The Plan, she's a'rollin' nicely

     As time passes and all the enjoyment of skill training completion messages passes from minutes, to hours, to interminable days and weeks, as a rather ADHD type of guy, it's nice to slowly see level 4s piling up in all the focused skill areas.  I'm surprised that I've stuck to my plan as well as I have.  Way to be an adult, yo!  I have fairly well resisted the massive urges to turn all those nice little green check marks into long empty rectangles.  In resisting those urges, therein lies progress.

     All the toons are close to nearing the end of phase 2 of universal domination (at a snail's pace), and they are finishing up the last of the electronics skills, if not already moving on to drones.  Drones are a bit of a buzz kill because a lot of the skills are multi-day even to just get to level 4s.  I'm not going to level 5s in anything yet, unless it was a prerequisite for something of greater glory.  Whilst mopping up errant skills, and making nicely stacked rows of skills, 4 blocks to each, I started looking a little further down the road towards the minimums required to talk to the COSMOS mission agents.

     Lots of good advice out on the intarnetz, lots of good walk-throughs (I'm not much of a story-line reader . . ) and most seemed to recommend that if you're starting with Amarrrr, which I arrrr, I should head into the COSMOS missions with a rep of 4 so as to not have to stop and grind rep once I've started the missions.  No problem, I'm almost at 3 and I'll make sure Connections and Social are at 4 too.  4s are sort of my "thing" right now anyway :)  Chicks dig 'em.  So, I'll throw three toons at some ice mining whilst I track down some Amarr agents, close by, to start grinding some rep with the other toons that can't use mackinaws yet.  I'm keeping them all fleeted up and while the rep grindage will be lessened, they all get a boost, and I'm ok with the pace/timeline, even though I'm at the end of Sept already.

     Now, frequently usually at least once per orbit of the galactic centre, I like to think I'm not too bad at lateral thinking.  While looking for suitable agents though, both past and now, I assumed that Agent Finder was the name of the window that the agents could be found in.  Right?  Makes sense.  Am I right?  Never actually ran a mouse up to the TOP of that little panel.  Never had any idea that it was actually a BUTTON.  Man . . .  But hey howdy hey, how about that agent finder!  Is that some awesome shit or what??  Man, that thing . . . rocks.  Period!  Like I give a shit that a titan's doomsday weapon can turn entire fleets into sparkling salvage goodness with a single AOE firecracker, but how about that agent finder!!  That does such an amazing job at finding an agent compared to drilling through agents, and their corps, and then the types, and whether they think you're cool enough to talk to them or not.  At any rate, I located some mining and distribution agents and I'm seeing a gain in standing in all the toons.  It was also good practise at loading up my little gypsy caravan (as much as I can at this point with an orca and some transports) and moving them to my new area of operations.  I'm not concerned that it might take a little longer to get to a standing of 4 because I want to stockpile a little cash for some PLEX to have on hand and some shinies I still need/want to buy.  Mainly just a freighter.

     It's nice running some missions again vs mainly mining and some scanning.  Some of the distribution missions also require some simple manufacturing, so that has really started to demistify the whole production aspect of the game as well.  Time to think about some indy skills and some BPs too, but that's more time and iskies.  I'll focus on getting the other 3 toons into hulks first for some hard core mining fleet goodness, while getting the freighter/blockade toon finished up and start the last toon on exhumer 5.  I need to be mindful to keep some extra cash on hand during missioning as the missions aren't exactly bringing in truck loads of cash at level 2 and 3.  There's always the research agents for rep too.   Mmmmm . . . datacores . . .  Soooo many things to do :)

The Point?  Nice, steady gains can be realized by sticking to "the plan".  Can be boring at times, and stressful, especially when tempted by new siren-song skills that open up, but focus, STAY focused.