Letouk Mernel
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Posted - 2006.11.22 15:52:00 -
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The way people deal with the loss when the ship is destroyed is they don't fly what they can't afford to lose. Stick to frigates, for example, even if you have the skills for cruisers, until you can make more than 500k ISK per day or week or however long you figure it's ok for you to work to replace one (most newbies can make 500k ISK in a few hours, mining, but what if you get into a war situation and you lose 5-6 of these frigates within the space of an hour of "fun", then you have to work a few days to recoup the cost; now imagine if you'd lost 8 million isk cruisers).
As far as old players being ahead, skills aren't a true measurement of "level" here, ISK is. The more you have in the bank, the bigger your ship can be, and the ship is the true "Level" at which you fight. The skills limit how fast you can twink an alt (you can give him the battleship but he won't be able to fly it for a while), and yes, affect performance somewhat.
But the thing with veterans is, they can only fly one ship at any given time, just like you, and although their 30 mil skillpoints give them a variety of ships to pick from, they can only fly ONE at any given time (and so they end up using only 20% of their skills at any given time). When it comes down to you vs. a veteran, if you specialize in an interceptor and are flying one, and the veteran is flying an interceptor too, you're on equal terms. He can't possibly take his interceptor skills past 5 (each skill is capped at 5), and so you're relatively equal in that encounter.
He can go jump in a battleship if he dies or a HAC or a cruiser outfitted with specific modules to fight interceptors, and try to catch you, and you can only jump into another interceptor, for the rematch, and that's where his advantage is, really.
Combat is complex in the sense that it's all in the preparation. The good players win because they fit their ships well, rather than because they click fast or have good reflexes. It's more of a "ok I wanna take out a battleship, what are its strengths, what can I fit in my interceptor to bypass those strengths and win?" question. Besides guns, there are modules that do the equivalent of crowd control in other games: webifiers, warp scramblers, energy drainers, weapon jammers, tracking disruptors, targetting jammers, etc., and the skill comes in picking a good combination of these so that their combined effect is good vs. the target you're going to fight. You need to lock that battleship down so it can't hit you with its huge guns, deal with the possible drones it may have, prevent it from running, and deal damage to it enough to take it down before he calls in friends.
How you do that is where the complexity is, rather than in how you orbit and how fast you click your guns.
Skills: a ship has weapons (guns, missiles, drones), defenses (armor or shields), speed, energy (capacitor) that it uses to power everything up, and sensors. So, besides gunnery skills and Spaceship Command skills, you also want to train the Engineering skills (for energy and shields), Mechanic (armor), Electronics (jammers, webifiers, targetting), Navigation (afterburners, speed). These are usually referred to as "support" skills, and they're pretty much needed in order to be effective.
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