The Plan: Pie for everyone, part 1

     I like pie.  Lots of different pies.  Some not so popular, but still pie.  Pies are handy in other ways than filling that sweet spot, they're good for organizing things into manageable slices.  Whether that's rhubarb, lemon meringue, chocolate ice cream, or information.  Pies, I think, are the awesome sauce of life.

     Eve gives you running totals on skill points, and indicates how many skill points you've spent in each of the major skill areas.  For someone with a head for numbers, they can likely picture that in their mind.  For someone like me with a head for pies, it just makes me hungry, and I wonder how much whip cream I have left.  If I can organize the skill points into a pie shape or pie chart, well, that's almost as good as hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream.  While Eve itself can't perform such feats of culinary organization, Evemon certainly can, which you can find if you randomly dig around long enough.  Which I did, because who actually reads the instructions that come along with software, right?  Am I right?  I think I'm right.

     My plan for skill training and Eve experiencing and experimentation involved a number of stages, and as it is pretty much still chugging along in the intended direction, all the tertiary skills that were needed here and there, to accomplish said plan, were sort of unanticipated at the time I planned my plan.  I had a pretty good, but rough, idea of where I wanted to go, but was fairly unaware of all the other supporting skills I'd need for some aspects of the plan.  Looking at the prerequisites for all the skills is pretty time consuming, and, well, boring.  Even still, I am slowly getting to where I want, and wanted, to go, and that is pretty cool.  Thinking about all the extra skills I needed, though (especially with the addition of R&D to the plan), I was curious how the skill points were actually being spent, so I thought I would whip up some pies and see.

     My main started out without any plan, other than me seeing how many different kinds of shiney spaceships I could fly, and it was awesome.  Not extremely efficient as far as flying ships well, but definitely fun for flying different ships.  my friend had great focus and aimed straight at specific ships, well up the skill tree, but I was all over the place.  Even now, it's still the biggest slice of pie.  I pointed the toon slightly sideways at mining as getting up to level 3 combat missions with mediocre combat skills was a bit of a pain, so industry got a lot of love too.  Surprisingly, science is the 2nd biggest slice of pie, but that is no doubt because of the scanning skills, mining prerequisites, and most recently, the science skills for R&D.  Taking the time to finally round off most of the core skills brought engineering and electronics up a lot and now gunnery, drones, with the other two, are pretty well fleshed out to level 4.  Mechanic, I thought, would be bigger, but most of the skills are only trained high enough to just get into the level 1 rigs, so lots of skills are trained, but not very high.  Navigation also has most of the core skills up to 4, but it is supprisingly small too.  Missiles were trained up and aimed at stealth bombers, so it's small, and the rest of the smaller slices were specifically trained only for individual tasks.  I don't see too much leadership training until I start looking at things like carriers for this toon.  There will be more points going into industry for his hulk (3 days to go), and then a few more refininng skills for different mining crystals, but then he'll be getting a lot of love in the gunnery and ship departments to start flying the big boats, plus likely a base Orca pilot.  The combat and ship skills will also help a lot for level 4 combat missions, Incursions, and the COSMOS missions.

     My main alt started life specifically as a miner, first at a hulk, then as an Orca pilot.  Pretty skill intensive to head for maxxing out the miners and transport and industrial command ships, so it's no wonder spaceship command is such a big pie slice.  She's going to go Caldari for the combat ships as very few points have gone into anything but industrials.  Industry is big because she is also the main refiner.  Leadership is big because she is also the main booster for the mining fleets, so the other leadership skills were also trained.  The plan is for her to fly carriers and logi ships too.  It'll be easy to build those on top of the leadership skills she's already got for running mining fleets.  Her core skills are up to the same level as my main, but she has minimal combat skills, and needs to top up her basic drone skills.  She's 4 days away from mining director 5, and then just needs 2 more level 5s to have perfect orca skills.  They're big skills though.  Warfare link specialist and ore industrial.  I'll fleet her up with the otherr missions runners to build rep for the month+  it'll take to get those skills up, then she can top up her drones and start working on her ship and missile skills.  She's also going to pay a role as either research, invention or production.  She'll run as fleet booster for running level 4's and be an on-site fitting service in case mods need to be switched.

     The 2nd also also started life directly as a mining alt, but also trained her for running a Mammoth for the little mining fleets.  Not as many skill points as the other two toons, but the majority are in industrial ships, and then supporting industrial skills for T2 miners and crystals.  Science is big because of astrogeology 5, and it will get bigger when she heads toward the R&D skills.  Engineering is big in proportion to the rest of the core skills as she has nothing in combat skills, and the rest of engineering, electronics, navigation and mechanics are only skills in support of running a hulk.  Enough skills in PI to get to level 4, and that's it.  This toon is going to be Minmatar, will likely be a basic Orca pilot eventually too, but mainly a combat pilot with a secondary in manufacturing.  Right now, she's a perfect miner and is working on topping off her drone skills.  Next will be R&D skills, then a quick shot straight up to battle cruisers to help with missions and run COSMOS.

     This is my brother's toon that he hasn't had time to play in a while, so I'm making sure the electricity stays connected, and the grass gets cut :)  It has more skill points than the other two alts, but not as many as my main.  He started it aimed at mainly combat ships, LOTS of combat ships and had basic gunnery skills trained to get into some cruisers.  I took it and aimed it at an Iteron 5 so it could shuttle ore as I jet can mine with the other toons.  After that, I put it in a hulk and it's 2 days away from being a perfect hulk pilot now.  It's staying Gallente.  It can fly a freighter and a blockade runner, and I also intent to spend a couple days to get it into basic Orca pilot skills.  The big boats it can fly are the explanation for the ship heavy skill distribution.  Once it's done with the hulk, it'll top up it's drone skills, and then the science skills for R&D.  It has mostly level 4 skills in all the core areas as well, and will head toward mainly combat ships and carriers, so the slices of gunnery, and ships, with possibly more drone and some missile love, are all in its future too.  Big boats, big guns, and it'll be doing the COSMOS runs too.

     Between these 4 toons, all the races are covered, for flexibility, but my main is high enough in skills that it's very easy to switch between the faction boats of the different races, and likely in time, all the boats.  All the toons will/do have salvage skills and can fly a Noctis, so I can scoop some extra shinies during missions too.  Having all 4 races should allow for good flexibility in speed running level 4 missions.  The other two toons will be covered in another post . . .