The game of Eve is designed around an account with three character slots, only one of which may receive training at any given time. This means for the most part that only one character per account will be developed to its fullest potential. This article gives some examples on how to use the other character slots to their best ability, so you don’t have “dead weight”. These examples of course are just an opinion and may be followed, ignored, modified, etc. as a player sees fit.

I highly recommend running more than one account. The first decision then when it comes to Alt strategies then is to determine how many accounts you will play. Typically this will be two accounts but some prefer more. Personally, I use three accounts.

One of the biggest rules you should follow in creating your main and Alt characters is to be sure to specialize as many of them as you can. In some cases, you will be able to use some Alts right out of the box so to speak, or with little invested training time.

The next rule is to put them into accounts that make sense. For example, if one of your main characters is a miner/industrialist, you may want to consider having a Hauler Alt on another account to haul your stuff or Ore as you mine it. Likewise if one of your main characters is primarily a mission runner, then perhaps you may want to have an Alt on another account be your Log Alt (Logistics Alt, able to run shield or armor repairers).

A primary goal you should be shooting for in effective Alt strategies is to be able to run two accounts or characters at the same time. When it comes time to put points into your Alts you may follow one of two courses: either all in at the beginning so you can concentrate on your main characters afterwards; or wait until you’ve built up your main for awhile and then pour some training into your Alts.

I am going to use my Alt strategy as a guide – again these are just suggestions and opinions. You may be able to come up with better ones and by all means use them!

Account One:

• Character 1: Minmatar PvP and Ratting Pilot. Main character. Flies solo, except to gain faction.
• Character 2: Amaar Hauler. Alt. Flies with Character 1, Account 2.
• Character 3: I haven’t decided what if anything to put here.

Account Two:

• Character 1: Caldari Miner/Industrialist. Main character.
• Character 2: Caldari PvE Pilot. Mission runner, Alt. Runs with main characters in fleet to gain faction.
• Character 3: Minmatar Trader. Alt.

Account Three:

• Character 1: Caldari Log Pilot. Alt. Flies with Minmatar Ratter (Account 1), when ratting. Disposable in case engaged in PvP. Will also fly with Caldari PvE pilot on Account 2 as well.
• Character 2: Galente Datacore Alt. All about the research of datacores. Pretty much my main character on this account.
• Character 3: Amaar Alt. No current plans.

This allows for cross over from one account to another in terms of what gets done. I tend to fly my Minmatar PvP pilot, the Caldari mission pilot the most. Because of this I will usually tag another Alt in fleet for no other purpose than for that Alt to gain faction.

Alts are useful in Eve online, but be wary of spending too much time on Alts that are on the same account as a main. If you can’t get your Alt to do what needs to be done within a few weeks, then simply train those skills on a main character.

How many Alts do you have, and what are you using them for?

This article is brought to you by EVE-Mag.com - an independent EVE Magazine, ©2009 EVE-Mag.com. Read more of New Eden's finest writers here!

Everything you ever needed to know about skill training in EVE but were afraid to ask!
Skills – what do they mean to you? Are they the ultimate goal of EVE? a natural improvement progression? or just something you deal with as and when?

For this writer it is the former. I admit it – when it comes to my learning plan I am a geek, no worse than that I am an anal-retentive geek. Unfortunately it took me a while to realise the importance of learning skills and implants and I wouldn’t like to know how many more skill levels I could have had by now if I had known it from the start. So, for your benefit and delectation – here is much of my accumulated knowledge on skill training, learning plans and the philosophies behind them.

Here are some things about skills and skill training that you may or may not have known:

• There are, at the moment, 366 skills in EVE in 15 skill categories.
• To get level 5 in all 366 skills would require 411,648,000 skill points (SP).
• Some of these skills are not obtainable in the game. There are some characters that have these skills, which in most cases were assigned during the character creation process. Unfortunately for the players involved, most of them have no effect in the game. These include CFO Training, Duplicating, Diagnostic Interfaces, Hypernet Science, Mnemonics, Remote Interfaces and Reverse Engineering.
• All skills have two attributes applicable to them, termed the primary and the secondary attributes. These dictate the speed at which a character will accumulate SP in that skill. The attributes are defined primarily by the category to which they belong, for example all science skills have intelligence as the primary attribute and memory as the secondary. Not all categories have identical attributes for all skills though, for example most Spaceship Command skills have perception as primary and willpower and secondary but all T2 ship skills except Assault Ships and Covert Ops have these reversed.
• All skills have a rank, which defines the difficulty of the skill, ranging from 1 to 16. A rank 10 skill will need 10 times more SP for any given level than for a rank 1 skill. There are more skills with rank 5 than any other, accounting for more than one fifth of all skills. There is only one rank 9 skill, Jump Drive Calibration, and there are no skills with rank 11, 13 or 15.
• The number of SP you gain per minute for any given skill is calculated as your primary attribute plus half your secondary attribute. The exact attributes including the decimal points are used, not just the rounded down whole number displayed by EVE.
• Attributes are calculated as ( base attribute + basic learning skill level + advanced learning skill level + implant bonus ) x ( 1 + ( Learning skill level x 0.02 ))
• A typical starting character will gain somewhere in the region of 18,000 SP per day with their weakest attributes and 38,000 SP per day with their strongest attributes. This means they could complete a rank 1 skill from zero SP to level 5 in somewhere between 6.5 and 14.2 days. A character with well developed learning skills and good implants can gain anywhere between 45,000 and 60,000 SP per day. This brings the time needed for the same skill down to between 4.2 and 5.7 days. There is more on how to achieve SP per day figures like this later.
• The formula to calculate the number of SP needed for any given level is:
  2 ^ ( 2.5 x ( skill level - 1 ) ) x 250 x skill rank

  So for a rank 3, level 3 skill this is:
  2^5 x 250 x 3 = 24,000

  But it is easier to multiply the figures in this table by the rank of the skill:
  Level 1: 250
  Level 2: 1,414.21356 (rounded slightly)
  Level 3: 8,000
  Level 4: 45,254.834 (rounded slightly)
  Level 5: 256,000

Ecaf’s Skill Training Rules

Rule #1: NEVER LOSE ANY TIME!

Lost time is just that, lost. You can never get it back even if it was not entirely your fault. If you ran a skill that was due to end an hour after an extended downtime was scheduled to finish but problems kept the server down for an extra day then CCP will not shed one tear at your petition about it.

If you are in the habit of leaving a skill running with an hour remaining when you go to bed and don’t start a new one till ten hours later then think about how many extra levels or skills, and therefore new abilities, you could have had in that time.

Think that if you did that every day for a few months then you could have had Battleship 5 instead of nothing.

Rule #2: Maximise your SP per hour

You do this by training the learning skills and using attribute implants. The real question is to what level you should train the learning skills.

Probably the easiest way to work this out is to use EVEmon. This highly popular utility will suggest learning skills that will save you training time, but be careful because it can only calculate this based on the skill plan you have entered. If you only have three months of skills in the plan then it will only suggest skills that will give you savings over that time frame.

If you think you’ll play the game for a couple of years then put a couple of years worth of skills in but make sure they are skills that you will probably want to learn. If you put in all the social skills to level 5 then it will suggest the charisma learning skills but if you never train social, trade or leadership skills then you have wasted your time on the charisma skills.

Assuming you do intend to play the game for a while, and if you have read this far then I think that is a fair assumption, this is my personal recommendation for a simple rule of thumb:

• Look at the primary and secondary attributes for each skill in your plan. If you don’t have a plan (tsk tsk) then just go down the list of skills picking out the ones you like, or better still make a plan! For each attribute in turn score 2 for a skill with that attribute as primary and 1 for a skill with that attribute as secondary.
• Then list the attributes from highest to lowest score. If you are a combat orientated player then will probably match or be close to this order: perception, willpower, intelligence, memory, charisma. Industrial players will be closer to: intelligence, memory, perception, willpower, charisma.
• Train Learning and the rank 1 skills for the top four attributes in your list to level 5 and the bottom one to level 4.
• Train the rank 3 skills for the top four attributes in your list to level 4 and the bottom one to level 3.
• If you have one attribute head and shoulders above the rest then you could consider training the rank 3 skill to level 5 - but consider this very carefully. As an example to illustrate, it will take over 13 days to train Clarity 5 at 2,000 SP per hour. To gain back those 13 days you will need to train skills with perception as primary attribute for a further 399 days! So, to get back the time it would take to train level 5 in all five rank 3 learning skills will take around five and a half years!

Here are a few facts about learning skills:

• Investing the first six or seven weeks of your character’s career on learning skills and basic implants will pay for itself after around fifteen more weeks. After this time you will have as many SP in non-learning skills as you would if you had not trained any learning skills at all and of course continue to train skills at more than twice the rate as when you first started.
• If you have the skill Learning to level 5, then one more level of a learning skill or a +1 higher implant will give you 1,584 more SP a day when training skills with that primary attribute– that’s more than enough to get a rank 1 skill to level 2 or a rank 6 skill to level 1.
• Do not write off the charisma skills Empathy and Presence completely as the lower levels don’t take long to train, just 3 to 5 days combined for Empathy 1 to 4 and Presence 1 to 3. There are skills that use charisma that even the most hardcore of PvP characters can find useful: leadership skills, social skills for setting up jump clones, trade skills for selling all that junk loot and corporation management skills for POS gunnery.

And so on to attribute implants.

These come in five main types: Limited (+1), Limited – Beta (+2), Basic (+3), Standard (+4) and Improved (+5). Each of these types has five varieties, one for each attribute. The Ocular Filter – Standard, for example, gives you +4 to your perception attribute.

There are also extra types of attribute implants that in addition to a bonus to your attribute give you a further bonus in something else, for example the Slave Alpha gives a +3 bonus to your perception attribute and a 1% bonus to your armour hitpoints. If you have all five in any set plus the sixth special implant then you can build up a very nice bonus but these extra types are limited to a +3 attribute bonus.

In order to use any of these implants you need the Cybernetics skill, which in turn requires the Science skill at level 3. +1 to +3 implants require Cybernetics 1, +4 implants require Cybernetics 4 and +5 implants require Cybernetics 5.

The training time for +3s is minimal and is worth doing as soon as possible. Go for +4s if you can afford them. Loyalty point stores are a good source of implants and a good way to use up the points you have accumulated.

Note that the 2% per level bonus that the Learning skill gives you also applies to the bonus from your implants, so a +4 implant with Learning 5 gives you +4.4.

Also bear in mind that if you get podded you will lose any implants you have plugged in so don’t go running around in low or null sec with a set of +5s in!

Rule #3: Train skills to an appropriate level

A former corp mate of mine once took up the noble quest to take all the skills on her alt to level 5. Whilst this was an admirable ambition, it is not one I would recommend if you want to create a capable and well rounded character.

Here are some facts about training skills to level 5.

• As we saw before you need 45,255 SP for each rank of a skill for levels 1 to 4 combined but an additional 210,745 per rank to get to level 5.
• This works out to a ratio of 4.6568 times the number of SP needed just for level 5 than for all the 4 previous levels.
• You need nearly 843 times more SP to get from level 4 to level 5 as you do to get from zero SP to level 1.
• This one is a bit of an eye-opener: It takes slightly longer to train one skill from start to level 5 than five skills from start through to level 4, three skills from start to level 3 and four skills from start to level 2 combined. Yes you read that right – combined! If all these skills give you a 5% bonus in something that means 25% total bonuses versus 185% total bonuses. This of course assumes all those skills are of equal rank and trained at equal SP per hour.
• Twenty skills at level 5 need more SP than one hundred and thirteen skills of the same rank at level 4.
• Percentage bonuses per level diminish with additional levels. Lets take as an example the skill Medium Hybrid Turret, which gives you a 5% bonus per level to damage dealt by medium hybrid turrets. You will only get a 5% boost to your damage from taking level 1. Level 2 does not give you a 5% bonus to the damage you were doing at level 1, it will only increase your bonus from 5% to 10%. If your base damage was 100 then level 1 increased that to 105 and level 2 will increase it to 110, meaning a 4.762% increase over level 1. This return diminishes further with more levels: 4.545% from level 3, 4.348% from level 4 and 4.167% from level 5.

There are however a few good reasons to train a skill to level 5.

1. The top reason is that it is a pre-requisite. This could be for either another skill or an item. For example, you cannot fly any tech 2 ships without a level 5 or two, many tech 2 items and all capital sized items require a level 5. Also many skills require another skill at level 5, for example the skill to use POS guns, Starbase Defense Management, has Anchoring 5 as a pre-requisite.
2. The second reason is if the bonus that each level gives goes toward something essential and is costly to reproduce without skills. Capacitor capacity and recharge time is a good example and the skills Energy Systems Operations and Energy Management give you bonuses to these. No modules will increase your capacitor capacity and only a few will increase the recharge rate and of course these take up a slot on your ship. Other good examples are Engineering for extra powergrid and Electronics for extra CPU.
3. Another reason will be if the skill is for something that you use a lot. For example, if you spend 99% of your time in a Hulk then Exhumers 5 and Refinery Efficiency 5 are good examples of skills worth doing to level 5.
4. There is one other reason that really only applies to one skill that I can think of. The reason is that the bonus you get from it is so awesome even the time it takes to train level 5 is worth it and the skill is Drone Interfacing – 20% bonus to drone damage and mining yield per level? Yes I’ll take all five of those please!

So if not level 5 then what level?

When deciding what level to take a skill to you should look carefully at the skill description as not all skills give you a per level bonus. Although, when considering this, bear in mind that some skills do give you a per level bonus even though it is not stated in the skill description. The classic example of this is ship skills, for example Minmatar Cruiser or Interceptors – the bonuses per level are stated in the description of the ship, not the skill itself.

Some examples of skills that do not give a per level bonus are Capital Ship Construction, Jury Rigging and Anchoring. What these skills do at higher levels is allow you to use higher “grade” items. For example, Capital Ship Construction 3 will let you construct capital ship components, carriers, dreadnoughts and freighters – so unless you plan to make motherships, jump freighters or titans then level 3 is sufficient. Jury Rigging seems completely pointless past level 3 as that is enough to use T2 rigs.

In many of these cases the only way to work out what level you need is to look at each item that the skill is relevant to but there are some tools that will help. The previously mentioned EVEmon has a fantastic functionality with the very literally named button “Show me what this skill enables.” This will list all skills and items that each level opens up for you and even highlights the skill or item in red text if you will also need to train other skills for it.

There are also some skills where it is not obvious that there is no or very little benefit to be had from a higher level. A good example of this is Mining Upgrades, which grants a 5% reduction per level to the CPU penalty from Mining Laser Upgrades and is needed at level 4 to use the T2 varieties. What is not obvious is that, assuming you have Electronics 5, all mining ships have enough CPU to fill their low slots with T2 upgrades with this skill at level 4. Amusingly the Quantum Rise expansion gave the Mackinaw a boost to base CPU that now allows you to fit two Ice Harvester Upgrade IIs with Mining Upgrades 4 when you could not do this prior to QR even with Mining Upgrades 5!

The converse point to not training a skill higher than you need to is that the minimum requirements to use an item are often not enough to use the item well and this is particularly applicable to ships. A clear example is Force Recon ships, for example the Arazu. You only need Recon Ships 1 to be able to fly one but the per level ability is a reduction in CPU need for Covert Ops Cloaks. If you only have Recon Ships 1 you will have insufficient CPU left after fitting the cloak to fill all the slots let alone make a good fit.

A more extreme example is the minimum jump drive skill requirement for capital ships. Jump Freighters are the only capital ship with a requirement higher than Jump Drive Operation 1. Yes you will be able to fly a titan but you will empty your capacitor every jump, your range will be terrible and you will use stacks of fuel in the process.

Another tool that will help you make a decision on skill levels where ship fitting is concerned is the Eve Fitting Tool (EFT). This great application not only lets you test out fits with your actual skill levels but has the very nice feature of listing every skill that affects any of the items you have fitted. Right click on a fitted item and the pop-up menu has the option “Change Affecting Skill”. The sub-menu from this option lists all the skills that affect the ship or module and lets you select different levels for those skills to see what effect it will have.

To summarise rule #3 it is my opinion that level 4 is the one to aim for in the majority of cases. The exceptions are level 5 for skills that fit one of the reasons listed earlier and those skills that give you no benefit past a lower level, for example Jury Rigging.

What next?

So you have your learning skills up to scratch and some nice implants in your head giving you some respectable SP per hour numbers and you know how to decide on what level you should train skills to – where do you go from here?

I won’t attempt to try and suggest what skills you should learn for any given career path as that is well covered elsewhere. Here we will look at various philosophies behind selecting skills to train and ordering and arranging your skill plan.

• The “train everything you can” method
  Having spent some time on rule #3 there is a viable skill learning philosophy that does not adhere completely to that ethos. This method involves training level 1in every skill that is available to you, or at the least opening the skill book and then swapping skills leaving it on level 0, and then developing further the skills that fit into your requirements. The option in the EVE character sheet to display all the skills you can learn facilitates this nicely especially as you can right-click on a skill in your list and display the market for it.

  This can work particularly well if you are still relatively new to the game and are not sure what direction you will end up ultimately going. It can also reap rewards at later stages when you suddenly need to do something quickly you have never done before and find that you already have the skills you need.

  On one occasion not so long ago I was glad that I had used this method in my early EVE career when, having flown to Amarr space in a shuttle, I found that I needed to take a 100m3 cargo through several low security systems and get it there within half an hour. After finding out there were no Gallente or Minmatar frigates on the market close by at a price that was less than outrageous I suddenly remembered I had trained Amarr Frigate 1 a year earlier.

• The “round robin” method
  This involves working through all your skills taking a level of each in turn. Whilst this is very thorough and ensures you don’t miss or leave any of them behind I am not confident that it produces a gradual progression in ability. It will take quite some time before you become competent at anything although you will become competent at everything all in a relatively short time frame.

  It also lacks any kind of focus, which may be OK if you plan on being able to do everything but that is a difficult target to achieve in EVE with the huge variety of skills available.

  I have seen a forum post from one player who took this method to the extreme by spending just one day on each skill then swapping. This can only have resulted in massive amounts of SP invested in partially trained skills, which give your character no benefit other than a shorter time to finish off any given skill.

• The “new toy” syndrome
  I call this a syndrome rather than a method because it is a symptom of a compulsion more than any kind of organised plan.

  The player who suffers from this syndrome this has a favourite button in EVEmon - “Add All to Plan”. Simply select a ship or item, click the button and EVEmon puts the minimum required skills into your plan for you. Whilst this is a great functionality it does have one major drawback - EVEmon does not include the skills you need to get any good at using the ship or item.

  The previously mentioned example of the minimum requirements for a Force Recon ship highlights this well. Unless you also manually add in Recon Ships up to level 4 then you are not going to be able to make much of the intended use for the ship.

  But in addition to this there are large numbers of essential or very useful skills that EVEmon will never automatically add in for you using this method because they are not pre-requisites for any items. My favourite examples of this are the previously mentioned engineering skills Energy Systems Operations and Energy Management, which in my humble opinion are essentials for taking to level 5. Additional examples are navigation skills such as Acceleration Control and Fuel Conservation, gunnery skills like Rapid Firing and Controlled Bursts and drone skills such as Drone Navigation, Drone Sharpshooting and Drone Durability. There are many more examples of this kind of skills.

  What you end up with if you only ever put skills in your plan using this button is the ability to fly a huge variety of ships really badly. If you are a PvPer you are pretty much guaranteed to lose every battle you get into regardless of what ship you are in unless you are fighting against a hauler or freighter. If you run missions you will find yourself unable to tank a level 4 satisfactorily and will be likely to lose lots of ships in the process of trying.

• The “get good at one goal at a time” system
  This system gets my all-round thumbs up – it has focus and a target that is usually not too far off the horizon. It will let you get going with some low level skills and improve consistently till you are competent. This system works on the principle that going for too many targets at one time dilutes your efforts to the point where you are not achieving much.

  Pick one major goal, usually either a ship type, eg. covert ops, or an ability, eg. research. List all the skills that work toward your goal and prioritise them so the most beneficial skills come first.

Taking a covert ops ship for scanning purposes as an example:

• Priority 1 – pre-requisite skills
  -Frigate 5
  -Covert Ops 1
• Priority 2 – essential skills
  -Covert Ops to 4 (to reduce CPU need for the covert ops cloak)
  -Cloaking to 4 (for covert ops cloak)
• Priority 3 – role and/or supporting skills
  -Astrometrics 4 (for scanning)
  -Signal Acquisition 4 (for scanning)
  -Astrometric Triangulation 4 (for scanning)
  -Astrometric Pinpointing 4 (for scanning)
• Priority 4 – optional alternative use skills (for example, tackler or electronic warfare)
  -High Speed Maneuvering 4 (to reduce the capacitor penalty from MWDs)
  -Acceleration Control 4 (to get an improved speed boost from MWDs)
  -Propulsion Jamming 4 (reduced cap usage for scramblers and webs)
  -Long Distance Jamming, Frequency Modulation, etc.

Clearly priority 1 and 2 skills should be completed first but for priority 3 and 4 skills you could employ a round-robin system. Take levels 1 and 2 of each skill in turn, then level 3 of each, then level 4. This way you can make a start with some lower skill levels and improve as you go.

Many of your optional priority 4 skills will also apply for other ship types, for example, interceptors or electronic attack ships, so taking these now could significantly reduce your total plan time for the next new ship type.

This is a fairly simple example but if you want to work toward a carrier or dreadnought then the number of relevant skills will be much longer and will benefit from some organisation. You don’t want to have to wait till you have every skill at level 4 but you also don’t want to be poor at flying it and lose it on the maiden voyage!

Other factors to consider

1. Organising your training around your availability to change skills.
   If, like me, you have a job and a family to balance around your EVE life then you only have generally two periods in which you can change skills with any practicality – in the evenings while you are online and in the morning before you go to work.

   For me this regular constraint actually helps me define what skills I should train and when. I have a 6 – 8 hour period while I am asleep followed by a 12 – 14 hour period while I am at work, eating dinner and putting my daughter to bed. Then comes my 2 – 6 period online.

   Any skills with less than 6 hours remaining will generally need to be worked on while I am online even if that means over two evenings. If they have between 6 and 12 hours then I will set them off before logging off in the evening and swap to a longer skill before I go to work. Skills with longer than 12 hours left have to run while I am at work. You can get this juggling down to a fine art if you do it regularly.

   If like me you find it hard to go 3 or 4 weeks without having a skill finish, using work time is a good way of chipping away at those longer skills that seem far too long to leave running. Work on your shorter skills whilst online and pick a long one for while you are asleep and/or at work. Try to make sure you finish each one off before starting another to minimise your total SP in unfinished skills as this gives you no benefit.

2. Cross-race training
   It is very nice to have a wider range of ships to fly and training the skills for another race’s ship type is a good way of achieving this but being able to make the best of a different race’s frigates is a bit more involved than just training Frigate 1 to 5.

   For example if you have trained mostly Gallente ships and are good at using those and now want to fly Caldari ships too. OK so you should already have some good hybrid turret skills but Caldari ships also use missile launchers and have fewer turret hardpoints so you may find yourself with limited firepower especially as many Caldari ships have bonuses to missiles rather than hybrid turrets and much smaller drone bays than their Gallente equivalents. They are also much better suited to shield tanking and you will most likely have much better skills in armour tanking. They also have a high CPU output to facilitate the Caldari speciality of ECM.

   Of course this does not mean you cannot fly Caldari ships but bear in mind that there are many more skills needed to become competent and make the best use of them. Consider whether the SP required to do this would be better spent improving your skills in the Gallente specialities.

Final Thoughts

There are many many abilities you can learn in EVE and it would be near impossible to get good at them all but it is possible to be competent in several different things. There is nothing wrong with diversifying and allowing your character to do more things and there is nothing wrong with specialising and becoming awesome at one thing.

If I were to give one recommendation on skill training methodology, other than the all important learning skills, it would be to finish off the skills for each target that you start. Try not to get distracted part way through a plan and start another one.

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So Christmas came and went and I decided to be a little naughty in EVE, seeing as the fat man had already delivered the goods. I logged into EVE, got into my assault frigate, put a snowball launcher on, filled my hull with snowballs and went out on my mission.

My mission was simple, to see what sort of reaction I could get out of people, not just any people, but miners. I randomly jumped from belt to belt, looking for targets (a side note, this was Friday and most of the belts were already bone dry, geez). I spotted a retriever chewing on some rocks as I entered the belt, no drones deployed. I set orbit for 1,500 meters, far enough not to bump but close enough that your personal space starts to feel violated. I orbited for a few rounds, nothing happened, however when I locked on him that’s when he let his drones out (three tech 1 hammerheads).

“Ah, someone is home.” I thought. Now I used to be a miner, I know what makes miners nervous. An assault frigate orbiting you at 1,500 meters with a lock on you will make any miner nervous. As soon as he started to turn and his engines started to glow, I opened fire on him, and laughed as a bunch of snowballs hit his ship. I quickly took my leave to find other victims in my harmless fun.

I exclusively targeted miners (anyone who was in a belt with active mining lazers was a target) and soon found an interesting pattern emerging. Out of about twenty “victims” roughly seven reacted the moment I started to orbit them in some way. Be it to deploy drones, line up to warp to a safe spot or what have you. Only six did something when I put a lock on them, be it to deploy drones, put shields up or begin to warp out (only about three actually warped away even after receiving a snowball, they either didn’t know what it was, panicked when the concord message didn’t appear and quickly left or just decided to move on to another belt). The rest did nothing, from approach, orbit, lock on and ultimately snowball up the engine they did nothing, likely vets, AFK miners or worse. In short, thirteen players out of twenty actually reacted to a potential threat before that threat acted.

It is a shame that I hadn’t the opportunity to do something similar as it would have been interesting to see the difference in numbers between say before the infamous Jihad Swarm campaign and today. What is apparent however is that a fair number of miners WILL react to any perceived danger that gets in their face.

In the end though this was all a bout of harmless fun, no ships were destroyed in the making of this article though I’m sure a few miners got a micro dose of adrenaline when they heard the bleep, bleep, bleep of a target lock.

This article is brought to you by EVE-Mag.com - an independent EVE Magazine, ©2009 EVE-Mag.com. Read more of New Eden's finest writers here!

Another year has passed and the new one has just started. On behalf of the authors here at EVE Magazine I’d like to wish all readers a Happy New Year and at the same time thank you for all your support in the last couple of months. Thanks to your continuing readership and feedback we feel encouraged to further develop our site and progress with the idea of EVE-Mag.com.

2009 will be a great year, and the peeps here at EVE Magazine are anxious about it! Nonetheless, as a retrospect we’d like to share the Top 20 of the most popular articles published here on EVE-Mag.com. These stats are according to Wordpress Stats. Enjoy!

1. The Sky Is Falling!
2. The Orca is a double-edged Sword
3. When losing means nothing … a gentler, kinder EVE
4. Farming Datacores - The Ins, Outs and In-Betweens
5. The 36 Strategems of War
6. My Veldspar brings …
7. One Titan Too Many?
8. The Art of War: Tactical Dispositions
9. Not so “Lofty” Ambitions
10. The PVP Guide for Assault Ships
11. WTF! Someone declared War on us!?
12. T1 Rig Manufacturing Guide
13. China Man ask, you want ISK?
14. The Mindsets of the Players
15. The Orca: More than meets the Eye!
16. What’s in a name? A look at EVE Character Names
17. The Value of a BattleShip … a NPC BS that is
18. Whining about Nerfs
19. EVE Bloggers
20. Factions – Love me or Hate me?

This article is brought to you by EVE-Mag.com - an independent EVE Magazine, ©2009 EVE-Mag.com. Read more of New Eden's finest writers here!

Back in October I went over some basic security rules for your account. But long gone are the days of giving EVEmon your username and password, or manually providing XML files from the MyEVE website. Thanks to the work of an enterprising individual at CCP known as CCP Garthagk, and his successors/helpers, CCP Elerhino and CCP Lingorm, the EVE API is now the de facto standard for getting data out of EVE Online. But what does this mean from a security standpoint?

Understanding Keys
CCP has never really attempted to document the API properly. CCP Garthagk started documenting the API project on the EVE-Dev Wiki, a generally available wiki used by many third party EVE developers, and those same developers have kept updating his documentation through trial and error as the API has evolved.

There are two types of API keys- limited and full. The limited key is intended for skill monitoring services and other applications that only need to know your name, skills, and a few other things like medals and standings. The full key is your real API key, providing all sorts of information- kills, wallet journals and transactions, assets, and so on.

To burst the first bubble: You should not ‘never give your full key out’. This is as much of a misnomer as ’static/zero-speed alignment’. It’s simply not true. You should be careful giving it out to people you don’t trust, but it’s not a key to never be used. It’s as valid and legitimate as the limited key when it comes to using it online- you need to trust the provider to give them the key.

The full key has lots of information you’d probably rather some people didn’t have, but it has found it’s place on some trusted web services such as asset listing websites, market and wallet analytics programs and websites, and other tools.

CEOs and Directors Beware
Using a full key as a corporation member is fine in 99% of cases- but what if you’re a director? Director API keys are valuable for large corporations, and even traded on some of the dodgier black markets that permeate EVE’s culture. If, for example, I got hold of SirMolle’s full API key I could get a nice list of every starbase his corporation runs, the fuel they contain, the combat settings, and a list of every pilot in that corporation with their location and ship.

Limited keys are, for directors, as safe as for anyone. No additional data is handed out, so there’s no need to be cautious with those keys. Full keys of directors are a moderately large security risk.

Change your keys!
If you have a password you probably (or at the very least know you should) change it every so often. The same rule applies for your API keys. On the API page, there’s a nice big button to regenerate each key. Press it once a month and spend five minutes updating the websites you use. It’s unlikely to have been compromised, but if you’re a director of a large corporation, don’t rule out that website X might be operated by someone who wouldn’t be averse to handing over keys for a modest sum. Regenerate keys often and stay away from websites that appear to have no evidence of proper security for API keys.

Use a Wrapper/Proxy
There are a number of tools out there which will either let you run your own ‘API Proxy’ or will provide such a service for you. However, this requires the website or tool you’re using to support such a wrapper.
One of the few major implementations of this sort of tool is Gatecamper, which has the added benefit of offering a HTTPS secured service, which adds security when using a shared network such as a company or university network. It lets you choose which bits of data you’d like to let applications have access to, and makes a special key just for that application, which is locked to allow only that application to consume it by requiring the application to authenticate with Gatecamper seperately.

However, support in applications is few and far between for these wrappers, and while they do add another layer of security they do not protect you from website operators who are using the data they are using to provide a service for their own benefit. An asset listing site, for example, might then store that data and use it to pick likely targets for a pirate gang. POS tools could let pirates spot POSes low on fuel and camp them to pick off refuellers, or spot POSes that have only recently been set up.

It’s unlikely that many of these situations would occur, but they certainly could. Remember- in EVE, ethics are something you can choose not to adhere to.

Don’t be Stupid and Keep an Eye on Things
API keys are by far the safest method of getting data out of your EVE account. Apart from anything else, you can view a list of all the times your API data has been used by looking at the log page on the MyEVE API website. It’ll show you which IP address requested what data, and for which character.

The safest thing to do is to keep a safe distance from sites and tools that look remotely dodgy, inquire before you provide your key as to the security in place to protect it (all my applications, for example, encrypt the key in the database), and be sensible. If you’re a corporation director and need to use a full key, use another account with no CEO/director characters on it. Don’t be fooled by websites that ask you to select a character- the API gives them access to all characters on the account, not just the ones you select, though the website may not make use of other character’s data.

Conclusions
Security in EVE, much like real life, is mostly about having some common sense when it comes to giving out information. The real killer for security is for corporation directors and CEOs, where the full API opens the door to real problems and vital information for potential attackers.

The trick is to be wary of who you hand out information to, know what keys expose what data, and be happy that the person you’re giving those keys to knows what the data exposes.

Further Reading

• Related article: Security Part 1: Intruders at the Login Screen
• The Unofficial (but way, way better than anything official) API documentation
• Gatecamper, an EVE API Security Proxy
• The EVE Online API Log
• The EVE Online API

This article is brought to you by EVE-Mag.com - an independent EVE Magazine, ©2009 EVE-Mag.com. Read more of New Eden's finest writers here!

So you’re sitting there at your local agent and you notice another one that is part of a R&D division. Curious, you try to engage in conversation with it only to be told something along the lines that you don’t have the proper skills to start any research. You ask in your corp stream what the R&D agents do and quickly learn that they give points which in turn can be used to by datacores. These datacores can be used in invention or sold on the market. There is a plethora of information out there regarding these datacores and I hope this article will get you off to a running start.

In this article I will be going over how to get into datacore mining and what it means to you as a player. Because of the subject and length of this article I am actually including a table of contents.

Contents:
Introduction
Preparation
Applying your plan
Conclusions

Introduction:

First things first, what is a research agent in eve.
A research agent is a special type of agent that in exchange for having the proper skills and standing with their corporation will give you a non stop constant stream of research points every day. You can do a mission for these agents once a day to double the number of research points you would get that day as well.

What is a Datacore?

A datacore is a consumable object that is required for invention to take place. There are many types of datacores available that can be bought for 50, 100, and 150 research points a piece. The more expensive a datacore is does NOT mean it is worth more on the market.

Why do you want to mine them?

Two reasons, both that I mentioned above but I will go into greater detail here. Datacores are a consumable for invention, which means if you are keen on inventing one of these days you will always need datacores. Being able to create your own assures a steady supply and eventually pays for itself (the cost being time grinding standing and money on skills).

Alternatively, you can sell datacores that you get from these agents at a nice profit. Though the typical price can be between 150k-350k per datacore, multiply these number by however many datacores you can acquire per month. A well planned operation can get its user in the ball part of 200-300 million isk a month per character. When you figure that all you have to do is get the standing up, do some training and after that its all a passive process that is nothing to sneeze at.

Preparation

The Catch
There is ALWAYS a catch. The catch in this case is that to set up this passive income machine requires 3 things. Money, Standing, and Time.

Money: Depending on what you want to get, you can expect to spend about 70-80 million isk, however many of these skills you may already have. I will go over the skill list in a minute.

Standing: The best research agents require a minimum of a 6.0 standing with them before they will even look at you. You MUST grind the standing by doing missions from their corporation’s agents. Faction standing does NOT substitute for corporate standing. Agents have 2 standing requirement sets. The first is a minimum standing with their corporation. The second is the personal standing, which is usually a full 2 points higher than the corporation standing. Always go by the PERSONAL STANDING number IF your faction standing does not meet or exceed the personal standing of that agent.

If you have a 7.0 standing with say the Gallente Federation and you are doing work with CreoDron, all you would have to do is grind the corporation standing up to the required level. However do not be fooled, faction standings take barbaric amounts of time to reach any point worth while and a 7.0 standing is at least a 6 months to a year commitment (furthermore, this standing has to come from the player, NOT the player corporation they are a part of). If you don’t already have a high faction standing, don’t bother with doing the storyline missions with the mind that you can cheat the personal standing requirement. By the time you reach say 7.0 with the faction, you will already have long fulfilled both standing requirements for the highest research agent several times over.

Time: While you may think that all you have to do is grind and then your done, the fact is that you will have to routinely return to the agent to “bring in your harvest”. This entails going to the agent, getting the datacores, and then taking them to a market hub where you can then sell the datacores. Though unlike mining, where you have to actually be at a belt to get minerals, acquiring the points for datacores is a completely passive process that will only stop when you tell it to. The length of time you allow your “crop” to multiply is completely up to you, it can be a day, week, month, months, or years. The only reasonable limit is your cargo hold size (I’ll explain later.)

So at this point you have either hit the back button or are now very interested in getting your hands on this resource. Heck you have likely thought of working for CreoDron simply because I mentioned it. Stop right there and listen:

Different R&D corporations have different agents that specialize in different types of datacores. There are eighteen different datacores, four of which are only available to research agents of their native main factions (For miners, this concept isn’t new, certain asteroids are only found in certain empires). There are also thirteen different R&D corporations that you can choose to work for. There are two questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Will I want to use my product either right away or at some point in the future?
2. What datacores sell the most and why?

Once you have answered both to your satisfaction you will have an idea of what cores you want to go for.

Data mining

I recommend you make use of the following websites when doing your data mining.

Eve-Wiki: This site gives you the basic overview of what we are doing (I however am giving you a detailed overview). What you want from this site is towards the bottom that lists the R&D divisions of each research corporation as well as their level 4 agents, what cores they do and their standing requirement. The site however does not state the sec status or where the agents are located, this you have to look up yourself.

Eve-Central: This site will give you a general idea of what each datacore is currently going for. Always check the price of all potential datacores you are looking into and compare the RP costs of those datacores. Why do research for cores that you can only get one a day for 250k when you can do research for cores that you can get 2 or 3 a day at 200k?

Coldfront: This site will tell you the RP cost of each datacore you are interested in. Remember, a datacore costing 150 RP does not make it a better core compared to one only costing 50 RP nor will it fetch a better price.

Eve database: This site has a calculator that lets you input the agents level and quality as well as the level of the skills that affect the number of research points and tells you how many you get per day for your levels. Take this number and multiply it by however many days you let your harvest grow, then take the number of datacores you can get from that agent in that timeframe and multiply the cost by that number, that is how much the agent is worth to you per harvest cycle.

Eve agents: Quick and simple way to get all the info on the agent in question, ie. where, sec status and so forth.

Picking out the corporation:

Again depending on the datacores you want you may or may not be limited by empire boundaries however one thing I have found personally is that research agents DON’T have to be in their empire. A CreoDron research agent could be in Amarr space. If it’s a particularly good one and your standing with Amarr is a bit grimy due to that Gallente movie you stared in that one time when you needed the cash then you cant use that agent and it may be best not to do CreoDron missions all together if you intended to make that agent one of your primaries. Always take the agents location into account when deciding as you may find them very spread out and in a situation where travel is a factor this may play into which corporation you choose to work for.

Furthermore, while this may not be a factor for some, be wary of research agents in low sec for obvious reasons.

Once you have picked out the corporation(s) its time to move on to the next step, the grind.

Applying your plan

Grinding:
There are two ways you can do this, both require mission grinding though however before even starting you need to have the following:

Social: leveled to 4 and eventually 5 (it’s a short skill). This skill gives you a 5% increase to faction, corporation and agent standing increase per level. Because its standing here you are aiming to increase this should be the first skill you train.

Connections: Level to 4 and eventually 5. This skill modifies the effective standing of friendly factions, corporations and agents by 4% every level. Basically this skill gives you more standing then you actually have with a corporation, which in turn means less work grinding.

Both of these skills should be leveled to at least level 4 before beginning the grind. This skill also has a direct effect on the number of points you get per day from an agent for datacores.

Regardless of whichever method of grinding you choose, provided you have the above mentioned skills leveled to level 4 right off the bat your effective standing will be 1.60 after the first mission you do for that corporation. This should put you in reach of a handful of level 2 agents. As soon as you finish the first mission, pack up and head to a level 2 agent.

There are two ways you can grind standing, both require mission running.

1. Run courier and odd missions. While not as exciting as combat missions, this sort of mission type is far less skill intensive as at most all you will need an industrial ship from level 3 agents onward. Your standing with your selected corporation will increase faster as opposed to combat missions as the longest time for any one mission will be about fifteen minutes.

2. Combat missions. Depending on your situation this may be more tolerable, you will get more money in the short term but your standing may not climb as fast as the first method.

In either case be sure to check the corporation you have chosen for which agents they offer for your preferred mission method. Remember that the higher level the agent the more standing you get per mission (mission difficultly also factors in but agent level is always better higher).

Note: CCP in Revelations 3 reintroduced mining missions, if you are not a miner don’t bother with these missions as they require huge amounts of the fake ore. These missions are typical in the manufacturing and production divisions but are not exclusive to those divisions. Also know that the fake ore can not be sold on the market (and for that matter, bought). They can however be bought over the contract system, however these contracts rarely offer the proper amounts of the ore required and charge large amounts of isk for what little they do offer. I recommend declining these missions when possible.

Datacore transportation:

On top of this research you also need to figure how you will move the datacores. Each datacore takes up 1 m3 of cargo room. Figure how many datacores you are likely to acquire in your harvest cycle and this will determine what ship you need. Because of the value of these cores, I recommend you use a ship that can move quickly, not be seen, or can take a beating.

I highly recommend you invest in a blockade runner if you find yourself with a few thousand datacores. They are the t2 versions of industrials, so they naturally have a large cargo hold a speed bonus, a repair bonus and when Quantum Rise was released, can use covert opts cloaking devices as well (meaning they can warp while cloaked). They do cost a bit of isk and because they are t2 they have a naturally lengthy training time, however if you find yourself with a lot of datacores the cost in a blockade runner is a worthwhile business expense.

The Skills:

Up to this point we have been talking about activities leading up to using R&D agents. These activities in themselves don’t require many skills in game however you will need the following before you can actually start using R&D agents.

Research V – Base skill, super cheap, most industrial oriented characters start with this at three already

Science V –Base skill, just like research, super cheap and industrial oriented characters will already have this leveled to three.

Negotiation IV - Directly affects the number of points you get from research agents, you should have this trained to level 4 before beginning your grind and have it eventually trained to 5 either right before or shortly after beginning your research.

Engineering V - Base skill needed for use with some datacore skills. See below for what datacore skills this skill is required for.

Electronics V - Base skill needed for use with some datacore skills. See below for what datacore skills this skill is required for.

Mechanics V - Base skill needed for use with some datacore skills. See below for what datacore skills this skill is required for.

Laboratory Operation V – A prerequisite of Research project operation.

Research Project Management IV – all characters can use by default one research agent off the bat, this skill increases that number by one with every level, meaning you can have a total of six research agents working for you (though the catch is to get it to level 5 will take over 90 days with a character without learning skills). In all likelihood you will only have this leveled to 4. This skill costs 40 million isk and is a required skill to make this whole thing worth while.

Datacore Skills IV – as with the skills needed for mining crystals and processing various types of ore there are skills needed for performing research for a particular type of datacore. These skills will always require science leveled to five and either engineering, electronics or mechanics leveled to five as well. You will typically want these leveled to level four though eventually leveling them to level five is always a bonus as this skill directly affects how many research points you get per day from an agent. Each of these skills flat out cost 10 million a piece so when starting your research be sure that the skills you have selected will yield profitable results as soon as possible.

The following is a list of Datacores and their prerequisite skills. As a rule, all datacores are part of the science skill tree so naturally, this skill is required to level five in addition to one of the three skills listed below in bold being level five as well. Datacores are sorted by their secondary skill requirement.

Engineering
Graviton Physics
High Energy Physics
Hydromagnetic Physics
Laser Physics
Nuclear Physics
Plasma Physics
Quantum Physics

Electronics
Electromagnetic Physics
Nanite Engineering
Electronic Engineering
Hypernet Science

Mechanic
Amarrian Starship Engineering
Caldari Starship Engineering
Gallente Starship Engineering
Minmatar Starship Engineering
Astronautic Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Molecular Engineering
Rocket Science

Naturally if you are using an alt for datacore mining, you should include learning to make the whole process quicker. The whole learning process should take roughly 75-85 days, depending on the number of datacore skills you have chosen to use initially.

Conclusions

Going about the grind:
Depending on what method you are going into, I highly recommend you do the grind as more of a passive thing than an active thing. Because it will take roughly 75-85 days of training before you can competently use research agents you can spread your grind over that length of time. If you can grind 0.10 standing per night every night (in most cases this is only two or three missions after you start using level 3 agents) it should only take you under eight to ten weeks to get the standing for most high level agents.

Wrap up

Datacore farming can be incredibly lucrative if you can devote the time and money to it. If you are willing to devote alt characters to it as well you can easily find yourself one day up to the neck with datacores that can then be turned into cold isk for whatever you need it to. Simply do the research, crunch the numbers and make yourself a plan that you can stick to and eventually you will find yourself with surplus isk.

Remember that when you are moving to a new research agent and you must stop the research of another to convert your research points into datacores PRIOR to canceling the research as all points will disappear after you end the research.

In summery remember these quick notes above all else:

Plan out what research corporation you want to work with, what agents offer what and where they are.

Social, Connections and the datacore skill you select all have a direct impact on how many research points you earn per day. These are controllable so level these all to five when possible.

Agent level and quality directly impact how many research points you earn per day but they are only controllable by the agent you select to do your research with, in short aim for the best research agent you can to maximize results.

Faction standing only comes into play when its number meets or exceeds the agents personal standing number. Unless you have 6.0-7.0 with the faction this rarely comes into play.

Use the websites that I mentioned in this article to figure out your plan and remember, it pays to research everything completely before beginning.

Website References:
Eve-wiki Research Agent Info
Eve-Central
Coldfront
Eve Database
Eve Agents

This article is brought to you by EVE-Mag.com - an independent EVE Magazine, ©2009 EVE-Mag.com. Read more of New Eden's finest writers here!

Picture credit: Michael Bravo

As a carebear noob I had reason to say exactly that and as a more experienced player I have been there when my corp mates, and ex-corp mates, newer to the game have said it. War decs on carebear corps happen a lot more frequently than you would imagine, it is just the sheer number of player corps that makes it a less common event for you. There is a good chance that if you play the game, even as a dedicated carebear, for more than a few months then you will get the chance to say it too!

But take heart from someone who’s been through it and survived. As Douglas Adams so beautifully put it…..DON’T PANIC!

So why did another corporation declare war on your peaceful, timid, carebear corp?

Well, the simple answer is just that it is very easy to do. To find a more specific answer we have to explore the human psyche a little bit. There is a nearly dormant aspect of our genetic make-up that is inherently violent. We all have it to some degree or another and it is there because not so long ago, the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, we had to have it just to survive in a brutal, unforgiving world.

Social conditioning, the penal system and the practically zero need for us to personally kill our food before we can eat it has pushed this kind of behaviour into our sub-consciousness but nonetheless it lies there, part of who we are, aching for a chance to break out and cause havoc! The all too common news stories of violent attacks, the popularity of contact sports, both as participants and spectators, and in particular violent video games all play testament to this fact.

Those that are athletic and with some intelligence have the option of participating in an organised physical activity or contest of some description. Those that can placate these rising urges just by watching boxing, “wrestling” or rugby this is easily achieved.

But some need to be the one exacting the punishment, watching someone else do it just isn’t enough. Video games such as Mortal Combat and even Grand Theft Auto are a superb way of satisfying the blood-lust – I myself am not ashamed to admit the hours I have spent on GTA running down “innocent pedestrians” till the police finally catch or “frag” me even though it is not an objective in the game. I offer no apologies because absolutely nobody got hurt and my primal desires were sated. You will just have to trust me that I find the idea of doing this in real life abhorrent and repulsive!

But for others a mere graphical representation of an electronically generated entity is not enough and the desire to actually inflict even a small grain of suffering on a real person is needed, however remote and sanitised. EVE provides the perfect playground to do this – you are still basically taking out pixels on your screen but a) you know that there is someone real behind those pixels and b) in EVE, as we all know, there is time and effort invested in what is being lost, and lost is exactly what it is – no respawn in a graveyard with your ship, mods, cargo and implants intact here. EVE imitates life in this respect, we just have to deal with that.

But why your peaceful, timid carebear corp?

It’s possible that you or a fellow member of your corp did or said something to annoy someone sufficiently to declare war on you all but I don’t believe that this happens very often. It is much more likely that you were just picked pretty much at random.

But why don’t they go to 0.0 space? After all war is free there. Well there are several reasons for this. Firstly you don’t so often find juicy or vulnerable targets roaming around in null sec. Secondly the situation is less controllable for them – not only can anybody happening upon the fight join in if they so desire but also the targets will generally have more support. It’s not just the target corp they could be fighting but their alliance if they are in one and other alliances that they are friendly too. Undoubtedly they will have intel channels that will warn them of hostiles present in the area and that they can use to call for backup.

The third, and main, reason says something about the majority of people who spend their time in EVE deccing carebear corps and that is that their preferred targets will generally be unprepared, inexperienced in PvP and, not appreciating the risks, often careless. To put it simply they are, generally speaking, playground bullies who are not interested in a real fight. They would rather front up to the guy who cowers and pleads than the one who will aim a decent punch back at them.

Amazingly the deccing corp will often not even turn up to fight! Yes really! After spending money on a war dec they don’t even show up! I have been directly on the receiving end of two war decs so far although I got myself involved in a couple of others. Just one guy in a BS showed his face in the first case but he spent the whole time hugging a station and docking when he got too damaged. The second occasion saw one guy zipping around in an MWD’d frigate and running every time he saw us. We got fed up of this after a few days so putting together a fleet of six we travelled the 20 odd jumps to Caldari space where they were based. We encountered one war target three jumps from their home system. As he was on his own he legged it and I don’t blame him for that, but on jumping into a system with three of them in local we started to look about for them only to have them all log off! As I said – not after a real fight.

You really should take some comfort in this last fact but please please do not rely on it!

You should have noticed from the declaration mail that you have 24 hours notice from the time of declaration so hopefully you have some time left to prepare. You will also get 24 hours notice of the war finishing. Wars last seven days but can be renewed for subsequent weekly periods.

So what can you do if you receive a declaration of war?

Well you have several options.

1. If you are particularly repulsed by the whole idea you could take a week off EVE. Come back in seven days and if it’s all over go back to business as usual. Remember to set a long skill!

2. Why not try out trading? With some low rank skills at even low levels you can buy and sell remotely without ever having to leave the station! You can even set up courier contracts to have other people move stuff around for you.

3. You could relocate temporarily to another part of space. Use the 24 hours notice to take your mission or mining ship to the other side of empire space and see a bit of the universe! Bear in mind though that you can still be tracked down. How this is done is mentioned later.

4. Hire mercenaries! There are lots of mercenary corps about that will declare war back on your aggressors for an appropriate fee. These are invariably seasoned PvPers who will often relish the prospect of taking out war dec corps who like to pick on carebears! Check the forums for them.

5. You could do any of those things listed above but my personal recommendation is to stand and fight! Don’t let the bullies dictate to you! Try out a bit of PvP – you might like it!

What should I do to help myself and my corp mates before it all kicks off?

1. Protect your implants! Podding (the destroying of a capsule) is legal in war and if you are podded you will lose your implants. If you have implants but do not have the skill Infomorph Psychology then take it now! You only need level 1 to have an additional clone. You will need to go to a station with medical facilities owned by a corporation that your corporation has good standing to. Install a jump clone there via the medical button which is located in the top right part of your screen along with the repair and reprocessing buttons and, before you undock for the first time after the war has started, jump to that clone via your character sheet – Jump Clones. You will most likely gain skill points slower than normal due to not having any, or lower grade, attribute implants but this is better than losing your implants altogether.

2. Research your opponents. One thing you have in your favour is that it is impossible in-game to get the names of members of a corporation just from the corporation name, except of course the CEO and founder who are listed in the corp info. So if you are not a high-profile player posting on forums or appearing in killboards then your aggressors will not know you are in the corp they declared war on unless they a) see you flagged as a war target in local or on the overview, b) picked you out while looking for prospective war dec targets or c) were just lucky enough to pick your name out at random and found you were in the corp they are after. This is in your favour as they will most likely be on killboards and possibly also forums. I just searched in Google for my corp name and the word killboard and straight away obtained the names of three members of my corp. A search with the corp name in the EVE forums picked up one more. Create a new folder in your in-game addressbook, label it something suitably insulting, for example “Cretinous Morons”, and add the names you have found into it. Link the names into a corp mail so everyone else can do this too. Now you will see straight away when they log on or off and when you log on you can check this folder and see which morons are on or offline!

3. Set up your local chat so you can see it at all times. Local is your lifeline. You cannot be online in a system without being listed in this window and when you jump into a system your name will appear a second or so before your ship does. Detach it from the other chat windows and stretch it as high as you can so you can see as many names as possible on it. You can shrink the chat text display part as that is not so important but stretch the name list out wider so you can see the whole name. Watch this at all times as war targets will have an icon next to their name in the same way that your corp mates do. The default icon is a white skull on a red background.

4. Make safespots. A safespot (ss) is a point in space as far away as possible from any object you can warp to, eg. planets, moons, belts, stations and stargates, and are easy to make. Warp to a belt or a planet, not a station or gate. Open your People and Places (P&P) window on the Places tab. Now warp to another belt or planet. While you are in mid-warp click on the Add Bookmark button at the bottom of the P&P window and then click OK as quickly as you can after (the bookmark is made at your location when you click OK). Here is your safespot!

Right-click anywhere in space and select Warp To on the bookmark (bm) you just made. Edit the bm and rename it to, for example “Rens Safespot 1”. You could even elaborate with the places you warped from and to, eg. “Rens Safespot 1: P3 – VII-8” (between planet 3 and planet 7-belt 8). Now make lots more bookmarks, one for each corp member, at the same spot. As you are not moving you can copy and paste the name in before you click OK.

Drag these additional copies from the P&P window into your cargohold. It becomes an icon which you can trade to your corp mates or deposit in the corp hangar. By the way these make excellent items to stop a jet can popping when you take the ore you’ve mined out!

Your corp mates can put these icons into their cargohold and drag them from there onto a folder header in their P&P window and they now have the same safespot as you! You can also do this by fleeting up with your corp mates, have them warp to you while you are at the ss and then make their own. Create lots of different safespots, at least three, in every system where you intend to continue operating and the surrounding systems too if you have the time and inclination. Using the first method you could allocate systems to corp members to save time and duplication of effort.

5. Set up voice communication. In a war situation, especially if you plan to fight, you want your eyes on the main screen area and hands on the mouse and keyboard F-keys – not reading a chat window with both hands typing out “Help he’s got me!”. There are several good applications for this, TeamSpeak which is generally free, Ventro which is not and of course the in-game voice system. If a ten pound, or twenty dollar, headset and mike saves your 150 million ISK battleship you’ll be glad you spent it!

So you decided to stand and fight?

Great! Make sure that you have as many of your corp mates with you on this as possible. Discuss what roles you want to fill and what types of ships you want to use. Just make sure you are all reading from the same page! I won’t go into PvP tactics and setups in any detail here. I point you in the direction of excellent EVE-Mag articles by Black Claw, Sam Guss and others for more on that. I can give you a few general tips though.

1. Unless you are confident and/or rich, use cheap ships and cheap setups. Second best named modules are not much worse than their T2 equivalents but are a tiny fraction of the price. Keep foremost in your mind that one of your opponents T2 ships will cost the same, if not more, than 20 of your cheap fit ships but will be nowhere near 20 times better. For example a T2 fitted Ishtar will run anywhere between 100 and 150 million isk, and a lot more with rigs, but a Vexor fitted with second best named modules will cost you 6 to 8 million. Four or five of the latter together could easily destroy one of the former.

2. Battleships are cool and pound well if you have support around you but are not very good for a solo stand. They lock very slowly, move very slowly and large turrets track very slowly! Consider T1 cruisers – generally flexible and relatively cheap yet fairly quick and sturdy.

3. If you’re new please don’t think your frigate is no use! Put a microwarpdrive on it along with warp scramblers and stasis webifiers and then stick on as many tank buffer modules, eg. shield extenders or adaptive plating (avoid plates as these will slow you down), and resistance boosting modules, including the mandatory Damage Control, as you can. If you can put on some turrets, launchers or target painters too then that’s great. Then get in there and keep the morons pinned down while your friends pound away with the heavier ships! If you keep moving and orbiting them you will stand a good chance of surviving – with this in mind watch out you don’t bump into stations, gates or other ships as this will probably spell your doom if you are being shot at. Usually you will only need to stick around long enough to allow the bigger ships to get their scramblers and webs on the target and then can retreat to a safe distance or go pin down the next target!

4. Consider using logistics, eg. remote armour repair, energy transfer, shield transfer and maintenance drones. Some ships gain bonuses to these, eg. the Exequror, a Gallente T1 cruiser, which gets a 500% range bonus to remote armour repair. A player with weak combat skills could ably fill this role. Bear in mind though that once your opponents realise what this ship is doing it will probably be called primary. Being called primary means everyone will shoot at you until you escape or pop!

5. Always be in a fleet and assign the booster role to the player with the best leadership skills. Designate a Fleet Commander (FC), normally the player most experienced in PvP, to call the shots. Do what they say but please don’t give them a hard time if it all goes wrong! It’s a tough job and it may have all gone wrong anyway.

It is important to say here that if you give your opponents lots of easy kills then they may well extend the war expecting more. If after four or five days it’s all been going badly maybe it’s then time to hide away so they get bored and go pester someone else! Don’t feel bad if this happens, these guys will probably be experienced at this and you should be happy in the fact that you had a go and stood up against them rather than let them push you around.

If you are not experienced in PvP here are a few things you may not be aware of.</