Skip to main content

EVE: A good time to remember I forgot to insure my battleship



Marb Pelico has slipped into the well worn care-bear groove of running combat missions and this weekend he finally graduated to level 4. This is generally regarded as the highest level that is realistically solo-able and many players farm level 4 missions for loot and bounties. I am sure that mission farmers have the ships and skills to make these missions an exercise in boring repetition but for a new player (just 5 million skill points to date) they represents a new and fairly daunting challenge.

A brief sortie in the hurricane that saw me though level 3's quickly convinced me that I needed bigger guns so I bought and outfitted my first battleship, a maelstrom. If I get a chance later I'll try to post the fitting but as usual in EVE it was a case of drooling over uber powerful setups that are well outside my level of skills and isk and then bastardising them down into something that I can actually fly. After several major compromises to my skill set and my wallet I ended up with a shield tanked artillery boat sporting about 300dps omni tank (before  using mission specific hardeners) and 400dps gank. Not particularly impressive but about twice as good as the hurricane on both counts and good enough I hope for the job.

My overwhelming first impression on flying the battleship was how much more slowly everything happenens even when compared to a battlecruiser. I guess I was expecting it to fly and manouevre very slowly but I hadn't expected other tasks to take as long as they do. It takes many seconds for example to lock onto a target before I can shoot it. When I finally do lock on is most gratifying to be able to knock out cruiser sized rats with a single broadside from my artillery but then it takes a full 20 Seconds to reload before I can fire another shot.

My second key observation is that I seriously need to improve my drone skills. Those big guns can annihilate frigates and cruisers that politely hover in place 50 km in front of me but once they come in and orbit I cannot touch them. These small fry cannot do much damage by themselves but but they carry stuff like webbers and warp scramblers that hold you in place while their bigger bretheren rip you apart. My bargain basement tech 1 drones are barely adequate to the task of handling these annoyances so Marb's skill queue has been quickly re-jigged to
add a bunch of drone stuff.

A somewhat unexpected observation is how severely the slow speed of the battleship limits combat options. In lower level missions you can reduce a lot of incoming damage by either standing off and sniping or by orbiting close and outpacing the tracking of opponents guns. It is harder to get to sniping distance in a slow battleship (particularly when webbed) and even if you manage to pull it off you are left with a long string of kills spread out over more than 100km with a very slow journey back to pick up the mission objective. As for trying to get into a close fast orbit - forget it. The net result of this is that much of the time you need to sit there and soak up the damage. My tank was overwhelmed on a number of occasions so I had to resort to warping out and in again. Warping in and out takes time and killing the mobs with my less than stellar dps takes time so my progress to date has been very slow. It took me almost three hours (with a break for dinner in the middle) to complete a mission called "The Dread Pirate Scarlet". A more experienced player explained to me that he can do it in about 20 minutes in his dedicated mission ship.

A final observation is that these missions are indeed profitable. That mission I bumbled through over several hours netted about 35 million ISK in bounties and cash rewards before loyalty points, looting and salvage is considered. If a complete noob can make 15 million per hour in hist first days of running lvl  missions then I am sure a dedicated mission farmer is making a large multiple of that.

Oh yes - as per the title I did forget to insure my battleship and only remembered round about the time I also discovered that battleship guns are completely incapable of killing the interceptors which had me webbed and scrambled. Happily fortune smiled on me and I survived but once again a reminder to always think before you fly.

Shout of gratitude by the way to Stabs who made a generous in game contribution towards my battleship fund.

Comments

Stabs said…
Shout of gratitude by the way to Stabs who made a generous in game contribution towards my battleship fund.

It was a pleasure.

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p