Communiqué from K (research associate I knew from Core Complexion)

Hey Jar,

Just wanted to let you know that the research POS is up and running. We managed to get a good deal on a Shadow Control Tower and have anchored labs and defenses in a quiet corner. Let me know what you need and I’ll get started on the copies. Best of luck with the T2 program! Sending you a photo of the POS (did they upgrade the shields again?). Looks fine doesn’t it?

K

Excellent News! I met K while working at Core Complexion and he expressed a desire to start his own research facility. This sounded like a great idea since my lab access got cut off when we pulled out of 0.0 and having to endure Empire lab queues was a bad experience. Now the T2 process can be more efficient with BPCs being churned out at a faster rate. With some training, K can also take on some of the workload in the invention jobs and I can focus more on the corp programs.

T2-007 is putting along after I made a mistake with one of the traders and forgot to get sufficient Mechanical Engineering Datacores. The 425mm Railguns were left sitting in the hangars while waiting for new datacores to be delivered.  The rest of the jobs went smoothly with 55% success rate providing a spread of 330 T2 modules to work with.

After gaining Gallente Starship Engineering IV, I reactivated T2-005 to begin Arazu (Recon) and Ishtar (HAC) development. 9 hours to go before the lab techs tell me if they were worth the ISK. Mica has been pressing me to send these new ships so that he can start testing them out in the field. Hopefully I’ll see some success in invention as it will bring us a step closer in providing fitted combat ready ships.

Most capsuleers in EVE move on to a player run corporation one day (even if most choose to stay in NPC Corps for its safety net) since that is where the fun begins (drama, intrigue and espionage!). The key thing to a well run corp are the members who choose to be active. In the past year, TGIND has seen relatively good growth. However for the last few months recruitment has slacked (mainly as only 1 person was interested). With this current stint back in Empire, it seems we need to reform and rethink our goals and strategy.

The above shows a simplified view of how members can be organized to be more productive and actually have some fun while we focus on getting back in 0.0.

Example of teams and their goals:

Production
Every Month

• Produce 30 x Ships (T1 and T2)
• Produce 2000 x T2 modules
• Maintain 2 bil worth mineral store to facilitate production

Security

• Run Lvl 4 Missions as a group twice a week
• Run Exploration Complex (Scanning and Clearing site hand in hand)
• Run a 0.0 Roam Every Weekend with the aim of practicing FC’g and tactics.

Human Resources

• Recruitment Campaigns once a week in different Regions
• During off-hours can choose to be part of Security or Production
• Recommend recruits and train them to be effective in the teams they will be joining. This includes skillbooks, training plans, ships after they are certified.

Finally! QEN for Q1 2009 is going to be released next week according to this dev blog. Seems they decided to skip 2008 and only gave us some numbers of Orca last year.

If you love charts and want to know how many ships are destroyed in PvP each month, hop on over to "I didn’t want that ship anyway” by CCP Diagnoras.

More Dilbert humor :

Here’s a slightly different version than Jar’s boring places visited post. 

I’m about 11 months young and have seen a lot more action that the boring mining and production that Jar is so fond of. As a military man, the thrill of undocking and getting in a good fleet is what I look forward to.

Most of the places I’ve visited, Jar will probably never visit as they were during fleet roams. As you can see though, New Eden is huge and there is still a lot to cover.

The time in Sylph Alliance saw some nice roams to Derilik, Curse and Stain with Providence and Catch being the active defence areas. Some very memorable fights were in F9E-KX (first Double Doomsday!), HED-GP and ERVK-P with Ushra’Khan and Against All Authorities (when i see –A-, I’m glad I insured my ship). There was also a Scrapheap Drake fleet that attempted to mess around with Providence and got sent home (not very accurate picture as there was a lot more kills/losses).

After we left to form Nova Invicta, an attempt was made to settle in the Outer Ring (lots of production folks were excited coz that’s where the exhumer BPOs are sold). Unfortunately, after a few days (now fruitless) of making tactical bookmarks, we were told to pull out due the to increasing conflict between Dead Man’s Hands (allies) and Avarice. This very short lived adventure marked the visit to Syndicate and Outer Ring.

The quick trip to Pure Blind just last weekend with Agony Unleashed’s PvP Basic class saw quite a bit of T1 mayhem. Over 70 in fleet with some insane ewar setup saw a hostile casualty list of 5 Battleships, 1 Battlecruiser, 1 Assault Frigate, 1 Covert Ops, 4 Heavy Assault, 1 Recon, 2 POS Modules and 4 Pods. The jump gate bug didn’t help much for travelling but I look forward to a longer roam during the Wolfpacks class in a few days (will write a complete account of the two classes after Wolfpacks).

What’s next? 0.0 beckons and hopefully we are able to resolve some corporate and alliance matters so that we can make a move back. I’m not too fond of running missions and be at the beck and call of agents in Empire. There’s currently lots of hotspots with Querious and Etherium Reach seeing lots of action so hopefully we’ll find something there

Kirith Kodachi started a new meme asking people where they have been in New Eden.

Here’s my journey (not terribly exciting as I’m heavily into mining and production)

I’m just slighly over 1 year in game and as you can see, having only been with TGIND has somewhat limited where I’ve travelled. Most of my purchasing work is outsourced to associates who almost never travel beyond the market hubs and thus I seldom need to travel to the crowded Jita area. In fact, only time I’ve been to Jita was during early days when we were war dec’d and we were advised to relocate to a safer system in The Forge.

In terms of corporate history, Gallente space is our primary area of operation and during the time with Sylph Alliance, Providence and Catch regions was mostly where we saw action. ERVK-P is probably my favorite station to spin ships while Mica is out having fun

What’s Next? The alliance is currently mulling over prospects and hopefully some decisions will be made soon about 0.0. It’s been some time since we left 0.0 and a disastrous attempt to move back in the Outer Ring with Dead Man’s Hand saw us getting caught in a crossfire with Avarice and a bunch of other hostiles. Mica had more experience there as I chose to stay in Empire to revisit some agents. I would also like to visit the Minmatar area to get in touch with some agents just to have a change of environment.

* Understanding the map : Small yellow means few number of visits to big red means LOTs of visits.

Other travels

• Kirith Kodachi – Eve Meme! The Places I’ve Been…
• Wensley – Where I’ve Been
• Mynxee – New Eden: Places I’ve Been
• Melindhra -The Places I’ve Been
• pjharvey -Places I’ve been
• Shrike Juk – The Places I’ve been
• Shae Tiann – Journeys in Eve
• Manasi – Kirith asks…Manasi answers II
• Kyle Langdon -Where in the World is Kyle Langdon?
• Pod Pilot -Eve Meme! The Places I’ve Been…
• Letrange – Where I’ve been
• Karox Lominax – Where have you visited

Welcome to the eighth installment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here . Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Ga’len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: “What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a ‘nerf this, boost my game play’ post like we see on the EVE forums.”

Ship Boarding!

Part of the unique ability in the X-Universe series of games from EgoSoft was the ability for the player to script almost every action in the game. Some truly ingenious scripts were released like Carrier Commands, MARS fire control and ship boarding using marines. Now if we could use the NPC passengers in EVE Online for this purpose, it would make ship capturing a possibility instead of destroying a ship every time and looting it (such a waste of good resources).

The conditions for this to work is that Marines or Mercenaries need to be in your cargo hold for this to work and the target ship can also stock similar personnel to defend his ship. Obviously new skills and support skills needs to be trained like “Boarding Crews” etc and passenger transportation would actually be useful (Personally I have exotic dancers and spiced wine on board my ships).

Sample logs as you activate a module that sends a raiding party onto target’s ship when their shields fail (it would be great if we had an Ion cannon weapon which only affected shields?):

Marine Leader : “Approaching airlock… activating cutting lasers … we have a good seal.. get ready men!”

Loud bangs and Fighting ensues and after some time, the experience of the crew and the defense crew determines if the target capsuleer should be expelled from the ship and sent home.

A quick search for “Salvage Tug” on the Features and Ideas Discussion shows a lot of people wish there was a new class of ship to enhance gameplay. With ship boarding, it’s conceivable that boarded ships are then towed away to a station for re-use or profit.

Of course, the exotic dancers on board should be claimed

Other Banters:

My new CEO just showed me a link to Dilbert’s comic strip about spreadsheets which instantly made us laugh. In my corp, a few of us run and plan production by our spreadsheets. From budgeting to sharing jobs between corp members, Google Spreadsheets is our savior with all the different time zones. We have spreadsheets for ore/ice mining, Capital/T2 production, POS setups etc and he said the above comic illustrated exactly how he felt

Patch notes for Apocrypha 1.2.3, released 26 May 2009

FIXES

Critical

• Jumping through a gate will no longer cause the client to lock up.

After numerous complains, the engineers have finally figured out a fix to the issues when ships use the jump gates. This has caused many delays to travel. I’ve personally not experienced the lockups but an associate who helps me with large volume couriers had to wait a few agonizing minutes while his systems came back online after a nasty lockup. However it seems they won’t be able to fix this before next week so this might have an effect on the practical portion of the PVP Basic class.

Was checking out Wing Commander CIC News when I came across a blog by Pix who spent a year re-living the Origin series of games. Normally it wouldn’t have registered on my read list but Wing Commander popped up and I felt compelled to know how this guy survived the CGA/EGA screens in this day and age of 1920×1200 gaming.

I’ve been a huge fan of Wing Commander series since I got hands on my first PC many years back. Each series was eagerly waited for and bought when it released at the local games shop. My last attempt to relive the games felt short mainly due to time constraints and also having real difficulty adjusting to the CGA quality graphics. The storylines of course was still very enjoyable in particular Wing Commander 3 and 4 with live action movie scenes (a rarity in those days) while Prophecy was lack lustre and saw the series come to an end.

Take a look at Pix’s experience here and relive Wing Commander through his efforts :

Wing Commander
Wing Commander 2
Wing Commander 3
Wing Commander 4

There’s also of course Strike Commander and Privateer which I was fond of. With the recent attention in space MMORPG, there seems to be a revival of interest and we might finally see a worthy successor to Freelancer (a culmination of the genre IMHO during its day). I’ll be watching and hopefully participating in Jumpgate Evolution and Black Prophecy when they release. EVE is great but sometimes, you just want to get behind the cockpit and use the Force

2 days to go! With the current lull in alliance activities, I’ve decided to go back to school and get a fresh perspective on fleet formation and tactics. Was introduced to the school while reading two articles at Eve Tribune titled “Back to pvp Basics” and “Destroyers”. While I’m no slouch when its comes to fleeting up during days in Sylph. It has been over a month since I last saw action. Running missions for SOE has been great for my wallet but when the mission rats are unable to hurt my Dominix, its time to hunt some capsuleers.

After a rushed sign up for the limited spots in the class (only 50 are allowed), I managed to register for PVP-BASIC [BASIC - 2305091800] and PVP-WOLFPACKS [WOLFPACKS-3005090030]. The course materials has just been released and I’ve gone through the well written materials that is great read for new players or as a refresher course. I’ve made sure that the basic skills are met and took time to train up skills for the destroyers class that is held next week as I’ve neglected some of the training for it.

The basic class will consist of using T1 frigates in a Hydra fleet. I’ve decided to go with the Incursus since it is the T1 version of the Ishkur which I’m fond of flying. With spare ships and hydra ewar fittings (ecm, webifer, tracking disruptors, dampeners, scram, disrupt) all ready, I’ll be ready to set out for Nonni where the course will be held. Just need to remember to use a new jump clone before I fleet up for the class.