My Ship Collection in Eve – Part 2
by Shals on April 28th, 2008Well, it’s been one month and three days ago when I first posted about my ship collection in Eve Online and finally reached a milestone in my training plans so figured I’d post a part 2 of my ship collection to show off the 3 new ships I can now pilot.
Will start off with my alt character whom finished up Caldari Cruiser 5 and began training Logistics which allows her to pilot a Basilisk. This ship is a support cruiser with bonuses such as 150% bonus to Shield Transport and Energy Transfer Array ranges per level of Caldari Cruiser, 15% reduction in capacitor use per level of Logistics, role bonuses of -50% CPU need for Shield Transporters, etc. Unfortunately it’s not the best looking ships out there (which I think all 3 I can now pilot fall into that same category), but you can view the screenshot at the end and judge for yourself.
As for my main character, he finished up Caldari Cruiser 5 also but continued with Heavy Assault Cruisers. This has given him access to the Cerberus, a missile ship, and the Eagle which is a gun ship. Both fill their roles respectively but I’d have to say the Cerberus would be my favorite of the two being a long range missile ship with bonuses, at max skill levels, of 25% Kinetic Missile damage, 50% Missile velocity, 50% Missile flight time and 25% to Missile Launcher rate of fire.
Of course the Eagle is also a powerful gun ship with similar bonuses, but to guns of course. I look forward to using them both. However, the combo of the Cerberus and my alt in the Basilisk with shield transfer drones and arrays would allow the Cerberus to take a huge amount of DPS for some level 4 mission grinding while the Cerberus dishes out great damage. If the alt happens to get targeted by a 2nd wave of mobs, she’ll be able to absorb a fair amount of damage too with the help of shield hardeners but also thinking of carrying a few logistic drones on the main, just incase (your shield transfer drones can only heal other players).
Anyway, here are the screenshots of all three new ships!
My Mastercraft “Oliphant” Indiaman and a PotBS overview
by Galithor on April 23rd, 2008The MC Oli is my endgame ship in Pirates of the Burning Sea (somewhat misleading, I actually have 5 different ships, all for different purposes). It’s dual purpose, with a large cargo capacity of 1000 tons, I can do all my freetrader business hauling goods around the carribean. It also has the second most guns of any Freetrader ship, so it’s a fantastic warship. Primarily the strength in combat revolves around close range DPS. My Oli doesn’t perform as well at longer ranges as some of the Naval Officer specific ships, or a couple of the “any class” ships. it’s got decent speed, and when coupled with my Freetrader skills, can really get moving.
You can see the entire user interface for PotBS in this screenshot. Pretty much standard stuff, except for the ship combat rose which is in the bottom left with my skills and radar. I’ve got my ships health stats above it (the green circle denoting armor facings, structure integrity, and to the right has bars for guns, crew, sails, morale). The ship combat rose has all of my gundecks on the ships, and shows what ammunition type is currently loaded in each, and how many guns still remain on that deck (you can lose guns as combat progresses). My Oliphant has a total of 56 guns. Everything can be repaired via consumables during combat. There are also skills available to each class that can help with maintaining your ship.
PvP lovers will do well to note the mini map I’ve got open on the top right of the screen. All the triangles denote other players or NPC groups on the open sea. The flags on the islands are ports that I can visit for quests, shops, or running my economy structures/warehouses if I have any in that port, etc. The big Red Circles on the right hand side though, are the PvP zones. PvP in PotBS is dynamically consensual, in that the zones technically can appear around almost any port in the game (basically all the ports but the newb ports). I can avoid pvp by staying out of the red shaded area on the map… but the red areas will be different every day I log in depending on what other players are up to. It all plays into the RvR aspect of Potbs. If my economy ports are put into a red circle, I’d have to brave the PvP zone to get in, collect my resources, and haul them out. Each faction can actually conquer ports and such. It gets really deep, escpecially as it intertwines with the player economy. 95% of the ships, ammo, consumables, outfittings, etc… all made by players. Each port has specific resources, and each item requires certain things to make. I make iron ingots and other iron products. I’m a midlevel producer. I take raw resources of iron ore and limestone, make ingots to sell to ship builders, or further assemble the ingots into iron ship fittings, anchors, nails, mast hoops, etc and sell those directly. What I decide to do with my ingots all depends on the ingame market at the time.
The PotBS economy deserves a blog of it’s own though… so I’ll save that for some other time.
Some pics for enjoyment. These show the MC Oli in her full graphical glory (well, not quite all the way up on all the sliders) in a battle instance. The way combat works in PotBS is you sail around on the open sea looking for targets, or you get targeted. When you find a target, or get found by someone else or an NPC, you merely sail over to the ship on the OS, click the attack button, and it drops you down into a battle instance, or the other player or NPC tries to do the same to you. The battle instance is some randomized ship combat map, where you and your foe fight a battle to it’s conclusion – you sink, you sink your enemy, or one side withdraws. If you’ve ever played final fantasy games, think of it like the Open Sea as the overworld map, and when you get attacked by a random encounter, it flashes down to a fight scene.
Notice my custom sails, provided to me by my society (guild). You can submit your own user-content for sail and flag designs, and crazily enough, many of the ships in the game were designed by 3d art adept PLAYERS. Yep, My Oliphant was submitted as user-content by a player and accepted into the game. FLS is smart, why hire extra art guys when you’re player base is rabid enough to do it themselves. Players submit the designs, FLS polishes them up, they get inserted into the game. How’s that for evolving content. There are currently half a dozen ships being worked on by players that look like they’ll be good enough to be put into the game in the next few months. Also notice my white/red paint design. You get a full color palette to paint parts of your ship with, so everyone can look fairly unique, even when sailing the same model of ship.
You can see my cannons firing in the second and third screenshots. Doesn’t really do them justice though, it’s alot more intense in-game (not all the cannons fire at exactly the same time… more like over a period of 3-5 seconds for a volley, which is really freaking cool). I’ve got 3 gun decks on my ship, which is a unique thing to only the ships of the line… and my oliphant. No other frigate class ship in the game has 3 decks. The absolute largest ships in the game have as many as 4 gundecks on a broadside! 104 guns are on the biggest ship in the game. Only about a dozen such ships even exist in the entire PotBS universe so far. They’re prohibitively expensive to build, much like a Titan in EvE. Truly a national effort to build such ships, and when they get sunk in port battles, it’s a major event. Only 3 have been sunk so far, two of which sank a couple of days ago on my server. The poor pirate NPC in the third picture abandoned ship after 3 full alpha strikes from my broadside, on the last of which I utilized a special freetrader skill to maximize damage. It takes 30ish seconds for my heaviest gun deck to reload, so to do 3 alpha strikes took me roughly a minute and a half. I could have let my decks fire as they reloaded (lighter gun decks fire more often due to ease of reloading), but I like Alpha Striking with everything at once 
You can also see in the pictures my firing arcs on the sea around me. This is where I can shoot my various guns. Each deck has a different number of guns and ranges depending on the size of the guns. My ship is fairly unique in that it has bow and stern chaser guns, allowing me to have 4 firing arcs, albeit the front and rear arcs only have two guns each. Most ships have the third arc for stern chasers, but my bow chaser setup only exists on maybe a half dozen ship designs. Steering your ship works like moving around in any other MMO with A and D being your turn keys, and W and S being your raise/lower sails keys. Mastering maneuvering your ship is HUGE in this game, and separates the good PvP players from the mediocre PvPers. No two ships handle exactly the same, especially when you account for all the different outfittings each player might be using.
A picture of me and a group of my society mates setting up outside a red circle in preparation for a foray into the PvP zone. Half the battle is fought before you even zone into a PvP instance. You gotta catch your prey first on the Open Sea, or if it’s going to be an even battle, it’s advisable to get good wind position on the Open Sea before zoning into the instance, so you start the battle in a favorable position to your enemy. That’s something else I forgot to mention about maneuvering your ship, there is wind in the game, and it determines what your ship can and cannot do for maneuvering. If you turn directly into the wind, you’re going to slow down ALOT. The amount of strategy, tactics, and skill that plays into this game is massive. No other MMO on the market offers anything like this, especially for PvP. You can sink Lvl 50 ships captained by idiots with a level 12 ship if you know what you’re doing. Of course, a good captain in a lvl 50 ship would probably be impossible to sink since he’d never let you get good position on him, and always be able to bring his superior firepower to bear. That said, much like Eve, target tracking helps the smaller ships somewhat in handling bigger ships, but even the bigger ships usually have lightweight gun decks that can track small ships with ease when they get into range. Also, when those big guns DO land a hit, it hurts pretty bad
To finish, a picture of a gank
Rhadam Asunawa playing his alt Paul Revere in a Hermes Sleek Packetboat (a society mate), Vampton Soulbane in the same type of ship ( a guy from another society that jumped into our battle instance to help), and Renard De’ Mer in a Triton Interceptor (a friend from a good society that we work with alot), and myself in a Mediator Mastercrafted Cutter caught this poor Spanish chap Allucard Scott in a Minerva Frigate as he left Havana while it was in a PvP zone. He’s a member of Los Bucaneros De’ Tarifa, a spanish society that only has about 10% of it’s players that enjoy PvP. This guy wasn’t one of them, he ran in a straight line despite the fact we were closing on him easily, and made poor decisions with his guns. He could have easily driven our three smaller ships off with heavy round shot. Had he done so, he’d only really have had to deal with Renard in his Triton interceptor. In all likelyhood though, even if this guy knew what he was doing, he was still going to be defeated. It’s worth noting that despite the fact that we’re all lvl 50 in the picture, nobody in this particular battle was using a lvl 50 ship. The way ship levels work are you get access to bigger and bigger ships as you level up. That doesn’t mean the smallest ships you used back at level 10-20 aren’t still potentially very useful in the right situations. The small ships are very quck and maneuverable, and have thier place in the game.
Much to our surprise, he was hauling 2 Mordaunt 4th Rate Ship of the Line deeds!! That loot was worth about 140k doubloons! That’s right, much like EvE, every ship can be destroyed, all your 6 of your permanent outfittings lost, and your unsecured cargo can be confiscated. It takes the best aspects of risk in eve (ship loss/looting), and does away with the loss of annoying things like ammo/consumables/backup outfittings. This way it’s much easier to refit your ship, and get back out in the fray again more quickly. Ships themselves can be given “durability” to allow you to not have to go and repurchase a new one every time you sink. Basically, you can buy a few deeds, and fill up a ship with extra lives
All the loot loss and item destruction lends strongly to the Economy in PotBS. As stuff gets destroyed, more stuff has to be produced to replace it. Everything is intimately connected in PotBS. PvE, Economy, PvP, RvR… it all relies upon one another in this very unique game.
Next time I do a PotBS blog, I’ll show some of the avatar stuff, and the cities and some of the swordplay combat! Gustave Molyneux is a pretty bad-ass dual wielding mofo! I’ll also go into the ingame economy in more detail, since it’s such an awesome system, and a player could get lost only messing with it every day if they wanted to