EVE Evolved: Setting up your overview, part 2

In part 1 of this guide, I examined the usefulness of the overview system in EVE Online and explained the various customisation options available to players. In this final part of the guide, I look at the best ways to set up your overview for PvP, mission-running and a few other tasks. No matter what you do in EVE, this guide should offer some helpful hints and tips on getting the most out of this useful tool.

Default settings:
The default overview settings that exist when you first log in are less than optimal. They can fill your overview with extraneous information that make it difficult to find what you want. No matter what activity you're undertaking, you'll benefit from creating a new default settings list. With the overview settings menu open, click the "select all" button on the states tab. This will enable everything that can possibly appear on your overview, allowing you to manually deselect those things that are useless in your everyday life in space.

Read on for detailed instructions on setting up your overview for everything from mining to PvP.

Start by deselecting everything in the "Asteroid" section. Then in the "Celestial" section, deselect the options "Planet", "Moon" and "Asteroid Belt" as these are easily available through the standard right-click menu. To reduce clutter, deselect the options "Large Collidable Object", "Wreck" and all options with the word "container" in them. Unless you've got a penchant for collecting corpses, you can also safely deselect the "biomass" option without impacting your day to day activities.

Deselect the entire "Drone" section as seeing them on the overview doesn't really help. In the "NPC" menu, deselect everything except "Pirate NPC" and "Mission NPC". The "Entity" section is mostly fine but you should remove "Sentry gun" and "Billboard" from this list. To finish, deselect everything in the "Structure" menu. Your overview is now free from the major sources of clutter but if you ever see anything on your overview of a type that you don't want there, right click it and select the remove from overview option. Don't forget to save these settings so you can reload them later. The only difference between this setup and a mining overview is that for the mining overview you'll need to enable asteroids.

Missions:
The mission overview setup uses the default setup described above as a base. Load the default setup and open your overview menu to make a few tweaks. If you're doing missions or complexes as part of a co-operative gang, it will be helpful to enable the "tag" option in the columns tab. This allows you to see an alphanumeric tag that the gang leader has assigned to each enemy ship so that he can refer to them in an unambiguous manner.

If your ship uses turrets, turning on the "angular velocity" column will show how fast your turrets need to track to hit certain targets. Likewise, missile ships will benefit from turning on the "velocity" and "size" columns. This will let them know if a target is moving too fast or if its signature radius is too small to take significant damage from your missiles. Both of these will help you avoid wasting time and ammunition on targets that you can't hit.

PvP settings:

Unlike mission-running, your overview for PvP will not use the default base described above. The default base settings are there to ensure nothing useful is missed out but in PvP you only want to see your enemy on the overview. Seeing friendly or neutral ships on your overview could cause a friendly fire incident and additional clutter will make it harder to find your intended targets. Open your overview settings and press the "deselect all" button in the "types" tab to create a blank canvas to build your overview on.

In the stations in the "Station" section and then in the "Celestial" section, enable "Beacon", "Covert Beacon" and "Stargate". The beacons option will show cynosural fields and complexes that you may be asked to warp to by your fleet commander. Having stations and stargates on the overview is always desirable as having to fiddle with the clumsy right-click menu will slow you down when your fleet commander gives the order to align or warp to them. Faction Warfare players will also benefit from selecting "Landmark" and "Warp Gate". Finally, select everything in the "Charge" and "Ship" sections and you're done.

The most important section for PvP is the states tab in the filter window. As described in the first part of this guide, this section allows you to filter your overview by abstract states such as corp standing or fleet membership. Here you should select everything except those you don't want showing up. Deselect "pilot (agent) is interactable", "pilot has good standings", "pilot has high standings" and all of the "pilot is in your alliance/corporation/militia" options.

Appearance:

The default appearance options use a lot of small icons where coloured backgrounds would be more appropriate. Coloured icons have the benefit of showing in local and can be useful for quickly assessing the security of a system but they aren't as quick to spot on the overview. In this menu, select "pilot is a member of your corporation", "pilot is a member of your alliance" and all of the standings options. Another useful tip, as described in part 1 of this guide, is to select "pilot has security status below -5". This actually only shows if the target has a criminal flag that allows you to attack them and is be a very handy way to spot pirates in low security space.

If you're taking part in corporate wars and faction warfare, you'll want pilots you can shoot at to be obvious and distinct from those you can't. This is best done in the backgrounds tab of the appearance menu. Deselect all options here and then reselect the options "Pilot has security status below -5", "Pilot is at war with your corp/alliance" and "Pilot is at war with your militia". Next to these options, ensure that the background colour is red and anyone who shows up red on your overview will be a viable target.

Overview tabs:

One of the most useful additions to the overview over the years is overview tabs. This allows you to rapidly access separate overview lists that you might need without having to load new settings. If you want to concentrate on killing enemy electronic warfare, for example, you could save a separate overview configuration which shows only specialised electronic warfare ships and then add this to your overview as a tab. Other useful tabs include options to see only enemy drones and fighters or only enemy frigates.

To set up a new overview tab, open your overview settings and go to the "overview tab" section. Here you can create up to five separate tabs that, when selected, will change your overview settings to match the selected configurations. Add your default setup to the list and then create specialised setups for niche roles that you might need to switch to in an instant. One of the most useful features of overview tabs is that you can select a configuration in the "brackets" menu and this will hide items on the main screen that don't appear in the overview.

Summary:
The overview is one of EVE's most useful tools but like many aspects of EVE, it's complexity means that a lot of newer players struggle with it and don't get as much out of the UI as they could. I hope this guide has helped explain the various ways the overview can be used to best effect.