For starting, you need to pick a good race:
Caldari- The easiest by and large to use. They use Missiles and hybrid weapons mostly. You don't need to train a whole lot of skills to be pretty much set with these guys, so they give you an accelerated start. Allot of their ships are also consistent, missile ships generally shield tank and hybrid gun ships usually armor tank, which makes it easy to specialize.
Gallente- Probably second easiest, they come with Drones and Hybrids. These guys were my favorites because drones are scary as forget in Pvp. Drones were also infinitely useful and easy to use in missions, and the skills to them could be trained up within a month to make them into tiny monsters. Gallente come with a few good drone ships, and hybrid weapons are so-so. Their tanking is all over the place though, so it's difficult to specialize in tanking which means more training time.
Amarr- Lasers, golden ships, and they usually shield tank. These guys are more difficult simply because they need a stuff-ton of Engineering skills to meet the capacitor needs of their lasers, since they don't use ammo. Still and interresting bunch.
Minmattar- The hardest, longest training race. Don't pick these guys unless you want to do some Pvp, and wait 3 years straight to do it. They use, get this, projectile turrets, missiles, and armor tanking, sometimes shield tanking, need a stuffload of mechanics skills, engineering skills, targeting skills, navigation skills, it just goes on. They're jacks of all trades but masters of none basically, atleast until you max out all their skills. The advantage is their ships are fast as forget so they are amazing at ganking and guerrilla warfare. One of their tech 2 cruisers, called the Vagabond, used to be a huge menace because, simply put, no one could catch it. It was too loving fast and unless the pilot forgeted up it was all but unbeatable. But again, Pvp is a humongous bitch in this game so hopefully you'll stay clear.
What bloodline, stats, whatever you should look out for:
- All the stats except charisma are important, especially intelligence and precision for guns, ship skills, and other important knick nack skills.
- Try to get an alignment that will give you level 4 frigates right off the bat, so then it will be really easy to get into a destroyer, and then a cruiser without having to wait 4 days for the loving frigate skill to train up.
This game is really loving harsh on newbies, but some advice for staying alive:
1- If you die, you lose your ship. Permanently.
2- Stay away from low security systems (0.4 and below), otherwise you'll get ganked.
3- Don't try to PvP, don't even bother. You'll be going up against people with Tech 2 ships with around 2 years-worth more skills then you, and 2 years more game experience as well. You can't beat them, so stay in high security space.
4- If you gotta warp out during a mission, do it.
Then, for making money:
*- When you get named equipment, check the market to see whether it's valuable and if so, where you can safely go to seel it for the best price. You'll be finding guns that are literally worth your entire ship, so it's important to check this. They don't give enough of an advantage to risk using yourself unfortunately.
1- In the beginning, a little bit of mining. You'll need to get a better ship to run missions with, so pick an asteroid field and start mining. Reprocess the ore and sell the minerals, OR sell the ore itself. It depends on what the demand is for either and how badly you'll get screwed if selling one or the other by the buyers. Then buy a mining frigate as soon as you get enough money, fit it with as many mining lasers as you can (the good ones, not civilian crap) and mine until you get enough for the best or second best attack frigate.
2- Missions. Kill missions, when you look in the right places, will give you tons of money both directly and in equipment. You'll be able to net yourself a cruiser within a week doing missions.
3- You can safely run level 1 and 2 missions with a destroyer, although level 2s get much harder so you might need to get into a cruiser for them. A battlecruiser runs level 3s, and a battleship runs level 4s.
What you should train:
- If you decide on keeping the game for half a year, train learning skills. No, seriously, do it. Max them up to the 4th level of the advanced learning skills. They speed up the training of all your skills tremendously, in the end it's well worth it. Start with the Intelligence one (to speed up training of learning skills :P), then wisdom, then everything else EXCEPT charisma. Charisma's used in corporation management and some rare skills used to boost mission prizes, but it's just not worth the 15 day training time.
- Any time you need to train something else, hold off on Learning and train it. Only train skills up to a level absolutely necessary to use equipment.
In combat, what you need:
- A "web", or stasis field generator or whatever it's called. It slows down ships. Why is this good? In a fight, slower ships = easier to land hits. Webs are magical, and when you get into a ship with bigger guns you'll need to use a web to be able to hit the little guys.
- A rack of the SAME guns or missiles. This is important because guns will only work beautifully within specific ranges. Mixing artillery with autocannons is a terrible idea, because now your power is pretty much cut in half. Autocannons work well at short range, but miss everything at long range. Artillery miss everything at short range, but wreck stuff at long range. Stick with one or the other. Your question now is, well if I use artillery won't I be screwed once something gets too close? That's why you have a "web", you slow them down to a halt, burn away and shoot them simultaneously. You'll actually be landing hits at really close range with artillery this way, not the highest damage in the world but enough to murder things.
- Missiles are not all that range dependent in contrast. Some are short fly range and fire faster, some are longer fly range and shoot slower. The thing with missiles is, it does not matter how close the target is to you, you will consistently be hitting them and damaging them for the same crazy damage. THat's why missiles were a favorite, you don't need to worry about how fast you're going and in what direction, how fast the oponent is going and in what direction. All you need to worry about is the size of the ship and whether your missiles reach it.
That's pretty much it. Don't worry, this game has by far the biggest learning curve of any online game in existence so don't feel bad if it's overwhelming.
