This And That

The greatest and most frustrating part of Eve is the skill training system. That a character can train and improve even when you are not online makes it easy to come and go in Eve and not feel like you are falling behind your contemporaries. On the other hand, it makes for a lot of clock watching, aching while waiting for the days, hours, and minutes to pass until that next skill is complete.

What makes it even worse is that there is always another skill set you want to try out and its hard to stay on track with the current plan when another plan is just begging to be started. For example, at the turn of the year I set out on a combat training program to improve my basic fighting skills. I was flying a rail Ferox but not very well; my shots were missing and not doing much damage, my drones couldn't go beyond 20 kms, and my fittings were so tight I needed grease to slip on anything useful. In addition, I wanted to fly a battleship.

I made a plan that would see me improve my skills first and then slip comfortably into the Rokh. Of course after a week of my multi-week plan I trained up the battleship skills and got my Rokh anyways. So I made the situation worse by getting into a vastly more expensive ship with barely improved skills. I did better since then, only breaking off a day or two here and there for Gallente and Ammar frigate skills and other miscellaneous stuff and now I'm down to about 13 days with a bunch of level IV skills but for the most part my combat ability has vastly improved. I can use T2 shield extenders and boosters, my weapons hit often and hard, and my drones are... well better.

Once I'm done with the combat flying improvement plan, next on the list is T2 drones. Fortunately that plan is only 10 days long. Beyond that, its either Gallente cruisers and battlecruisers or Interceptors, haven't decided which yet.

In other news...

I've got a small game of 40K tonight against Rob and his Dark Eldar. I played him once a long time ago back in GM7 and beat him soundly but he had just started then. Time to see how much he has improved.

I'll be using the same army I used against James a few weeks ago as its pretty sound and I'm comfortable with it. Report forthcoming tomorrow.