After watching the nifty intro video I’m prompted to create a character. I choose the religiously fanatical Amarr Empire as my faction and the Khanid as what I’m assuming is akin to my ethnicity. As for what I guess is my class I choose Unionist. The game farts me out into the Chaven star system where I get acquainted with the controls. The first thing that hits me is just how complex the mechanics are. I can approach, orbit, send out probes, send out drones, scan, warp, fuck up people’s warps, cloak, engage afterburners… and the list juts goes on for fucking ever. Considering I’m playing on a laptop without a mouse I think this game might be difficult for me.
Before long I’m prompted to talk to what amount to high school career counselors. I’d read probably the first fifteen pages of posts in the newbie boards on the EVE Online forums and I’ve gathered that there’s a shit ton of ways to make money. Some people join in huge barge convoys that mine asteroid belts, some people pirate, others offer their skills as hitmen and mercenaries, some people smuggle goods through hostile space, some people explore uncivilized space, some people manufacture goods in factories- there’s no end to it. But one style of play that keeps getting mentioned on the forums is trading.
In lowsec systems without much traffic supplies can be hard to come by. People living there are forced to either make the long trip back into highsec space to get their goods for free or to pay the hyper-inflated prices of the few supplies that are available. There’s profit to be made and I’m hoping to cut my teeth on the tradesman’s life. I have virtually no idea how to get started (I’m still having trouble just traveling between systems), so for now I’m completing the career missions so that I can get all the free ships and skill books.
After a while I’m given a Tormentor frigate. I’ve got a few hundred thousand ISK by now so I decide to keep the Tormentor as a backup ship and I buy an Executioner. I’ve picked up some aftermarket parts from pirate ships I’ve raped and I go ahead and slap those onto my ship. Before turning in for the night I create a simple plan for myself:
[ol]
[li]Complete all the Career Missions and amass a small fleet of ships and some skillbooks.[/li][li]Look into what goods are abundant in the Deepari star system and buy a good amount of those goods for a relatively low price.[/li][li]Look into which nearby star systems have a scarcity of the goods I’ve stocked up on and travel to those systems, offering my goods for sale at an inflated price.[/li][li]Rinse and repeat until I’ve amassed a good deal of money, then purchase larger ships that are capable of hauling more goods at a time.[/li][li]Convince my friends to play.[/li][li]Start a corporation with my friends with myself as CEO.[/li][li]When I’m a fat moneybags capitalist with shit loads of dough, find a strategically sound system without a strong corporation presence and conquer it.[/li][li]Construct space ports and planetary outposts with my corporation as their sole supplier.[/li][li]Take over the universe.[/li][li]???[/li][li]PROFIT!!![/li][/ol]
I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish these things, so advice and pointers are welcome from whoever plays EVE.
OK, first get the program EVEmon - it helps you sort out exactly what skillbooks you need to study and in what order.
For burgeoning capitalist, I can suggest you first cover the learning skills to level 4 [level 5 takes forever for the different skills, and the bonus is not worth the time right now. You will want to get them in later]
You will need 2 ships - a freighter, and a transport ship. The freighter hauls a huge amount of cargo, 700 000 cubic meters or more [depending on which racial freighter you get] and the transport is what you use to make runs for cargo into low security systems, it is able to cloak, and it gets into warp very fast. These are both very important! Even in high security systems, people may try and ‘suicide gank’ you - kill you knowing that the police will be killing them - they have someone around to immediately loot your wreck. So even hauling through high security in a freighter, you have to be careful. The transport is for lower security runs, so you can get into warp faster, and also warp while invisible [under certain conditions] to make it more difficult to catch you.
You need to make your 2 spare characters into market drones - set one in Jita, to monitor prices in that sector of space, and the other one in a different sector. I wish MSWAS was still on the boards, he was heavily into trade empire building … but his real life sort of interfered and he has stopped playing =(. Perhaps Finn can pop in with a few links for trade information …
You may want to get mining as a backup skill to help make investment capital … ice mining can be a license to print ISKies …
Catch up with me in game, I play a character with the same name as my user name =)
If you get into manufacturing goods, I still have a copy of the spreadsheet me and some friends made. It takes into account every step of the process, from ore prices, refining skill and production costs, all the way to overhead market costs and shipping times. It’s basically how Mswas and I managed to make billions. I made the stuff as efficiently as possible, and he would trade day and night for crazy profit (we called him the Economancer).
If you get into it seriously and you decide you need modules, by the by, I have a pretty fully equipped T1 module/ammo/ship manufacturing concern on my non-PvP character at the moment, and we LOVE contract orders.
For me one of the funnest parts in starting out in Eve was poking around and seeing what you can do and trying to push the open-ended sandbox nature of the game. There are really a ton of possibilities. After a while, though, i sort of hit a wall and got a little frustrated with all the things I didn’t know.
If you experience this, one possibility is joining the corp Eve University. It is a player run corp set up to help new folks learn basic skills and figure out parts of the game that initially seem opaque. It can be as rigorous as attending classes they teach and taking part in corp-led operations or as laid-back as having a channel to ask question in while you do your own thing. One thing I liked about the corp was access to their library of recorded lectures on everything from trade to pvp. They won’t be able to teach you everything, but joining and playing with them for a while re-energized my enjoyment of the game and let to moving on to bigger and better things. www.eve-ivy.com/
I too just started last week and am Amarr Amarr I think. I played a bit a couple years ago but it is all pretty new to me again.
I am going the exploration route right now so maybe we could team up. A new corp could use a budding explorer (I hope). My name in game is…surprise surprise Blinking Duck.
If you get sick of using those probing skills against inanimate targets and want to locate piracy victims instead, absolutely give me a call. I’m sick to crap of being one of two exploration-specced guys in my corp.
Lemme know when you get those astrometrics skills up, let’s say. Probing IS one of those things that takes a bit of training up skills time in order to be fast enough for PvP (unless you’re preternaturally good). I have Astrometrics at V and the three support skills at IV, but I’m not terribly skilled so I have a rough time locating targets anyway. My CEO has IV and IIIs and can lock down the average target’s location in 5-10 minutes.
I have more than one character you know. My Amarr character is named Sallisistra. Feel free to send a message to her, too.
You can’t train industry skills on trial accounts, so I’m not building them. I’m buying them where they’re plentiful and selling them where they’re scarce.
By the by, send me a PM if you want me to expand on the probing skills (not as in character sheet) that one needs to be a successful pirate target locator.
My Amarr character is named Sallisistra. Feel free to send a message to her, too.