training « Our EvE

Industrial Quandry

How do I balance my own progress with that of providing for my corporation and or alliance? As an industrial character who has spent a fair number of hours learning to build nice things, how do I remain profitable while supporting those around me?

If I produce for the corporation and/or alliance, the expectation is that there is some kind of break in prices. As a conscientious industrialist, I am going to tell them how much it costs me and where it’s more than the market, suggest that they obtain it there. Where it is cheaper to build, I want to offer them the opportunity to get it cheaper and be there for the people that help make it possible. I have found that I am quite horrible though at maintaining the balance necessary between things produced for sales [the market] and those manufactured for consumption [the corporation/alliance]. Often then the result is a complete halt to my industrial tendencies.

This is often further complicated by my relative incompetence and disconnect with the sales and marketing side of things. I am quite comfortable in navigating the market, getting the resources I need, etc, but just as equally uncomfortable putting my wares up for sale. Finding holes, navigating gaps, incremental adjustments, market trends all tend to elude my grasp, leaving me with a very real sense of dissatisfaction with the sheer number of things I could be doing to maximise my profits, but are generally left undone. I envy both the selfless industrialist who is able to provide everything her corporation needs as well as the ruthless profiteer who is able to judge the market, jump into the fray and make obscene profits.

As a corollary to the above, there is also a push to be involved in corporate and alliance activities that are somewhat beyond my level. I am fairly competent at combat in sub-battleship roles, but could always use more experience and training in weapon systems. I’m quite happy to spend the time training for better weapons, drones, fittings, but have to balance this with a desire to also be able to improve my abilities to support my corp-mates with industry. Has anyone else figured out to do it all and do it well yet?

It is certainly something to work and think through.

Along the Way

Now listen all you swingers, don’t you try to tag along
I know monkey see, but monkey’s dead, for you it would be wrong
Put a dime in my jukebox, you’ll only hear this song
And it won’t be fun for long -(TMBG)

The end is nigh!

The end has passed and off into the night we continue swimming past planets, moon and stars. Wormholes open and close and wars and rumors of wars are left in our wake. All and all, everything continues on as it did before, so what is different?

Training for the Damnation has been completed. Mostly. Sort of. There are few days left to fit the armored warfare links, but everything else is fit and fine. I should be jumping for joy, holding parties in low-sec pirate filled dens of iniquity and generally announcing it to every stray passer-by I meet. Instead I’m merely looking at the next couple of weeks of training and thinking, “Now What?”

The whole trip to Damnation has been a grand adventure. It marks the third, major, long training plan I’ve completed. The first plan was learning skills, which can be debated ad nauseam both on the forums and in various other postings. They were long, arduous and imminently debatable, however I have never once regretted doing it. The second was maximizing my asteroid warfare potential, including a few weeks on Exhumer V, Cybernetics V, and a host of ore specific refining skills to level IV for tech 2 crystals. Again, there were parts of it that I probably could have cut corners on, but I haven’t regretted being able to field a really sweet Hulk, that can mine about 27 m³ of ore per second without being in a gang and significantly more with a good Orca pilot boosting.

Finally, the trip to the Damnation, which has been a slightly longer journey than the others. Over all it was uneventful and all the skills that I have picked up in the interim have been useful across the board. In the beginning it started with the look for a decent armor tanked missile ship to swim alongside my remote armor repairing corp-mates. The Sacrilege was an option, but wasn’t really able to fit a decent remote rep fitting. The Damnation could do that, had enough tank to be able to use ballistic computer systems without sacrificing tank and could still theoretically fit a RR with it’s missiles. The DPS worked out to a similar end as the Drake with the added benefits of helping the whole fleet’s tank.

Now that I’ve reached the Damnation, I have to admit I’m feeling rather blasé about the whole thing. I love flying it. It corners like an Orca, tanks like a very large plated battleship and hits about like a Drake, but from slightly farther away. This is all well and good, but my eyes were taken by something else shiny that had cropped up along the way.

Somewhere along the way I realized that in and amongst the skills for a Damnation, was hidden the skills for a Guardian logistics ship. So on a whim I began to research them, ask questions and look at fittings for them. I got to looking at just how the efficiency of remote repair modules compared to their ‘local’ counterparts. What did it take to use them and or abuse them. Since the Guardian is also bonused for energy transfers, I threw that into the mix as well, looking at how that could be used to the best advantage. I began to develop a real sense of respect for 0.0 fleet logistics pilots and the work they do. Flying a logistics ship well takes a fair amount of capacitor savvy, shrewd targeting and really tight fittings. Tried and true skills like weapons upgrades and advanced weapons upgrades have no effect on RR’s and Xfers, so it’s down to rigs, reactors, PDU’s and CPUs to make it work.

[Editorial Aside]:

I tend to scoff when I see CPUs, PDUs and Reactors on a lot of fits. They are mostly used to compensate for a severe lack of real fitting skills or to ‘tide one over’ until their skills catch up to their hulls. [I still maintain it would be an interesting study to compare the number of killmails between the pilots having 'helper' modules like CPUs/PDUs/Reactors versus their opponents.] I fully understand that even given max skills and an expensive implant, occasionally you still run into a fit that just won’t. I myself have used these modules to great success in the past and will continue to do so in the future and even recommend some fittings that do so.

All of this to say, “Congratulations logistics pilots for making it all fit. Large remote modules on a cruiser hull with a tank that survives and makes things so much easier for the other pilots to just shoot things.”

How To Fail

Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)

As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!

Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.

There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.

Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.

So what have we learned from all of this:

Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.

And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.

Guardian of the Week

32 feathers in my brand-new Indian headdress
32 new moons shining in 32 skies -(TMBG)

So finally I finish the long walk to Amarr Cruiser level V. It’s been a rather arduous journey toward a predefined goal that I set for myself and managed to talk another into. The completion of AC-V represents one of the milestone events that we discussed as being a relevant stepping stone along the heavily wooded path. It allowed for a bit of shiny in the midst of an otherwise long journey. Hopefully the last 10-15 days of training will fly by in comparison.

The upshot of AC-V is that it opens up the line of Tech 2 cruisers from the Empire for exploration and exploitation. Now I can fit and fly Her Highness‘ [no real devotion mind you - she just owns the flim-flamming Empire of Squirrels] logistics ships and can fly the Amarrian recons, but only with a Tech 1 fit. It seems rather pointless to fly a T2 ship with T1 gear. It’s rather analogous to giving special forces commandos Nerf® battle gear [That's another post!]. The T2 remote armor repairers and energy transfers will find a use, and only become more so as soon as I wrap up training for Logistics IV.

So I hit the shops and find a sweet deal on a Guardian that someone was trying to dump in Lonetrek [Amarr ships are cheaper in the State?] and flitted over to pick it up. After picking up the ship, I used some fairly ugly, low-meta, named, mission looted, gear to fit a tank on it for transport to my main hangar. I flew it quickly as I could from gate to gate, desperately hoping that anyone looking to bite into a yummy T2 cruiser would prefer ganking a Hulk to my new shiny. The trip was uneventful and I was able to even snap a couple of touristy images from the camera drones.

The whole exercise might be one in pointless futility unless I can settle on a more tanky fit that I think will allow for WH survival. Maybe the dual Guardian-lock could survive incoming Sleeper fire given the higher resists. If any of you have used Guardians in fleets against the wormhole denizens, I would be interested in your thoughts about what to slap on it.

Obligatory Monthly Update

Ouch! I usually add a title after I’ve written something up. It stems from a long habit of writing without titles and basing them off of either the content that has been produced or some obscure, arcane reference made in the article that is only tenuously tied to the rest of the content and thus only understood by my psyche and perhaps the asteroids that I spend so much time talking to [apologies to the gas clouds, I've just been busy lately]. However I thought that perhaps I ought to stop and take stock of the last month or so of output and see what I can learn and where we’re headed as well. Back to the title; I thought perhaps after adding it that it might appear like I only manage to post information monthly, but upon review realize that it only seems like that because I’m sad that I just don’t get more up there for you. Thus, I will mix in some information you might be interested in about my activities along with some information that you might be interested in about the statistics related to my postings.

[caption id="attachment_319" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Visits"]

[/caption]

I had been trying to get the WordPress Stats plug-in to work for several months, but managed to repeatedly get results of zero visits a day [sorry Mom, I know you were reading!] and once I even had -4. I’m not sure what happened, but as of September 13th, the whole contraption started reporting visits as well as the other reference information. I wouldn’t have even noticed that, but for a mis-click on “Blog Stats” instead of “Dashboard”. So I started perusing the results and checking back from time to time. There were several surprising things that I just wasn’t expecting when I started looking back at the visits, searches, references and onward traffic. I printed the daily views graph all to include in the post and quite by accident the median daily post number was highlighted.

It seems that for the half of September that I was able to get statistics for I managed to get 674 visits. I have to admit a certain amount of joy in this. I fully expect that half of that was Mom trying to see if I had finished training for a Command Ship yet. The average number of visitors was 39 and the median was 32. If those just seem like random numbers to you, let me put it into perspective. I didn’t know of more than four people who had visited the site and to find out that nearly 8 times as many visits had occurred as shiny [please help me with the illusion and don't mention unique page views, etc].

Another odd number I’d like to point out is the number 1. Apparently that is how many of the same search results led to my page being located and served. At no point in the last 17 or so days did people search for same terms to find my page. Again, the number doesn’t mean anything. I just like things that are different.

Posting about fittings and ore prices appeared to be my niche, without really trying to hit anything in particular. I have no intention of trying to replicate something you can find somewhere else like the fittings of BattleClinic or Scrapheap. They do fittings better to a certain degree, but they also aren’t the one in my ship and have little to lose by suggesting an alternative that may or may not work. I appreciate their feedback, but also like the fact that my fittings are my own.

For the postings ore prices, I have noticed that they have been steadily coming down across the board as I update the page. I don’t have enough meta-data to extrapolate anything as interesting as causality [a slippery, dangerous area to tread into with the best of information], but I really am kind of surprised. I don’t rely on ore as the primary means for my income as much as I once did and only sell a Charon-load or so a month of tritanium these days.

Finally, as I realise this post is nearly as long as my skill plan for a carrier, I’ll wrap up with some training thoughts.

Learning skills suck, but boy am I glad I have them. For now I’ll lump them in the same category as whiny pvp pirates who can’t handle changing mechanics, I’d rather not deal with them, but I’m glad they are there to provide more depths and aspects to the universe I love to swim in. Train them well and they will change your world.
Support skills does not mean the ability to fly an industrial ship full of capacitor charges. Train electronics, engineering, WU/AWU [I hate you too!], science, mechanics, navigation. Just because there isn’t another module or battleship attached to the skill doesn’t make it worthless. I know none of the readers would fly without having these trained, but share with your new corp-mates.

Training for a command ship has actually been a really gratifying long wait. It is a destination that becomes so much more along the journey. By the time I finish up the training for the command ships I will also have gained the ability to fly logistics and heavy assault ships along the way. In point of fact, after the first command ship, it will only take about 3 weeks to fly any other race’s set of logistics, HACs and command ships. I will still need to cross-train for the weapons systems, but the broad, hit-or-miss, seemingly random training to this point is actually paying off at this point.

I believe in doing things well if I can. Training something to level V is not a sign of weakness or stupidity. Ok, it’s not always a sign of an idiot, the author might well fall in those categories.

Ok, I’m done till next month. [Ok, really I'll probably try to post something tomorrow but will fail miserably, feel bad about it, mope for two days and then rinse and repeat until next month rolls around.]

Through the Veil

And so it happens. There is the past that is always with us. There is the present that is always running away from us. And finally there is the future that never quite manages to get here. There will always be another ship to build, another system to swim, another skill to train, et cetra. From my past I have trained to be a good scientist. For the present I am working on a few small projects, but the future draws my eyes to the misty veil of time. What then shall I do and where shall I go? Do I need this or that skill to get it done and how best to proceed in that direction? The future is always full of questions.

One of the things that has changed radically within the universe that we all swim through is the way new capsuleers join us. As technology has improved and the cloning and pod-pilot technology matured, we arrive at our current place where not only can you improve yourself towards any desirable end, you can also improve and train in what would seem like no direction at all. Now a pilot can not only improve her ability to learn skills that improve her ability to pilot ships that improves her ability to learn/earn/kill/thrill, but that same pilot can utilize the new technology available to rearrange the very fabric of the brain to enhance certain basic attributes or reduce others.

The veil around my own future has grown quite thick, and I am left without real pictures of what it will look like. There have been some things that I have always wanted to do, but given the lack of direction, I let them wander. I also know that sitting here in this present and expecting to get a clearer view of the future will never cause the past to go away or said future to become clearer. I have decided then, to walk off into that veil of mist. I have been to the new technology, and drank deeply of its mind altering draught. I am now as balanced in ability as any and only break down and cry a little about my slightly slower skill training in science on days that end in “Y”.

Moving Forward Through Time

Greetings from the past. I have arrived here to continue what was begun with a previous post on perspective. I wanted you have some background as I looked back at some of the things that have been going on lately, as well as what will happen in the future.

To some extent, we are all fellow time travelers. We do not exist here and now, independent of our previous self or actions. No matter how much we would like to be unassociated with what we might have done, or reconnected to a prior success, we are temporal creatures, bound by our own definitions and limitations of time. Now that was an incredibly long way to say, we can’t change the past and must proceed to the future while living in the now.

I have made some questionable decisions in my past. I live with the ramifications and know that my ships will someday all swim with a captain that has made those same mistakes in her past. But the ships all keep swimming. They have no mistakes made, no past memories, no baggage brought forward. Her Abbadon swims in the same space that her Burst does. Thankfully your Typhoon doesn’t regret not getting the mission time bonus any more than my Drake does.

I studied long and hard to learn how to invent things and do it well. I managed to pick up a few ships along the way, but not nearly like others have done alongside me. Most of my corp-mates can fly battleships [and a few of them even know how to fit them], while I am very happy in a battlecruiser sized hull. I don’t have much ability to deal damage, but most every ship I fly can soak a lot of it up. I have a lot of my training invested heavily in science and I have loved every minute of it.

Some Perspective

From an early age, listening to my parents wax eloquent about the physics behind their Micro Warp Drives and the best way to insure success when inventing various tech 2 ships, I was hooked on science. I received my first home-datacore set when the rest of my playmates were still tinkering with frigate models. I was far from the only Achuran to be born to in Inventor enclave, nor the only one to like science and pursue that as a career. But on the other hand – I also had a great passion for the way the universe was knit together and was determined to understand it all!

I quickly graduated with advanced degrees in a broad range of science fields related to capsuleer endeavors and knew that to continue to learn and explore I would need to get out of Saisio and be able to visit the stars. I managed to barely scrape through training and prepare for the transition into the life of a “pod-pilot.” Don’t let anyone lie to you, the necessary pseudo-suicide, transneural burning scan to jump into the waiting pod-clone was painful [and it still is]. However, now I was free to swim through the stars in a super-massive space fish.

My parents, through good investments with and years of working for the megacorporation, Lai Dai, had managed to accrue a significant sum of interstellar credits and fitted me with a modest Bantam frigate and some direction to pursue. I headed for the stars and began working toward my dream as a free-lance inventor. I left the construction details to various station-side facilities, sales were done by other representative and I left the ship in the care of the knuckle-draggers. I knew how to fit a mean scanning ship or mine with the best of them, but even the thought of combat was something that was endured as a means to an end. To that end, I was spending every last ISK that I could generate on buying the skills to train and learn.

Where I Am

In a recent meme-sharing, eve-blog-wide, map-a-thon sharing session, many of us who post articles about their lives in the pilot’s pod, gave account of the places they’ve visited via the NeoCom map computer’s tracking of “Systems I’ve Visited“. For one reason or another, I skipped that part of my map and never managed to actually post anything about it. If you are interested in that still, you can look at the SIV link above and see the ground I’ve covered.

In an unrelated post, but similar theme, Godless Wanderer, recently posted a look at his skill training allocation in a graphical chart. This strikes me as a very similar meme. What are the skill breakdowns by size? Have you been spending your time in missiles or guns? Do you have support skills or just skimming along by the skin of your teeth? Where have you been?

[caption id="attachment_211" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Where I've Been [Training"]“][/caption]I’ve used both EveHQ and EveMON to track skills in the past and don’t really have a preference. I would most prefer a native client solution for the Mac, but would settle for a platform agnostic web version or similar. Having said that, I’m posting my current skill pie for your perusal. I don’t have anything to gain by hiding the numbers, so like the maps, you know where I’ve been. The extremely high imbalance toward Science is directly related to our current activities in wormhole space and the desire to get Tech Three production up and running.

Regardless of what I managed to get trained, there is always something else I want to do and no less than 4-5 new skills [plus several that need raising] to get it. I only wish EVE gave you more choices on what to train!

So feel free to jump on the bandwagon and share some of your skill distributions. I would guess that most of you probably aren’t so wildly disproportionate in your skill sets, but I could be wrong.

Too Many Wormholes

Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.

Old Business:

It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.

On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.

On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.

New Business:

The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.

For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].

We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.

So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.

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