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EVE Evolved: Fitting Amarr cruisers for PvP in Retribution
EVE Online's recent Retribution expansion overhauled many of the game's old PvP mechanics and rebalanced all of the tech 1 frigates and cruisers. These are the first ships new players get into when they start playing, and many found they just couldn't compete with more expensive ships in combat. In Retribution, the basic tech 1 cruisers have been buffed beyond all recognition and now stand a serious chance against battlecruisers and tech 2 ships. New players and veterans alike have found the updated tech 1 cruisers to be a lot more fun to fly and more effective in solo PvP and small fleet warfare. Two weeks ago, I started a new series of ship fitting guides with effective PvP setups for each of the four Gallente tech 1 cruisers. In between hilarious sessions of baiting gankers with my ECM Vexor, I've recently been been getting to grips with the updated Amarr cruisers. The Omen is now a fast tackler that can project damage over 25km, the Maller is a fantastic support DPS platform for fleet warfare, and the Arbitrator has become a great anti-frigate platform. Even the humble Augoror should now be a welcome sight in PvP fleets, repairing almost as much as a Guardian at only a fraction of the cost. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give new PvP ship setups for EVE's recently buffed Amarr tech 1 cruisers.
EVE Evolved: Preparing for the Inferno expansion
The Inferno expansion is set to launch on Tuesday May 22nd, promising a complete revamp of EVE Online's war declaration system and a whole host of new modules. If you're in a wardec corp, you'll need to make a few adjustments to the way you operate when the patch goes live. The minimum war fee will increase to 50 million ISK even if you're declaring war on a small corporation, making very small corps less-appealing targets. The fee increases based on the number of members in the target corp, but it doesn't start increasing until around the 130-member mark. If you want to get your money's worth, you'll be best off picking a target corp with 100-150 members or selecting very high-value small targets. Be very wary of wardeccing large alliances after the patch. While the previous war system swung in favour of the attacker, the new system has gone to the opposite extreme. Large corps and alliances are now significantly more costly and dangerous to declare war on, especially as the defender can now call mercenaries into the war at any time. Players have complained that the increasing war costs could be abused by getting all alliance members to add alts to the corp, but this would be a logistical nightmare to apply in practice and would increase fees by only a few hundred million ISK. If alt padding becomes a problem, CCP will undoubtedly step in and revise the fee structure. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the new modules and gameplay changes coming in Tuesday's Inferno expansion and give some tips on preparing for the patch.
EVE Evolved: Bringing back the glory days
In years gone by, exploring the unknown far reaches of the EVE Online universe meant setting a course for nullsec. With no way to install a permanent residence in the most lucrative far-off systems, players would launch dangerous expeditions into the deep with the hope of striking it rich. Nullsec was the only place to mine rare ores containing megacyte and zydrine, and piracy wasn't as common as it is today. For putting themselves at the risk of pirates, miners were rewarded with an income stream greater than that of any other profession in the game. It was a golden age in exploration that wasn't to repeat itself until March 2009's Apocrypha expansion opened 2500 hidden wormhole systems for exploitation. Things have changed considerably since those early days of EVE. Player-built starbases and outposts have transformed the face of nullsec, allowing alliances to build themselves an empire in the void. December 2009's Dominion expansion brought a complete revamp of the nullsec sovereignty mechanics, allowing alliances to upgrade their space but dramatically increasing the cost of system ownership. Despite all of these updates and improvements, over the past several years we have somehow lost a lot of what made nullsec great in its glory days. Local industry has been replaced by risk-free logistics, and nullsec's risky but rewarding mining profession is now greatly overshadowed by safe highsec mission-running. With a new iterative nullsec revamp scheduled to begin this winter, I use this week's EVE Evolved to speculate on what can be done to bring back the glory days of nullsec industry.
EVE Evolved: Research: Five top tips
In the past three weeks, I've covered the ins and outs of research in EVE Online, from Tech 1 blueprints and the Tech 2 invention system to Tech 3 and reverse engineering. In my nearly six years of playing EVE, I've delved into every traditional profession and picked up some valuable tips and insights on each one. Having been involved in every aspect of the Tech 1, 2 and 3 industries, I've built up a fairly complete picture of how the research portion of any industry interacts with its production lines. In this final part to the EVE Evolved guide to research, I give five top tips that I consider invaluable for anyone getting into research and industry. #5 - Chasing profit: To keep your profit margins high in any business, you'll need to adjust your choice of products frequently to keep up with what's recently profitable. The most important tool you'll ever have in any industry is a spreadsheet or application to calculate build costs for you. By updating the prices on your spreadsheet regularly, you can quickly spot which items are profitable to build and stay ahead of the curve. This is important because in some areas, like the market for Tech 2 modules, it can take as little as a week for an item to go from high profit to making a loss. In EVE's highly competitive markets, it's the most agile players able to stay on top of market trends who make the most ISK. There are several freely available applications and websites that can help with practically every industry but I've always found it useful to make my own spreadsheets. Skip past the cut for four other invaluable tips on reverse engineering chances, invention profit margins, predicting trends and more.
EVE Evolved: Research: Five top tips, page 2
The key is keeping in mind the relationship between each stage of your market's production chain and not just the ones you're involved in. For example, when the prices of certain advanced materials change, this has a slightly delayed knock-on effect to the Tech 2 component market and so to the build cost of certain Tech 2 modules. If you see a downward trend in advanced material prices, you could predict that the build costs of Tech 2 items that make heavy use of that material are about to drop.
EVE Evolved: Research: Reverse Engineering and Tech 3, part 2
To install a reverse engineering job, you'll need more than just the relic. A hybrid tech decryptor for one of EVE's four races is required to specify which race of hull or subsystem your blueprint will be for. For example, using an Amarr hybrid tech decryptor will make the subsystem or hull blueprint it produces an Amarr Legion one.
EVE Evolved: Research: Reverse Engineering and Tech 3
In the first two parts of this guide to Research in EVE Online, I covered the basics of Tech 1 blueprint research and the "Invention" system that allows players to make their own Tech 2 blueprint copies. The reverse engineering process used to make Tech 3 blueprints is a lot like invention except with a new set of materials, equipment and skills. Though the process used to create it will be familiar to inventors, the end product is a strange beast. Unlike Tech 2, Tech 3 isn't just a straight improvement over lower tech levels and doesn't use Tech 1 or 2 as a base. Instead, it's an entirely new technology used to make custom, modular ships. At the moment, the only Tech 3 products we have are the modular "Strategic Cruiser" class but more is planned for future patches. Tech 3 frigates are rumoured to be next on the development table and it's entirely possible that we'll see strange new Tech 3 modules thrown into the mix too at some point. In today's part of this bumper guide to research, I look into EVE's newest addition to the researcher's repertoire as I examine Tech 3 and "Reverse Engineering". I'll look at how it all fits together to make a finished product, what's required to get involved and best practices for staying profitable in what has become a very competitive marketplace.
Winterblink: asset control and consolidation in EVE Online
Warp Drive Active podcaster Winterblink is a man who's got everything, apparently. And too much of it, scattered throughout his hangars in New Eden. It's a common problem in EVE Online, particularly for players who roam a lot throughout the galaxy. Mission runners, ratters, and adherents of most any trade or livelihood in the game accumulate a lot of random assets, individually of low worth but which can hold substantial value when seen as a whole. Unfortunately, what Winterblink describes in his blog gets even worse when a player uses containers to organize their possessions by category across multiple stations. The contents of those containers cannot be viewed remotely; one has to be docked in that particular station to see what's inside. Winterblink decided he couldn't handle the clutter anymore and shared the most efficient way he's found to deal with it all, step-by-step. He also had a good idea about having a container that only has the modules for his preferred ship fittings. Slowboating all over New Eden to consolidate his assets worked out for Winterblink. But this writer found that the negligible value of his junk and the time lost consolidating it wouldn't be worth the effort, and opted to ruthlessly destroy a fair amount of it, rather than collect and reprocess or resell the odds and ends. The slash-and-burn approach works for Tech I modules, but once ships and Tech II of anything enter into the picture, Winterblink's way is best. Especially in that he opted to reprocess the materials rather than trying to sell them all on the market.
