Gantry Koh
   |
Posted - 2006.02.10 17:36:00 -
[1]
I am a month old in EVE and here is my take on your dilema. First, I started Caldari and went the Military School route, but evened my attributes as much as possible. The first week or so of the game for me was overwhelming. So many things to learn about the UI and ship controls, etc.
You mentioned you are currently flying a Condor, which is a great frigate for fighting lower level drones and other frigates. It has a great advantage in speed and small profile. One thing you should try doing while flying against NPC's is manually controlling your vessel. Frigates are small and nimble for a reason, it makes them harder to hit. When fighting NPC's treat them as though you are fighting other players, maneuver about and try to hit while not getting hit. Doing this will quickly get you to the point where you can assault lower level cruiser NPC's like Osprey's, in a Merlin, Kestrel, or even Condor. I run a Merlin with a top speed (with afterburner) of 565 m/s, and adding more navigation skills will get you faster and more maneuverable. I can successfully assault and destroy 4 NPC Ospreys at the same time while taking only moderate damage and usinga shield booster to negate that. I DO NOT use the "orbit at optimal range" approach. Instead I am constantly setting new vectors to complicate the turreting of the NPC's (good gunnery skills for you will help).
In short NPC combat is too easy as the AI simply isn't intellegent, but practicing against NPC's as if they were players will help you in PVP. PVP is much tougher, although if you use tactics you can take down opponents much larger than yourself. I have been in a 3 v 1 fight (PvP), where I was the 1 and I blew 2 of the enemy ships away and podded one of those pilots...the 3rd escaped as I was chewing into his structure...very exhilerating.
As for joining a corp, I am glad I did early. I joined a corp called The Knights Templar after I was in game about 10 days. They are more of an industrial corp, but do not require members to be at any mining operations or to provide for the corp in any way except to be active in corp chat when you are on. We do run weekly mining ops, but attendance is not mandatory. We have recently started a military wing to protect our miners in low security space from NPC's and players alike. We are running our first training op on this soon. Also, we used to be part of an alliance that got war declared on it. The most fun I have had in EVE so far was hunting a few of the enemy players through Caldari space with 3 of my corp mates. It was us in 1 Merlin (me) a Kestrel, a Caracal and a Moa, against 3 of them, (Amarr vessels) which were 1 battle cruiser, 1 cruiser and 1 frigate. We never even caught up to them for an engagement, but the hunt across a constellation was absolutly heart pounding good time!!
You will have fun in EVE, I believe to truly experience it, you should find a corp to suit what you want to do. I am really enjoying my corp because we have all types of players and they are all a mature and fun group to hang out with.
As for your skill progression, I would train as many rank 1 and 2 skills as you can to level 3 at least to be effective, then train your learning skills to lvl 5, then get the advanced skills to lvl 3 or 4, then start specializing in the area you are interested in.
Don't forget to train navigation, electronics and engineering skills in addition to gunnery and ship command, you will be amazed at waht ships are capable of when you have some skills to modify thier base stats!
|