I Been Searchin'

From flickr user Sarah Reid

Mo' Money Mo' Better

This is a slightly longer entry because it covers two days of activity.

The main theme in my Eve-mind for the past couple of days has been money. I bought 4 new ships from the corp and they'll very well equipped. 2 Algos and 2 Tristans cost me 70M ISK which is about 20% of my wallet balance.  I can lose ships pretty quickly -- my last Algos died in seconds as I responded to a corpmate's call for help in a plex, but I didn't know he was about to die while facing 4 enemy ships, who then chomped me up. I should've asked :-)

I can't afford to lose ships that quickly so I'm moving in several directions to fix this.

I'm trying to assemble my own ships, build some of my own components and buy others with cheap buy orders. Our corp has a regular delivery service from high-sec to our low-sec base, so I need to engage in some supply-chain work and spreadsheeting to get this done. This is the part of the game that detractors describe as Having A Job, but a kind corpmate helped me move some ships I bought through high-sec -- thanks Oreb!

[Later-That-Day Update] A great discussion took place on the Aideron forums (private, sorry!) and we'll soon have a new system in place for making ships available to new players. I'll stay away from making my own ships, which looked like a pretty time consuming activity anyway, and use the new system)

I'm also selling more of the assets that I have piling up. Evemon says I have a lot of valuable stuff, some of which I've tried to sell using sell orders. I'll need to lower those prices. Our corp has an agreement with another corp that will buy decryptors and I've contacted them and will see what price they're offering.

Lastly I will need to start using my 300K Loyalty Points. I use this site to see what the LP-to-ISK ratio is on various items, then I'll try buying/selling them.

Scout + 1

After buying my shiny new expensive ships we ran a couple of defensive plexes and, finding no fights, we decided to roam a little. This turned into a "Run Away!" session as we encountered a 15 ship Caldari fleet that chased our eight ships hard. Good FC'ing by Kirith Kodachi kept us all alive and hidden through six systems, though we all had a scare when we were at a safe and the Caldari showed up in our overviews! Luckily they were just warping to a gate and were on the same flight line as us. The safe wasn't totally-safe, but it was good enough.

Then I got picked to be our +1 for the flight back to Heydelies!  I'd done the occasional "look through the gate and tell us what's there", but never been a +1 before. If you don't know, the scout's job is to be one jump ahead of the fleet and report what hostile ships are at the next stop. I did OK and reported what I saw though I forgot to mention the number of war targets in Local a couple of times. Nobody died, so that's a victory! Next time, though, I want to have a cheaper Tristan ready for this kind of roam. I think I can have a ship that provides 90% of the DPS and HP for half the cost.

No Exploration For You

My last activity is something I'd been looking forward to for a few days. My corpmates were out participating in an Eve event, Nightmare In New Eden. They gleefully reported on comms that most of the fleet were attacking each other instead of the designated target, and since I wanted to NOT lose my new ships over something like this, I went out looking for a new exploration pipe. I'd noticed a chain of low-sec systems with very low traffic here in Essence, from Obalyu to Isenan. Three of them looked promising and with visions of unsullied cosmic signatures piled high, I flew out there. Sadly it was a bust. There were, at most, two sigs in some systems with others being totally empty. This must be where high-sec carebears come and dip their toes in low-sec so I crossed it off my list.

Tidbits Learned

• The quickest way to give the "Warp To" command is to hold down the S key on your keyboard and, while keeping it pressed, click on a celestial in the overview. This is faster than using the radial menu ("planet view" mode is on top, really?!) or right-clicking and finding the warp command there.
• Use a shuttle to fly through dangerous areas. It enters warp very quickly and takes a long time to get locked. If you're moving blueprints or valuable small items and can't cloak, this is another option.