Aeon's EVE

My Lone Wolf Devoter contest ist closed, and I am happy to announce the winners! You will get your prizes via contracts. Thanks a lot to all for participating!

A note on ratings: I reviewed each fitting thoroughly, and rated each in the following areas:

- Global rating, 10 points (how well thought out it is)
- PvP rating, 10 points (how well it would behave in PvP)
- PvE rating, 10 points (how well it behaves in PvE)
- My liking, 10 points (how much it appeals to me)

The final rating is a rating on 10 points based on the total of these areas. Seeing that each fit is either PvP or PvE, a 10/10 score is not possible, that’s why some of the ratings here may seem low.

1st Place:
Roosterton’s “Kickass buffer solo Devoter”
Category: PvP
Scored 7,00 points

2nd Place:
Hacra’s “Gankalicious”
Category: PvP
Scored 6,50 points

3rd Place:
Jackie Fisher’s “Devoter LOL Solo”
Category: PvP
Scored 5,50 points

4th Place:
Superted’s “Solo PvE”
Category: PvE
Scored 5,25 points

5th Place:
Ashram Starkiller’s “Devoter for Aeon II”
Category: PvE
Scored 5,00 points

The biggest penalties I gave were for the use of capacitor boosters. As a lone wolf, you are often venturing out far from anything. I know it is common in PvP fittings, but boosters should not be required for the normal operation of the ship’s modules. You have a ship that does not need to carry ammo, and you add a worse kind of ammo

Some statistics:

Biggest buffer: 93.488 HP, Roosterton’s “Kickass buffer solo”
Fastest MWD ship: 1798 m/s, Rasael Wolf’s “Solo”
Fastest AB ship: 465 m/s, Xe na’s “Solo Piracy”
Most agile: 2,1 secs, Roosterton’s “Kickass buffer solo”
Highest damage: 307 DPS / 793 Volley, Roosterton’s “Kickass buffer solo”
Highest defence: 702 HP, Xe na’s “Solo piracy”
Highest resists: 87,8% omni, Roosterton’s “Kickass buffer solo”

Naturally I was excluded from the contest, but I thought I would share my personal fitting anyway for those interested. It is a PvE fit optimized for exploration and wormholes. Previously I used a Zealot for this, but the Devoter has a slot layout that allows you to do more. Especially tankwise, it is perfect for making a good omni defence:

Devoter fit for wormholes and exploration:

[Devoter, Wormholes and Exploration]
Imperial Navy Medium Armor Repairer
Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Capacitor Power Relay II
Armor Thermic Hardener II
Armor EM Hardener II
Imperial Navy Heat Sink

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I


Full specs:

Defence: 88.8% omni resists, 333 HP/sec
Damage: 252 DPS / 715 Volley
Speed: 254 base / 1384 m/s with MWD
Cap stable with MWD and Analyzer off
2 Minutes cap with MWD on and Analyzer off

This is ideal for running highsec complexes and class 1/2 wormholes, although in wormholes I would replace the heat sink with a third energized nano membrane to be on the safe side. You can scan, salvage, hack/analyze, tackle, tank and kill in one neat package.

I will venture out and say you cannot find better for this task short of upgrading to a command ship (provided you only use lasers, when able to fit missiles this may be different).

Zealot fit for wormholes and exploration:

[Zealot, Wormholes and Complexes]
Imperial Navy Medium Armor Repairer
Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
Armor EM Hardener II
Armor Thermic Hardener II
Imperial Navy Heat Sink
Damage Control II

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I


Full specs:

Defence: 86.4% omni resists, 294 HP/sec
Damage: 217 DPS / 447 Volley
Speed: 261 base / 622 m/s with AB
Cap stable with AB off
7 Minutes cap with AB on

As you can see, even if the Devoter is not overly superior to the Zealot in pure tank and gank numbers, it allows you to fit one additional midslot module and a microwarpdrive instead of an afterburner. The additional turret is nice of course, but the Zealot’s bonuses make up for that.

Now I have to decide whether to fit the ship for PvP with Roosterton’s fit, or for Wormholes

UPDATE: Contest closed! Winners have been announced.

Before we get to the heart of the matter, a little background. About two years back, I bought a Devoter via trade because it was a good deal and I knew it was not a scam. It was fully fitted and I was thinking of reselling it for a small premium. The ship was damaged however, so I could not create a contract for it. To make matters worse, the station did not have repair facilities and I was a few months off actually flying the thing. In short, the ship was not going anywhere because I did not want to repackage it and lose the rigs.

Two years later, Aeon finally has the skills to fly one and the ship is nowhere to be found anymore. I do not know/recall what happened to it, but the fact is it disappeared without a trace. I was not going to let that stop me, so I bought a brand new one. This is where you come in: I need a good fitting for the ship, Battleclinic only has fleet fittings and the official forums are infested by trolls. I thought why not try a contest instead… Let’s see

The contest

What’s the challenge? Well, I want a lone wolf fitting. I know the ship is designed for fleet ops, but I am a hardcore solo player and I want to use it on my own, without any wingmen at all.

These are the rules:

• You may use any T1, T2 and Faction module
• You may use any rig
• You may not use any implants
• You may not use any deadspace or officer gear
• NO fleet-related fittings! Solo only
• Create a fit with EFT, paste your fit in comments (use EFT’s copy to clipboard functionality)
• For easier comparison between fits, use the All Level 5 template
• Write a short description of how the fitting is meant to be used
• Any additional details like optimal skills is apreciated but not mandatory
• Contest closes noon on monday, 17th may 2010. I will post the results in the afternoon the same day.

Note: any comments about using the Devoter for anything else than fleet ops being idiotic I will just delete, so don’t even bother.

Rewards

1st place:
An Abaddon Battleship, worth about 120 Mil

2nd place:
A Harbinger Battlecruiser with 3x CCC rigs fitted, worth about 30 Mil

3rd place:
A Jaguar OR Wolf Assault Frigate , worth about 20 Mil

4th place:
An Ocular Filter Standard implant (+4 perception), worth about 20 Mil

5th place:
An Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ AX-1 hardwiring (+3% turret tracking) OR an Inherent Implants ‘Lancer’ G1-Epsilon hardwiring (+3% large energy turret damage), worth about 20 Mil

The jury will be myself and I will rate entries on their originality but also the potential of actually using the fit and doing something with it.

Let’s see those fittings

When I had the idea to integrate a preview of EVE ships in my blog gimmick ShipsQuickinfo, I had a look at what is out there, and very quickly realized that would not cut it. So I did what I always do, which is to overdo it outrageously. A single view of a ship is not enough in my eyes: to get a good idea of the ship you are looking at in a static image, you need more than one angle. I decided I would need three views: front, side and rear.

What ensued was a screenshotting session that lasted about a month on and off. Using the ingame preview window, I made three separate screenshots for every ship in the game – excluding the ones I did not have access to, namely the tournament prize ships and private/test CCP ships. Needless to say, post-processing was the biggest part. I had to rename all the screenshots, then manually edit each one to remove the labels the game adds. After that I was able to automate the rest with Photoshop batch processing.

Now that I am done there are 245 ships total, so 735 individual screenshots for the three views per ship. I am really happy with the result, as the blog gimmick is a lot more useful with the screenshots. Plus, they are unique – and that’s what I was aiming for. But the screenshots bundle offers a lot more possibilities, and I am eager to try out a few ideas.

To see how I use the screenshots in my blog, click on any of the following ship names:

Daredevil
Cruor
Paladin
Dramiel
Federation Navy Comet
Brutix
Crow
Gold Magnate
Keres

This gimmick is free to use for your site, the libraries are open source. You can download it from the ShipsQuickinfo project page.

And finally, the eye candy These are the 245 ships:

UPDATE: I have uploaded a much larger version on my DeviantART page.

Note that the complete screenshots package is for sale for ingame currency. The format is a DVD with all 6 GB of post-processed screenshots as layered PSD files in 1632 x 1020 resolution. Contact me ingame or via email for details and pricing.

Reintroducing the website and blog gimmick Aeon’s ShipsQuickinfo: display detailed information about EVE Online ships directly inline without redirecting your users off-site. Now with custom ship screenshots with three views for each ship: front, side and rear. The script is made of a PHP backend and javascript clientside support.

Abaddon
Widow
Tengu
Hulk

Features for v1.5

- New compact tabbed interface
- Custom ship screenshots bundle (separate download)
- The popups are now draggable to arrange them if you have several open
- Live set of examples to get you started
- NEW! Generate the required HTML <head> tags for your site (demo)
- Bundled ship data files, no database required
- Possibility to configure the script to use a live MySQL database
- Several issues fixed, see the changelog

Ship screenshots

The screenshots bundle available as a separate download is custom: I took the screenshots myself using the ingame preview feature. A few ships are still missing, included for now are the T1, T2 and T3 ships. I am still working on the faction ships, those will be added later.

I spent a lot of time on the screenshots, so the bundle you can download for free has a small watermark. If you want to have a watermark-free bundle, you can buy it for 15 million ISK ingame currency. The bundle of original screenshots is also for sale.

Download

You can download the script from the project page:

http://aeonoftime.com/EVE_Online_Tools/Ships_QuickInfo

There is also a live demo that you can play around with:

http://aeonoftime.com/EVE_Online_Tools/Ships_QuickInfo/demo

Upgrade notes:

For v1.4 users: just replace all files. No changes in the configuration file.
For v1.3 users: replace all files, create a new configuration file with the provided template.
For v1.2 and prior: the best is to install it from scratch.

I had an idea lately. I wanted to add ship thumbnails to the script, but I did not want to use the same old CCP-sponsored thumbnails yet again. What ensued was a pretty crazy screenshot shooting session using the ingame preview window. Over 600 fullscreen 1600 pixel wide screenshots, with three views for each ship (front/side/rear).

After some post-processing to crop them and remove any leftover overlays from the game client with some hardcore manual editing as well as photoshop batch editing, I had a nice set of neutral screenshots that I could use. From there, I built a thumbnail previews addon package for the script that you can download below along with an update that adds the preview feature as well as some additional interface tweaks. Enjoy!

P.S. for webmasters: If you are interested in the full resolution screenshots bundle without watermarks, I am open to ingame offers. I will not offer a free download for it, for that it was way too much manual work.

Version highlights:

• Updated layout with tabbed interface
• Graphical preview for most ships (except pirate and faction ships, more to come)
• Draggable popups so that you can arrange them freely
• Added more ship specifications
• Additional failsafes and error checks
• Improved installation guide

Download | Live demo

What is it?

It is a script that can transform links to ships so they display inline information about the ship. It has a PHP backend (to retrieve ship information) and a clientside script (to display the info as tooltips) built on prototype. Some examples:

Abaddon
Chimera
Providence
Avatar
Concord Army Battleship

Note: Click on a link to open the tooltip. In case javascript is not available or the page has not been initialized, the original link will be used.

Upgrading from a previous version

Download the archive, and extract it over the existing files (replacing them). If you are upgrading from v1.2:

• add the new configuration parameters INSTALL_URL and USE_PREVIEWS to your config file (See the ShipsQuickinfo_Config-dist.php file)
• modify the javascript include for scriptaculous in your site’s header to read “[your_path]/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder,dragdrop” (add “,dragdrop”)
• clear the cache/ folder so that the HTML content will be refreshed

If you have made adjustments to the ShipsQuickinfo.js file (like modifying paths), you should back it up beforehand and mirror your changes back in afterwards.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, I recommend a clean install.

There is all the reason in EVE Online’s world to have the blues as a new player. You are looking at years of training for that shiny ship you want, and it seems that you will never be able to reach the heights of players that started years before you. While this is mostly true, it will not spoil the game for you – unless you cannot put it out of your head. If you can not, EVE is not for you – or you need to invest a lot of real money to buy an established ingame character. I do not recommend it, for the same reasons than giving a new driver a Ferrari is also a very bad idea.

Nowadays we are used to getting what we want almost immediately. EVE is a lot about patience, so it does not come naturally to sit around waiting for skill X to complete. The thing is, do not wait for it to complete. I can not stress it enough: play the game. In EVE you do not have to kill NPCs by the thousands to advance, it is done for you in the background. Even if you play just two hours per week, your character will learn new tricks on his/her own.

The way I see it, CCP are doing a pretty good job on the new player experience. The tutorials are really good, and the new starter missions are so interesting that even the older players run them. The key is to focus on what you can do with your current skills. If you try to take down older players in PvP it is true that you can succeed, but you will very likely fail. Choose your targets intelligently, be informed about what the different ships can do and which weaknesses you can exploit. Brute force will only work later on in the game, as a new player you have to put your brain into top gear. That is a good thing too, as it will give you the keys to understand how the game works.

Depending on what type of player you are, from the PvP addict to the avid explorer, no matter what your skill level, you will always find enough game content to have fun. Of course you will moan about those 30+ day skills, everybody does once in a while. Personally I have always had enough to do while skills were training – sometimes you just have to switch to something different for a while. Naturally you want what the skill you just started can give you as fast as possible, but you already have all you need to pass the time.

To conclude, in my opinion it all rests on how much you are willing to invest to keep playing the game. Some players I encountered did not find what they were seeking for, spending a lot of time searching for the kick they needed and never really finding it. Remember that it is supposed to be a game, if what you can do as a new player is not enough, faction battleships or capital ships will in all likelihood not fill the craving you have. I may be a special case – I have not been bored of the game yet after three years… There always seems to be something to do, and there is a lot of gratification in the gradual evolution of your character(s).

Tips:

• For fun’s sake, try to broaden your skills so you can do more stuff even if not well: that way you can try out different things and train up those areas you really like.
• To get the most out of the skills system, do not use the certificates – they will make you train more than you really need. Use tools like EVEMon to get a bigger picture.
• Always start with the minimum requirements for that new class of modules or ships you want to try out. You can always train it up further later.
• Level 5 skills are for noobs. No, really. Train those skills to 5 that will really give you a benefit. Especially early on, only train skills to 5 if they are a requirement for something else. Optimization is for later, and should be targeted at key skills for your playstyle.
• Relax. Don’t get too involved. If you get too tied up in the game it will end up not being fun anymore.

Note: I am not trying to defend CCP’s skilling system, just to give some leads on how to cope with it. My personal opinion is that while being a great concept, it reeks of artificial lifespan in its current implementation. But that is another story.

Personally I don’t care much about mining micromanagement. Even if an asteroid only has 700 units left, I just let my mining turrets complete their cycle. My Hulk does not even have a survey scanner on it. Blasphemy, right? Well I do know better, even if I do not do it that way. If you want to micromanage your mining operation, you need a survey scanner so you can see how much ore is left in the asteroids around you. If necessary, that allows you to adjust the cycles of your mining turrets to avoid losing precious cycle times on those that only have a few units left.

To be able to do that precisely, you have to know how much a single cycle will yield of the ore you are mining. Let’s say you are mining Veldspar: with my current setup, I get about 17.000 units per cycle. So if you divide the dial of your mining laser into sections, you can determine how much that turret has mined so far. That way you will know when to manually stop the turret so it only mines the 7500 units that asteroid has left in it. Of course that’s the hardcore micromanagement for those who want to pick a belt completely clean. The lazy micromanagers (not sure that makes sense) use the survey scanner to pick the big asteroids and move on to the next when they do not have a full cycle of ore left.

We are the hardcore micromanagers though! However, because calculating on the fly gets tedious real quick and as paper is not an option (think green ), here is a little tool I built that will do it for you.

Just enter the total yield per cycle of your turret in the field under the dials and it will display the according values. You can also change the name of the ore in the dials, I included some of the most common ones.

Here is a direct link to the flash file, that way you can use it fullsize. Here in the blog I had to downsize it a little. Suggestions and requests welcome!

P.S. Yes, that is a logistics ship tailing the Hulk in the screenshot. Better safe than sorry in some parts of the EVE universe…

“There is an empire within EVE Online, larger than anyone dares to admit. Its people live their lives in protected space, accumulating wealth beyond the dreams of mere mortals. They wage invisible regionwide market wars without ever undocking. From their unbeatable officer-fitted vessels, they organize raids against unsuspecting NPC ships, collecting bounties by the score.

Who are they? They are the Carebears.”

Hahahaha. I wish.

My question to the ongoing blog PvP regarding carebearism: how does being called a carebear affect you ingame?

My personal answer: The term carebear started out in EVE as being only mildly pejorative (“the real EVE is nullsec!”), but it has evolved into an insult. It is blatantly obvious that many players use the term nowadays as an easy means to infuriate players that see themselves as the “good” carebear type. The solution is just as obvious, and works with every insult known to man: ignore it.

Okay, I spent way too much time on this post already – I have a COSMOS mission waiting for me

Have fun guys n girls. In the end it is all about the fun. If your fun is blog PvP, by all means – continue. I am enjoying the ride during downtime

[EDIT] an old friend ingame gave me an interesting link to an Ultima Online cartoon featuring “Care Bear Land”. Carebears exist since the creation of MMOs, so chances are they will exist in eons to come. So will pirates and griefers in all likelihood, so I think it’s best to get used to the idea and just let things roll

This short guide will show you how to use EFT’s (Eve Fitting Tool) custom resist profiles. By default EFT calculates its defence rating based on a uniform damage distribution over all damage types (EM, Thermal, Kinetic and Explosive), but you can add profiles to see how well your ship fares against just EM damage for example.

We’re going to add the Guristas as a custom profile, they do Kinetic and Thermal damage. To get started, right-click the defence rating area in EFT:

Select “Edit custom profiles”, that will display a popup window. Add a new profile as shown, and enter a name for it (“Guristas” for example):

Now we can fill in the values for the damage. As far as I know the Kinetic and Thermal damage the guristas deal is spread fairly evenly, so we can split it up 50/50. It will vary from one NPC ship to another, but those values are okay for what we want to do. Here’s how my profile looks:

You can close the popup, the profile has already been added and saved. Now when you want to see the defence rating against the Guristas, just right-click the defence rating area again, and select your profile from the list:

That’s it. Once you have added all common NPC profiles you can switch between them very easily.

To avoid having to add everything manually though, I have a list here with the most common damage profiles – simply copy this list and append it to your EFT config.ini file.

DamageProfile=Gurista,0,570,3504,0
DamageProfile=Angel,480,0,719,3058
DamageProfile=Sansha,1945,1598,0,0
DamageProfile=Serpentis,0,1627,1320,0
DamageProfile=Blood raider,613,570,60,0
DamageProfile=Gallente federation,25,781,1127,0
DamageProfile=Minmatar republic,615,310,815,1633
DamageProfile=Amarr empire,1204,1349,0,0
DamageProfile=Caldari state,0,795,944,0
DamageProfile=EoM,0,618,1718,0
DamageProfile=Mercenaries,90,634,424,108
DamageProfile=Rogue Drones,86,91,281,964
DamageProfile=Sleepers,25,25,25,25

So you’re in low/nullsec and just a little paranoid? Good, paranoia is healthy in EVE in general. I recently had to run a few missions in lowsec, and it can be perfectly safe there in deadspace until someone scans you down and warps into your mission space. Mission runners usually know that feeling from highsec Ninja Salvagers that suddenly turn up out of thin air. In lowsec the motivation is a bit different though, so you want to know what’s going on – especially since scanning has grown a lot more popular lately.

The basics

First off, before jumping into the target lowsec system, check for a gate camp by opening your map (F10) then, in the world map control panel, go to “Star Map > Color Stars by > Statistics > Ships destroyed in the last hour”. Systems with ship kills will light up, and hovering over them with your cursor tells you how many ships were destroyed. One or two kills do not necessarily have to mean anything bad, so check for pod kills as well. Those invariably mean something is afoot. It may just be consensual PvP, but you are paranoid, remember?

No ship kills nor pod killings means it is pretty safe. You just need to be able to warp into the system and off into your deadspace area. If you do not want to leave anything to chance or want to confirm the target gate is clear, the next step is to scout out the system. Just use a shuttle, it is fast enough to avoid most trouble and does not make too big a dent in your wallet if you do get caught.

Spotting scanners

To detect someone scanning you, you need to know what tools they are using. With the new scanning system, you have to fit an Expanded Probe Launcher I, and use some Combat Scanner Probe I or Sisters Combat Scanner Probe I probes. Scanning down a ship is pretty much the same procedure as with scanning down a complex: you launch some probes, scan at the maximum range, and when you get a hit you incrementally reduce the scanning range of your probes until you get a 100% hit. To get a 100% hit on a ship, you usually need to go down to at least 2 AU scanning range depending on ship size. Ships like Exhumers or Freighters are very easy to scan down.

And that is the key: you know that to find your exact location, the pilot has to place some probes within at least 2 AU of your ship. From then on, it gets pretty easy: open the system scanner, set it to 360 degrees and 4 AU (598392000 km), untick the “Use Overview Settings” box and scan. If you see one or more combat scanner probes listed, it is time to think about leaving for a while or at least warp to the other side of the system to get the pilot off your trail. It takes a while to adjust the position of the probes from 4 AU until you get a 100% hit, so that should leave you enough time.

Note: If you see Core Scanner Probe I or Sisters Core Scanner Probe I in the list, do not panic. You cannot scan down ships with those, only complexes and the like. You are safe.

To sum up, the idea is to have the system scanner open, and periodically check for probes. Most of the time I have the system scanner set to the maximum scan range, and check if there are any probes in the system at all (no need to worry if no one is using combat probes). If there are, I reduce the range to 4 AU and wait to see if the probes appear at that range. It can but must not mean that someone is trying to find you, so just keep and eye on the scanner until they get closer and no doubt is possible anymore.

The good news is that there is NO OTHER way to find a ship in deadspace. Someone who scans you down can be in a cloaked ship, but a cloaked ship cannot find you without probing you down – just to eliminate some sticky rumours. Keep an eye open for probes and you’re almost as safe in lowsec than in highsec. Almost

[EDIT 20.08.09]: Make sure you also read Bel Amar’s comment below, he wrote about a technique some scanners use to try and hide their probing from their targets. It is good to know this technique exists, the big unknown is how many pilots have mastered it.

Understanding the mechanics

Scanning is a whole profession, so I can only encourage you to try it out for yourselves. It is not as profitable as mission running, but can be a lot of fun. There are a lot of tutorials and guides out there to learn how to use probes, and to do it yourself will give you an even better understanding of them. Even if the basics I told you here are quite enough to get by.

There is one additional tidbit that can be useful: To get a 100% hit on any object, you need at least 4 probes. So if you have your system scanner set to 4 AU and only have a single probe listed, you do not need to worry yet. The other pilot may be trying to scan something else down and one of his probes is in your area.

Fast range calculations

Google is your friend: you can convert almost any unit with the search engine. For example, to convert AU to kilometres to paste into the system scanner, search for “2 au in km“. Just change the “2″ to whatever you need.

Additional reading on probing

• My beginner’s guide
• Official Evelopedia Probing Guide, explains the mechanics quite well
• Probing Video Tutorial, good introduction material
• Combat Probing Video Tuturial, see how fast it can work

Sidenote

Yay, even with a separate header this time o/ I found a pretty cool video when I was searching for info on smartbombs – someone tried to replicate the effect of a Doomsday with smartbombs, the result was quite disco