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Phoenix Co-Operative's Beginners guide to Eve-Online

Welcome

The Phoenix Co-Operative is a corporation aimed at building up its member base from new or relatively inexperienced players. It was jointly created By Rogan Samish and Hanius Valm due to our interests in remaining in empire space, and in creating a corporation who's present and long term goals remain in secure (high sec.) space. Our reasons for undertaking this route is that we feel by doing this we will be able to formulate a closer knit and altogether more group orientated corporation. Above all we wanted a more relaxed environment to play Eve in, one where you could be AFK (away from keyboard), not have to be online for crucial operations, and just generally play solo if you wanted too, but still retain an option to play alongside fellow pilots if you felt you needed a change. The way we will try to accomplish this goal is basically by running fixed group events on certain days of the week [see below], these will in no way be compulsory, but will be there for anyone who decides they want to join in. Me and Rog are more than capable of running them solo regardless, so extra people would be an advantage but not essential. Saying that, we are also a corp aimed at making our new members as self reliant as possible, so in time when you have handled the ropes enough, if me and Rogan are not on that day for whatever unforeseen RL issue that comes up, we expect in time for everyone to be capable of organising group events themselves and not be to dependant on us. That said we are very approachable and don't be afraid to ask us any questions you have, however dumb they may seem. Remember, chances are me or Rog will have asked something similar ourselves at some particular time. Another goal we aim to try and achieve is to have our corp members as close to each other as possible. The reasons for this are simple, the closer everyone is together the more likely we will all want to work together. Therefore in a small way deciding to make this a corp for newer players allows us to give you advice on which agents to work for in order to have everyone based as close together as possible. Again, nothing is compulsory, but if you get stuck or need help it is a big advantage to have you corp members nearby. For this reason we have searched high and low for a relatively few number of systems nearby to each other that will provide us all with good quality agents of all Levels [see below] and good group mining belts. These systems will be based in very safe space where you will never have to venture anywhere too dangerous. But since a healthy balance of high sec space and low sec space exploration is key to making the most out of Eve we will also have a few systems marked out as staging posts for raids into low sec space where tougher NPC rats [None Player Character], and more valuable ores await you, and possibly so do player pirates Mwwaahaha.

Finally, it must also be said that just because we are a corp aimed at helping newer members become more experienced we do not want people to just consider us a stepping stone. As although we will always be a corp committed to helping newer members adjust to the complexities of eve in time we also want to become a Co-Operative of hardened Eve Veterans who have worked together since the beginning and continue to do so.

That said, joining us is not a lawful contract! It is only a game after all, so if you join, there will be no hard feelings at a later date if you feel that this corporation is not for you. Although we are hopeful that it will be. Kind regards, your joint CEOs:
Rogan Samish (Chief Industrialist) and Hanius Valm (Ex-special forces Military Advisor)

NB. below you will find a guide to help you find you feet firstly within our corp and secondly within Eve. Enjoy - I sacrificed an afternoon of Simpson's to write it :-P.

1. Group operations and solo resources within the Phoenix Co-Operative

As I mentioned above we are committed to try to provide our members with the best support network possible. Therefore we have opened offices within the follow systems:

All of these stations will have offices where you will be able to deposit stuff for either me or Rogan to refine or build for you. The important thing is that the maximum distance they are apart form each other is 6 jumps. Building, refining -- all sound confusing or daunting? Don't worry it will all become clear to you soon.

As well as this we will have staging posts in:

More coming soon, pending space exploration of systems.

Staging posts simply mean we will have a common station to dock in but won't own an office there. For me it simply means I have a stockpile of ships there fitted out for low sec space and a jump clone (like I said you are only a few pages away from enlightenment). The ratting and complexes are all one jump away or more form these stations based on the very fringes of high sec. We get in we have fun then we get the &*!# out.

Anyways this is a current list of the group activities we will try and run each week:

If you are curious about what production means for you, it means we will build ships and certain modules for you a lot cheaper than you will be able to buy them on the market place as ours will be without a mark up for profit. More will be explained below.

2. Basic Eve overview

Having given you all the information above I feel that it will suite us the CEOs interests and yours if I provide you with a basic overview of how to play Eve effectively. What's that I hear you say -- you have already completed the tutorials, well remember just because you passed your driving test didn't make you an excellent driver who knew everything. It came from experience, and the same applies here. I will impart this knowledge on you in a few simple stages. Oh and don't worry its not going to be rocket science, eve is a game that's hard to get to grips with at first but easy to understand once you have been around the block.

Firstly eve is foremost an economic simulator, don't get scared though that this means its all just boring maths, its not. It just allows for an infinitely complex game with many career choices. What I mean by this is that everything you see or use in eve was not simply spawned out of nothing, people have to mine the asteroids you see at belts, take the ore they receive for doing this and refine that into minerals and use these in combination with blueprints to build items and sell them on that market place you bought your first frigate from. Some items are simple to build others vastly complex. But luckily for you just like in real life you don't have to assemble your breakfast cereal yourself. There are people who can and will do this for you. Eve is a healthy mixture of combatants, Miners, industrialists, pirates, thief's, market analysts, freighter pilots, and just about any other carrier choice you can think off. Thus in essence you are not obligated to do anything you consider boring if you don't want to. Just remember though, which people happen to be the most wealthy and successful in real life. Celebrities don't count btw, in eve there are no heros only thousands of pod pilots all trying to make a living. Also there are no rules in eve, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want (except during downtime!, well you have to eat sometime). Our corp and thousands of player controlled corps and a few massive alliances of hundreds of corps are living proof. In that sense there are essentially two parts to the eve universe, empire and 0.0. Consider 0.0 freeform, no laws, no rules, no where is safe. You can quite literally get away with murder. It is owned by players and they are as brutal as they wish to be. At times this can be bloody fun, but it is also hard work and a lot of dedication goes into being there. Now in empire although people are still free to attack you just like they are in 0.0, two things stop them, one is the almighty warships of Concord (the police) and the four main factions that will come to your aid, and two is their security standings. These range from -10 to 10 for all the four factions and Concord. Concord standings will go up every time you kill badies, and faction standings will go up every time you run missions for them. The rule of thumb here is if you go below -5 for any of them ships from that faction or concord will attack you unprovoked as you are a wanted man. But don't worry you wont get to this stage accidentally. Another rule of thumb is that there is ten levels of space 0.0-0.4 is low sec and 0.5-1.0 is high sec, the higher the number the more concord or faction ships and turrets there will be to protect you. However the lower the number the more isk you stand to make form running anything equivalent, like missions or mining. When you get to 0.4 there are no ships only a few random turrets at stations or jump gates to help you out. By the time you get to 0.0 law no longer exists. Corporations can be human or computer run and it is only the computer run corps like Gallente navy that can provide you with missions. They also provide one other fundamental tool that keeps Eves market ticking over. Economic simulator remember. Within eve you will notice items that will have no significant value to you or your ships other than selling them for isk, for example cattle, crude oil, etc, these exist as NPC corps sell some of the and buy others at varying rates allowing you to exploit the trade index prices and make isk that way. It's simply just another career choice. Human run corps are just a creation of the games tools allowing people to make eve their own.

I know this is all basic to some of you perhaps but I am making sure to cover every basic angle.

Now that I've explained the political scene a little more its perhaps time to give you some useful usable info.

Tanking

(if you know this inside and out then skip this part)
There are four main damage types weapons can deal in eve, Electromagnetic, explosive, thermal and kinetic. Similarly your armour or shields and hull protect against these with varying efficiency, I think the basic % for shields is 0%, 60%, 20%, and 40% respectively. This is a simple calculation of how much of each shot your armour or shields will protect you against completely. There are varying ammo types to give you range or damage, a trade off exists between the two, more range less damage etc. However only two races can select exactly what damages they wish to do with turrets or missiles; those are the Minmatar and the Caldari. Gallente do thermal and Kinetic and Amarr do Thermal and EM. There are also different modules for your shields to beef up your resists, active and passive, active means they give you better resists but run on cap, passive give worse resists but don't use any cap. You can also either choose to increase your armour or shield hit points in total with some mods, this is the passive option again as it requires no cap, or you can actively repair them in a fight with mods, active and it uses a lot of cap. There is no significant better choice, either has the advantage in different situations, you will have to figure that out on your own. Thus you can see the advantage in a fight of having the right resist up high against certain races weapons and deciding on how much of your cap you want to dedicate to running shield or armour mods. Remember some turrets require cap to fire too, again only Caldari and Minmatar ones don't, and drones. However in regards to your next fight with a player you will never know who that will be so there is no one insta win setup. It is also to be noted that due to their limited choice of damage selection, both Amarr and Gallente have better drone bays, drones being able to be selected depending on which of the four damage types you want them to do. If you want to get familiar with their names, ie I know for certain that Hammerhead medium drones do thermal damage, I suggest you spend ten minutes browsing through www.eve-online.com and go through its item tab on the left here you will find detailed descriptions of every ship and item in eve in easy to navigate tabs.

These are the facts you will need to know for a basic fight, however numerous modules exist that you can equip at the expense of armour or shield mods to give you the upper hand. These include weapon disrupters, which lessen attributes of your enemy's turrets, ECM which stops them from being able to target completely and so on, warp jammers. Also some which go in high slots at the expense of Guns and missiles such as Nosferatus which steal enemy capacitor units. Thus there is never such a thing as basic fight in Eve. The only thing that will be fairly standard is missions. What I mean is this every mission will have standard rats that do specific damage and have specific resists, thus you can tank and choose your damage accordingly, a full list can be found in most peoples bios, including mine, or web pages, of what resists to fit against different factions and how to best kill them. For example guirisita NPC pirates are vulnerable to Kinetic damage and do Thermal and Kinetic themselves.

Low's, Mid's, Hi's and Rig slots, what do they mean (again skip if informed)

Every ship in eve has a varying amount of these and CPU and Power grid in which to fit things into them. Generally the bigger the ship the more high slots it has and race specific meds or lows. What I mean by that is armour items explained above go into low slots and shield items into meds. For example Caldari ships are designed to use shields not armour, read the bonus given to the ferox battlecruiser per Level trained. Of course you can fit whatever setting you want but unless you have found someway to exploit the system, other people using their slots and bonusess correctly will kill you very quickly. All items are basically fitted into these categories when deciding if you can fit them to your ship. Of course you can fit items that require frigate style amounts of CPU and power grid to your battleship if you want but people will laugh at you.

Although no ship can ever just fit the very best of everything as within every category of item there are tech 1 items (basic), 4 or so named variants, a tech 2 variant, and deadspace or Officer variants. These are put in order of better attributes but there is a trade off of more or less isk, CPU or power grid required, and skills needed. There is also the trade of between all the slot types as you will find some fittings just don't work, although skills can change this to some degree.

Thus I come to the end of my guide with two final headings: 3/ Ways to make isk solo in eve and 4/ Basic recommended skill books to train.

And if your bored of reading this then think about the afternoon I could have had watching Simpsons! Not long to go though I promise

3. Ways to make isk solo

There are many ways to make isk in eve, most of them I will leave for you to discover for yourself, partly because I cannot explain them through text effectively enough for you to be good at them, and partly because there are some things I think are better discovered for yourselves.

Missions

The meat and bread of most eve pilots base income, including my own. They start off small but keep this fact in mind -- in a two hour shift of running Level 4 missions solo I can make upwards of 30 Million isk. Agents can be found working for any NPC corporation, and whether they will offer you missions or not is a factor off your standing towards the corp they work for. See you own character sheet, standings tab to understand more. There are four Levels of agents and the jump to each Level although bringing more isk, gets harder on a very steep learning curve. To bring your standing up you can either buy the appropriate skill book, for example connections (highly recommended), or you have to run missions for a lower rung agent until someone higher up offers you a job. To see what agents you can work for in the entire eve universe click on the map tab on the left and when the eve universe map loads find the tab that allows you to display agents. All the shiny green dots are systems that have agents in them that will allow you to work for them and their corporation. Hover your mouse over them to see exactly what station they are in then either right click on the solar system and select make waypoint or open up people and places and types the name of the system into the search tab and click search and then when the list with hopefully one name pops up right click and do the same. Then just take a mental note of which station you have to select to warp to when you arrive in that system, then when you arrive either manually or on auto pilot, dock and there you have it. His name should be on the right under agents in the station window. However you don't wanna just be doing missions blindly then randomly searching the stars for a better agent do you? If your answer is yes, then ignore this helpful bit of info. When docked at the station owned by the corp that you are currently running missions with under the command of their lowliest of agent, look to the right top corner and you will see a nice blue info button next to their emblem, click it and you will be shown a plethora of info about them. You can also whilst in space do this by searching for them under people and places under the corporations heading then typing their name in the search bar next to it. When the list pops up again just right click and select info. What this will give you is as well as a tab listing what that corp buys and sells on that theoretical economic market we discussed before is an agents tab; under this you will see various headings such as security, transport, mining, exploration, internal security, recon, etc. Don't panic all these stand for is a different percentage of what types of missions they will offer you each time you ask for one, ie// security is 95% kill 5% hauling, whereas mining agents will offer you 60% mining, 30% hauling and only 10% kill, the real figures can again be found in my bio by right clicking on my characters face and selecting info or through people and places, getting an idea of how useful that tab is? Anyways under each one of these headings agents ranging from Level 1 to Level 4 will reside telling you exactly how much standing you need to get with their corp before they will use you. Be warned not all corps have Level 4 agents that allow you to do mostly kill missions so stick to the corps that sound like they will like Gallente navy, or Caldari Navy etc.

Mining

Simple find a ship that has the most turret hard points you can find, buy the best mining lasers you can buy and head out to your local roid field, found by right clicking in space away from the station you just undocked from, and sit there whilst your cargo hold fills up. This will happen fast, and it would be stupid to simple head back and dock every time this happens. Instead why not buy yourself an industrial hauler; they are cheap to begin with, e.g. the badger (see what skills you need to fly your own races by right clicking on it looking at the skills tab duh!). My advice though if you take it is this train for the Gallente one. And at this point I may finally remind you that even though you're a Gallente or an Amarr character in the early stages of the games you can change your mind at anytime. You can even train to fly every ship in the game from each race, but a certain amount of logic will tell you that if you do this you will be the jack of crappy trades and beaten by all who specialise. Specialising in one race is a good idea at first but when you get older like me you might like the look of another races Battleships and then you have to weigh your options up as a lot of time and isk may be involved. However at an early stage buying the skills to fly the Gallente industrials is no big investment in time or isk, and it has a vastly superior cargo hold. Which as I came back to the topic of mining is fundamental because rather than mining into your crappy 350m3 hold when it gets full eject it into space, it wont disappear rather it will turn into a can which you can continue to put ore into for up to one and a half to two hours after which it while pop due to the pressures of space, s before that happens keep an eye on the time and when it gets close warp back to station change into your industrial and come pick up in excess of 10,000m3 in one go. Rinse and repeat much quicker, yes. Finally when you get the time and the money if you think its worth while train for a mining barge, don't ask me find out for yourself at www.eve-online.com under the ships tab under the items tab, remember it. The very best of the first generation of these is the covetor, which will fill a can in around 25 minutes, a can being 27500m3. And roughly a can full of ore from high sec can be worth anywhere between 1.5 to 2.4 million isk, depending on what you mine and the market of course, ah that crazy eve market (Btw for a rough comparison of high sec to low sec a can of ore from low sec can be refined to give anywhere between 4 mil and 17 mil usually). You can sell the ore straight but rather get it processed into minerals and sell or build something with these and sell that (yes anything you buy will have the cost of the minerals and labour time and a healthy mark up added in on top to boot when you buy it from the market place). This is the perfect time to remind you that if you are a member of our corp we build things for you with no unhealthy mark up. This is why we mine minerals sometimes. We will help you to get the blueprint needed and the Minerals and build it for you. Works out roughly 20-30% cheaper than market place sometimes even more. Want to know what blueprints do, type in say raven into the market place, two items should come up, raven (the built and ready BS) and Raven blueprint, right click on this blue thingy and then select the tab that shows you the attributes required to build you will see a list of several minerals and the amount required to make a raven using this blueprint. I wont explain manufacturing itself here apart from to say once you have the minerals and a blueprint(worth lots) or a copy of one(worth little), building tech one items and ships is very easy once you have decent enough skills, takes a while. But manufacturing named or tech 2 items, even I don't have that much of a clue.

Ratting

A hidden danger in all ore belts is NPC rats not to mention player ore thieves, yes people will sometimes steal from you ore can. You will just have to find a nice quite system without these, but you cannot escape the rats, they are an easy cheap source of income that becomes a staple in 0.0, in 1.0 worth roughly 10k, in 0.0 upwards of 1million isk for the BS. Simple really fly there kill them, move to another belt, then either what for them to respawn in time, or move to another system. There is another way in which if you leave one of the bigger rats alive or a selection of the smaller ones and tank them, the other ones will respawn much quicker each time you kill them, eventually you wont be sitting around long waiting for new targets to appear.