that I can log in daily versus dropping a pos and then not being around to manage it.

My current process is working quite well but would be more convenient to have a small pos in a quiet hole to reduce hauling runs.

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This in an interesting idea. I will take a look into skill reqs for a rook. I have all the missile skills. Having decent tank sounds good as then I potentially have time to fly in support should the rook get tackled.

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I’m a ways off the skills for a curse on my alts but three curses sounds fun :slight_smile:

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Great feedback so far, thanks all. Coming to terms with the limitations of ‘T1’ hulls.

After a month or so living in wormhole space I’ve made a few changes and refined my approach.

  • I focus now on trying to hang out in quiet C2’s but then roam and plunder more lively wandering connections when they appear.
  • I’ve split my main military char from my main scanner/expo - relegated to hacking/arch IV and NO covops whilst I train this char up to covops frigate! This is quite the experience trying to hack whilst elude hunters. Creating a warp in near the sites and warping back and forth, tagging cans has kept me alive thus far but can’t wait for covops to train.
  • I’ve got 2 ventures for gas clouds, one in TII scoops the other nearly there.
  • Lacking a pos or an orca, if I find alot of gas I take my main out to hisec and jump into a venture (I have one setup in each trade hub) and bring them back to join the venture crew. This adds 50% to the yield for the team going from 2 ships to 3 which is worth the effort when there is a lot of gas to harvest
  • I’ve been compressing gas with a porpoise and then jettison the gas to a hauler. This means I’ve never got much gas in any one place, split across ventures, porpoise and hauler so that I can only ever lose a proportion of my total unsold gas.
  • I’ve upgraded my main military ship to a T3 cruiser as felt i’d harvested enough from J-space to justify the loss should I slip up which has given me a little more confidence but am still toast should anyone who knows what they are doing catch me.
  • I’ve set two alts on a training path to tactical destroyers > T3 cruisers. Once they are both at this stage I will probably train one into something else but not yet decided. I wanted to avoid the typical setup of either a fleet of T3 cruisers or T3 cruiser, Curse/Pilgrim and tackle combo. I was thinking of adding a vagabond to the fleet as am getting into the minmatar lore, what there is of it and due to the lowish price point wouldn’t be too worried running combat sites as wouldn’t bee too bad to lose.
  • I’m training my hauler up but it’s currently pretty risky flying just a T1 hauler as can’t use TII modules. Will work up to better transports but the training time is pretty lengthy. If I feel the need to boost this i’ll use some isk on extractors.

I’ve managed to lose some ships but am getting better and learning. I had a run in with a flycatcher sneakily named ‘Heron’ which threw me off long enough for them to land a bubble on my gas sight. Fortunately the momentum i’d had from orbiting the cloud at 2.5k with mwd plus aligning out in time threw me out to the edge of the bubble and i warped off. I would like to get more confident doing pvp with the team so that I can setup a char ratting (which I enjoy doing weirdly) almost knowing that I’ll get jumped and then try to fend off the attack. So long as I keep shipping the loot off after each site I won’t feel too bad losing the ship if I can keep the cost down.

Lot’s of interesting points raised, such as the rook and pos which may see me change things up a bit. Thus far though I am enjoying life and have achieved isk income way above any losses but not quite enough to plex all of the accounts (although I have no intention of using ISK to sub, I am happy supporting the game with real money, it would be nice as a benchmark to try to cover my costs theoretically)

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