Planning Ahead

Over the past week I've spent time considering the future of my characters and what direction I want them to follow with regards to their training.

I have four accounts with my four main characters and a mix of cyno and PI alts, of varying skill levels, occupying the character slots on these accounts. it's the main characters I'll be talking about, providing a little background but also setting out what I want them to do in the future.

Shared Background

All of my characters started off with a mining focus, training to fly mining barges and then Exhumers with two being cross trained to fly the Orca and, later, the Rorqual. This is how I got my start in EVE Online, either running or participating in Mining Fleets in high sec and null sec. It wasn't moo goo money but it was a regular source of income and I really enjoy mining.

Since finishing their initial mining training they have all gone off in different directions in EVE but now I'm taking a longer term look at their uses and will plan training queues for them to maximize my return from them.

Planning

EVE Mon has been extremely useful, no vital, in helping me see my available options even if the results have been slightly depressing when I saw how long each skill plan will take to complete. But the advantage of planning my skill training for the next three, six or twelve months means I have objectives and am not wasting my game time on things that I will not benefit from in the long term.

I've now got four plans that I will be following as closely as possible until they are complete. I cannot predict everything and requirements may change so there will be some variation but I have a plan to follow that will open up more ships, modules and professions for my characters.

Main Character (Capital / Logistics Pilot)

93 million skillpoints

This was the first character I created in EVE but I don't use him everyday as I once did. He now spends most of his time in High Sec space supporting the activities (via logistics/manufacturing/invention) of my other characters.

Primarily an Amarrian ship flyer this character recently and he can fly every sub-capital ship bar T2 frigates and he has recently injected the Amarr Titan skill book (I had spare ISK and it completed a long term objective). He can use all guns but T2 rail guns and he has poor missile skills but he is not a combat pilot he has always worked logistics for me. As a result he can fly all racial Freighters/Jump Freighters and has most science and production skills at Level IV.

One aspect of his skills that I am disappointed with are his Drone skills, considering he flys drone ships and carriers his Drone skills are woefully inadequate. This is what I want to change and as a result I've used EVE Mon to work out a skill plan that will get all Drone skills to Level V.

Not ISK will be needed as all the skills are injected but the total time to get the entire branch to V will be 203 days at 2700 sp/h (Memory/Perception).

Once Drones are complete I will move back to Perception/Willpower attribute mapping and continue to work through the remaining Gunnery and Spaceship Command skills that I have either at Level IV or haven't started to train. This training will add another 360 days training, once a remap to Perception/Willpower is performed.

All in all, this character has his skill plan set for the eighteen months.

Miner / Booster / Logistics (Capital / Sub Capital)

90 million skillpoints

This was the first alt I created and was done so to meet the requirement of a pilot who could fly an Orca and boost whilst my main mined. When I was deciding to move to Providence I realized that I need to train all the remaining Leadership skills and thus, my Booster alt was fully born.

He can fly ever single racial ship below Battleship class and he is also a max skilled Rorqual and Jump Freighter pilot. This is nice as he continues to live in Null Sec where these skills are very useful for managing my towers and helping to move input/outputs about.

One peculiar thing about this character is that he maintains to this day the same gunnery and missile skills he was born with, they have never been improved and there has never been any need for him to have done so.

I have considered the role and at some point I will be adding Science and Production skills to his abilities but for the time being I will continue working on Support Skills to Level V and when this is done he will change to finally getting all racial Battleships and T2 Spaceship Command specializations to Level V.

According to EVE Mon will I have another 127 days on the Support Skills with Science (excluding T3 construction skills) at 491 days and Production at 259 days. He's going to be chock-a-bloc full of skills and will make a superb Industry addition to my roster.

Fun Fact: It was my wife who designed the portrait for the character and I haven't changed it since she did as she periodically checks his image and when I did once change his appearance I copped all kinds of hell over it.

Combat Character (Sub Capital pilot)

80 million skillpoints

I created a second alt a couple of months after the first because, well, I could mine more with two miners and a booster. It was only when I was living in a wormhole in 2011, and after he was able to fly Exhumers, that I changed his direction to being a sub-capital combat pilot.

After I moved to Providence this character become my defacto main and I recived a lot of encouragement/learning from the FC's that were active at the time. His skills adapted to the needs of the fleets I was in, moving from T1 vessels into T2 based Recons, HAC's and HIC's. He is well trained to use all T2 guns and HAM/HM/Torpedo's with just Level V specialization needing completing for all these.

It was this character that prompted a lot of my planning when I discovered he was only just over a total of 7 days training (and an injection of ISK) from being able to fly all racial dreadnoughts and able to use all capital sized guns.

He's now training for dreadnoughts/capital guns and will move on to finishing all sub-capital ships and gunnery skills to V. Something that EVE Mon tells me will take just 797 days with 204 days of to get each racial dreadnought to V.

I'll need more jump clones for him at some point but I am lucky to have at least four spare clones.

Miner (Scanning / Sub-Capital pilot / Manufacturing Alt)

58 million skillpoints

The youngest and most cross trained of my characters, he was born with a singular purpose: to be a perfect mining character which he achieved in about six months of training.

Has since become my scanning character after spending about 3 months training every scanning skill to V, which he completed two days before the release of Odyssey and the revamp of the scanning system.

He moved on to training to fly all racial sub capital ships under Battleship size and also able to fly the Amarrian Jump Freighter. As a result he acts as a back up jump freighter pilot for me in null sec. For the past year he's been working on Support Skills.

In planning for the future I've decided that I need another character to be able to manufacture modules and ships and so this character will be starting on Science and Production skills and will do until they are all Level IV and he can make all ships but T3's and Capital's.

EVE Mon tells me that this will take 77 days for all to Level IV and then another 125 days for the Production skills I'll need to actually do the building of modules/ships that I need to. Once this is done I'll have a remap available and I think getting Drone skill maximized (much like my main is now) will be a good choice for another 230 odd days training.

No Plan Ever Survives Execution

I have plans for each of my characters and I will be following them as closely as possible but there will be times I will have to make a detour and train skills I wasn't planning on. This has happened before and will happen again but my aim is to remain on the path I have chosen as much as I can.

The skill plans I have created will improve existing skills but more important open up new ships, modules and adventures to be had.

I'm looking forward to the training even if it will consume most of the next two years.

Comfort Zone

I've been playing EVE for nearly four years, that's four years of living in wormholes, null sec and high sec. I've yet to live in low sec but there is plenty of time to do that and the one thing that these things all have in common is I've been very comfortable in what I've done.

I've felt safe, secure and have always had the backup of people I trust. Very recently though I've started branching out into null sec without the safety net I've been used to and as a result I'm out of my comfort zone and I feel I've grown as a player.

Hermit Behaviour

For three months I've not left the system where I'm based except to jump to high sec or in the case of one character, move to a station in the next system over where I can jump clone to/from. I've led a sheltered life, very sheltered if I'm to be honest.

I've mined, reacted and manufactured without a care to the goings on around me and whilst I've done well I could do better and over the past week I finally decided to do something else.

Missioning, again

"You can earn 12,000 LP for one gas mining mission, no more than 15 minutes with good skills"

That was the quote I've heard four or five times from various corporation/alliance people and I've listened but did nothing about it. It doesn't help that most of my characters have high negative standings with the two corporations I'd need to get the missions from.

But salvation come in the unlikely form of my boosting alt, he had absolutely zero standings with any faction and only a couple of corporations liked him, a bit. An alliance mate offered to give me a hand with basic standings so I could run them myself and he did seven missions over the two corporations and I magically had 1.0 standings with both in less than an hour.

Fortunately you can get standings just by being in a fleet when a mission is completed and I took the chance to drop off some materials in Jita for sale (before Burn Jita started) and buy myself some modules for use on a Venture that I'd use for the missions.

Skills Need Work

I also purchased the Mining Connections skill book and made sure this was injected and trained to IV. I also remembered that the Criminal Connections skill would be helpful for standings increases with the NPC entities I would get the missions from and may help me get to the magic 5.0 standings sooner.

I now have Criminal Connections IV and Mining Connections IV trained and am working on Level V for both after I finish Mining Frigate V.

Results, are promising needs more work

It's been four days since I started mining missions and I've got just over 20,000 LPand 3.80 standings (4.43 modified). Nearly enough for Level 4 missions and they're the ones that will bring in the big LP amounts.

I'm getting between 300 and 1000 LP per mission at the moment and this has been great. I'm used to getting no more than 300 LP for a distribution or mining mission in high sec but here in null the rewards are much greater. The dangers are too but these can be mitigated by good decisions and using d-scan regularly.

The LP store has Snake implants so my plan is to get a low-grade set of Snakes for the market and then if they sell move up to the high-grade set. It's a plan and the Storyline missions at least give me the implants I need for LP exchanges.

Unintentional

I never planned this but I had to laugh.

 

Four of my five active characters have training that completes within sixteen minutes of each other and all skills are Level V ones so they've been active for at least a week and I've only just noticed.

 

The skills that are going complete around the same time are:

 

Social V

Science V

EM Shield Compensation V

Thermic Armour Compensation V

 

and looking at each of the next skills, this may happen again next week as they all move on to more Level V skills.

 

Totally unintentional but perhaps its my sub-conscious at work making sure I don't forget to keep the queues filled and best way to do that, arrange it so I have to update multiple characters at the same time.

 

Not a great blog post, I know. I promise I'll do a better one later today.

Momentum

Status

 

The past few days have been productive, wares sold in Jita fattening the wallet and then some of the money spent on fuel and inputs. I even got permission to defer tower taxes for a month to purchased a new Jump Freighter to help out with logistics, still debating whether to go for a Nomad (fuel is more easily available where it will be used) or an Ark (which I'm already fully skilled for).

 

Training

 

The PI character in null sec finished Electronics Upgrades V and as I type this Cynosural Theory III will have completed and Command Centre Upgrades V is in the queue. When that finishes I'll make sure Cyno Theory V is added and he'll run out this before I switch the queue back to my 'main' on this account.

 

My new Jump Freighter character is finishing Armour skills but will be changing to Jump Fuel Conservation V in a week, based on research in a previous post, it makes financial sense to get this skill complete as the savings in fuel usage will add up over time considering he'll be making at least two JF runs per week.

 

Industry

 

I'm not quite as blueprint copy rich as Lorna but I've managed to collect nearly two thousand blueprint copies of various modules and ships. I'm currently in the process of tracking my mineral and component needs in order to use these up, not going to be cheap but fortunately the profit margin looks to be between 30 and 40% so it's a worthy investment.

 

I'm both disappointed and happy to see that the price of Faction Battleships has dropped, disappointed because I have four nightmare BPC's and two of those I've had for nearly seven months and cost me more than the ship now sells for but it's good because I'm able to market trade them quite well. Seven over the past week I've made at least 30m on each one.

 

My favourite current item are Hammerhead I drones, I had a few BPC's that allowed me to make 20,000 of them and they sold like hot cakes  within hours of being posted at around the 25,000 ISK each price point in Jita. I have a couple more BPC's left to use and I've invested in BPO that I'll research so I can continue to make them as they, for their mineral need, are a good source of reasonably passive income.

 

Towers

 

My towers are running nicely, fuel and input is added and the outputs exported to High sec ready for sale on a fortnightly cycle. It just works.

 

I'm going to add two more towers making Sylramic Fibres to diversify somewhat, I used to make these in Providence and they were a good choice but I'm not going to both with Fullerides anymore as the margin is small and the market saturated with sellers.

 

Mentoring

 

I've had someone in my new Alliance ask me about setting up towers and I will be working with this person to teach them how to do basic reactions and getting them up to speed with running towers and researching.

 

I've discovered that I know a lot about running towers but I need to find a way to communicate this to someone who is in a different time zone that doesn't really overlap with mine. This limits communication to EVE mails and chat messages rather than voice comms. Going to be interesting to see what we can do.

 

I am looking forward to the challenge though.

Character Planning

Then

 

I can remember when I started playing EVE Online that training was important and as a result I found and started using EVEMon so as to plan what to train. However it was at least 6 months BEFORE I found EVEMon where I was training whatever I wanted and really was not doing anything efficiently.

 

I'm not embarrassed to say the first time, it was Christmas 2010, that I tried EVEMon and I could not work out how to get it to inject my plans into EVE for my characters to follow. How I laugh at myself now but I can remember how annoyed I was as I did not have access to EVE for about two weeks.

 

Epiphany

 

 

 

After I learnt what EVEMon was, it's feature set and how to use it did I have a "oh now I get it" moment and from that point on I really understand how skills worked and how my attributes modified how fast I learnt.

 

The removal of the Learning skills confirmed this and made the learning thing much simpler and now all I had to remember was what my attributes were mapped to and then apply that as my view in EVEMon and I could plan what I wanted to do.

 

No longer did I train what I wanted instead I would train skills that were mapped to my attributes and then when I'd reached a certain point would I remap and start training something else.

 

Now

 

EVEMon's skill planning has been critical to this and each of my characters has two skill plans:

 

Working 

a working skill plan that allows me to add/try different things to see how they do/fit with other plans/ships/modules I need to train.

 

Primary Objective

the characters primary objective for all training with their current attributes at maximum

 

I'm sure other people either have more or less plans but for me the two on each character is enough. I review them regularly but I try to avoid making changes to skill plans unless I really have to. My plans include remap points as well as the addition/removal of ad hoc training with remap points indicating completed objectives.

 

For me the planning aspect and having goals works to my mindset. The Working plan allows me to mess about and see how changes or different training will integrate with what I have. It also allows me to do a quick check to see if perhaps my Primary Objective can be changed to something new.

 

Example

 

A recent exception to my Primary Objective plan for one character has been the addition of JF training. The character, who is on a intelligence/memory remap, has had to train jump related Navigation skills which are intelligence/perception. I wasn't going to remap specially for intelligence/perception, as there aren't that many skills to warrant this, whereas intelligence/memory is a very large group of skills and I want to continue on using this remap after this detour.

 

I may have wasted a few extra days training but in the long run not using one of my precious remaps was worth it.

 

The Future

 

All my characters have training set for 2014 with a Primary Objective for all of them:

 

• My main is finishing Amarr Carrier V and Amarr Dreadnaught V then all gunnery skills to V before getting the long overlooked Memory/Perception so he can get all Drone skills to V.
• My PvP alt is still on Intelligence/Memory and doing all support skills (recently completed all sub-capital armour skills to V), will continue on this for another 9 months at least.
• My Logistics Alt is on Intelligence/Memory and doing all support skills same as PvP alt.
• My Scanning Alt is on Intelligence/Memory and doing all support skills same as PvP alt but with aim to switch to Willpower/Perception to get all sub-capital ships in a years time.

 

I'm also going to be receiving a Minmatar character from a friend who will be leaving EVE Online due to not having time to play. This character, which I keep the training queue active on currently, is extremely well skilled in support skills, all sub-capital Minmatar ships, all T3 Strategic Cruisers and Projectile weapons.

 

I don't know what I'll do with him or whether he'll be a trained character for 2014, but it's a new character that will give me options.