End of the Summer

The evenings are getting shorter, the sun is shunning Ireland and the next round of games are nearing completion. Funnily though, I am less inclined to play than I used to be. Evenings are being filled with watching DVDs with my wife or going out to get the last of the light, seeing people or sailing. When I do get round to switching on the computer it is late and I am tired. As such, EVE Online isn’t getting a fair trial, I get bored and wander off into Medieval TW2 and Homeworld2. I was even thinking about getting a FPS WW2 game for the change.

Then I get a quiet day at work and I look through the sites and the old WOW flame kindles. FWE seem to be doing well, the guild has lifted itself up and is back running Kara with all the attendant headaches that brings (the usual lack of healers). Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) is due some time this autumn and I am looking forwards to the exploration aspect of it, I’ll level both Slayfoe and Eirebull in an easy manner without rushing to L80.

While looking through the sites I found other aspects of Eve that I haven’t really given much time to; manufacturing and invention. The way into 0,0 space is to have a stock of BPOs, head out there, make friends, break all loot down into component materials and use these to build your own modules using your own BPOs. Now I am still chasing a competent level as a combat pilot (HAC with Tech2 railguns) before I branch into manufacturing. I figure that this should take till October.

I have jumped back to core Gallente space and am missioning out of the Chemal base in Meis to get my standing up with them. The medium term goal is to be able to use the high level Chemal agents in Sukanan. I currently have a standing of 1.04ish with Chemal and am using a L2Q-11 agent. Unfortunately she is a marketing agent and I keep getting sent on courier missions which just put me to sleep. Once I have a standing of 2.5 I get access to a L2Q16 internal security agent in Oursulaert VI. That should speed things up. The LOWEST level agent after this in Sukanan is L3Q20 for which you need a standing of 5. That might take a while.

Skill wise, I have trained up to cruiser 5, electronics 5, engineering 5, mechanic 5, drone 5 and MWD. For basic combat competency I want frigate 5, weapon upgrades 5 (for tech2 guns) and hull upgrades 5 (for tech2 armour). After this I have other skills that I want to invest in: science 5, industry 5 (for manufacturing and invention) and social 5 (to speed up reputation grinding).

I really should start with social 5, this would speed up the day to day progress.

New Low-Sec Home

Once I got back from my holiday and saw the possibility of defending low-sec space I logged on and got right down there! With the 2 reliables in the vent Pew-Pew channel we wandered from belt to belt killing True Sanshas.

I even switched off the warning that says - you are about to enter a low sec sector - do you want to continue?

The trip down was easy, only saw one person flash red while transisting a low-sec system, apparantly everyone's autopilot is NOT the same. I jump cloned before coming down here so that there would be no great loss if I got podded.

I brought my trusty Thorax set up for gank - with 5 Hammerhead II and blasters I can kill 3 belt rat cruisers before they get me. If I end up chasing a pirate then I hope to hide in the crowd!
What I have noticed is that most my ships are 20 jumps away so I will have to build a secondary depot down in Sukanan. That gives me something to spend money on at the local supermarket. I'll have to check out how this compares to Dodixie.

One of the good things abut the move is that there is a Gallente corp called Chemal in the constellation. The same corp has a presence back in the Gallente home-systems. In Sukanan they have L1, L3 and L4 agents, mostly administration. Note the missing L2 agents. To make things worse, the L3 agetns are quality 20. I suspect that it is going to take a lot of grinding L1 missions in Sukanan to get access to the L3 agents.

I noticed that the local alliance channel is full of pirate chasing - at least I hope they are pirates and that the system for setting a corp to red is reliable. A bit more investigation into this required.