The Ancient Gaming Noob

Ninety Million Skill Points December 10, 2012

I think I am now officially “invested” in the game.

There was a time when ninety million skill points would have seemed very impressive.  Now that I have meandered to that level of training, I have to think the bar for anything worth mentioning has to be well past 100 million.

But I will mention it anyway.  As I do at every interval of ten million skill points, I look at where I have been training.  The start date for all of my training was August 29, 2006.  Past reviews can be found here:

• Ten million – November 2, 2007
• Twenty million – June 18, 2008
• Thirty million – January 13, 2009
• Forty million – August 5, 2009
• Fifty million – March 22, 2010
• Sixty million – November 11, 2010
• Seventy million – August 4, 2011
• Eighty million – June 12, 2012

At ninety million, here are how my skill points are distributed.

Spaceship Command: 23,227,296*
 Gunnery:          12,890,926*
 Missiles:          9,628,426*
 Engineering:       7,514,510*
 Science:           7,170,676
 Drones:            7,069,944*
 Electronics:       4,558,761*
 Industry:          3,912,704
 Navigation:        3,330,255*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,447,530*
 Mechanics:         1,555,747*
 Subsystems:        1,280,000*
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:              943,765*
 Total:           ~90,000,000

Asterisks represent the areas that have changed since the last checkpoint.  And it looks like I have been training things all over the place, as usual.

For those who are more visual, here is a pie chart of my skill distribution.

Pie! Yum!

Last time around my training ended up with me having a new ship on my list, the Scimitar, complete with all the skills to be a healing space priest in fleet operations.  This time around, the big change is having all of my Tengu related skill at level 5… just in time for Tengu fleet to disappear as a doctrine… as well as the capability of flying the tech II Rokh fleet fit.

A new Rokh… unfit so far

Getting up to spec for the Rokh meant gunnery skills.  Nearly 3 million of the last 10 million skill points went into gunnery.

All of this training ended up adding a net of four new skills, bringing my total to 223.  That isn’t a lot of new skills.  Three of them were gunnery related, and for no particular reason I trained up Jump Drive Operation, just in case I got the capital route some day I suppose.  It is the cheapest skill on that path.

My 223 skills are distributed like this:

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 15 skills
 Level 3: 44 skills
 Level 4: 51 skills
 Level 5: 112 skills

14 more skills are now level 5 from last time, making half of my skills at maximum training.  Levels 4, 3, and 2 are down 5, 3, and 2 skills respectively.  A spent more time improving the skill I had rather than acquiring more.

Then there is the constant metric I have used since I started playing the EVE Mon skill point game: How many days until I can fly a titan?  I managed to shave about 3 days off the training time for a Leviathan, the Caldari titan, leaving me just 66 days and 10 hours away from being able to fly it.  Unfit, of course.  That would probably add another 90 days.

And finally, there is the question that is clearly as old as EVE Online itself:  What should I train next?

I am almost at the peak of points for shield and missile skills.  I am covered for the upcoming changes to destroyer and battle cruiser skills, which will divide those into racial rather than general skill.  So when they are split up, I ought to actually get a free skill point boost towards 100 million when there are Caldari, Gallente, Amarr, and Minmatar versions of destroyer and battle cruiser skill.  Gaff has been trying to get me to work towards a dreadnaught, though that takes some real money.  Even the skills are expensive.  I would have to work on earning some ISK to get there.  Or I could just tune up my armor tanking skills.  I have some skill points invested there… I have some skill points invested just about everywhere at this point… but fleet doctrine might change some day.

Large projectile turrets V is actually what is training for the next few days.  After that, what path should I take?

Eighty Million Skill Points June 12, 2012

I was not sure I would get to this milestone.  The last such post, a little less than 10 months ago, I was saying that 70 million skill points might be the extent of my involvement in EVE Online.    That was the height of the Incarna debacle, the Jita protests, and the potential end of EVE as we knew it.

Since then, the game has come around.  CCP has refocused on flying in space by fixing, revising, or improving what was already there, along with some incremental ship introductions, in the Crucible and Inferno expansion.

And, probably more importantly to me, I have moved out to null sec space, which revitalized the game in my eyes.  In my first five years of contact with the game, I had dipped by toe in almost all of the non-piratical high sec options.  Now new options are available to me.

And so, here I am again, at another milestone.  As as I did at the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 million skill point marks, I am going to summarize where I am and what I have trained in this last cycle.

First, my skill point distribution:

Spaceship Command: 22,095,390*
 Gunnery:          10,095,065*
 Science:           7,170,676*
 Engineering:       7,093,137*
 Drones:            7,069,104*
 Missiles:          6,838,701*
 Electronics:       4,556,076*
 Industry:          3,912,704*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,394,844*
 Navigation:        2,199,295*
 Mechanics:         1,443,982*
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:              917,422*
 Subsystems:          151,865
 Total:           ~80,000,000

Asterisks represent the areas that have changed since the last checkpoint.  And it looks like I have been training things in all areas.  The only exception is Social, which actually went down since last time.  They must have removed a skill, though I couldn’t tell you what they yanked.

Mostly training went into things to help me fly and equip new ships.  So Spaceship Command went up, as did Gunnery.  Early on I needed to be able to fly the Alpha Fleet fit Maelstrom and kept on that until I could use the tech II 1400mm guns.

I also trained up to fly a fleet fit Scimitar, which I have done exactly once.  It was blown up on its first fleet op and I haven’t replaced it yet.

Wilhelm’s first Scimitar

I also just finished up the skill set for flying heavy interdictors (hictors).  And due to my getting Minmatar Cruiser V for the Scimitar, I can fly both the Broadsword and Onyx hictors since the skills are otherwise the same.

All of this training ended up adding a net of 10 new skills, bringing my total to 219.  They are distributed like this.

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 17 skills
 Level 3: 47 skills
 Level 4: 56 skills
 Level 5: 98 skills

12 more skills are now level 5, while level 4 skills went up by 4, and level 3 skills went up by 19.  Level 2 skills dropped by 13 as I trained a bunch of stuff up.  No doubt some of that last was related to mining crystals.

So I have been not only been learning new skills, but getting them up to higher tiers.  A number of things have required level 5 skills, especially the logistics and hictor training plans.

Going back to my long time metric, flying a titan, I see that I am still just over 69 days away from the basic flying skill, almost all of which would be tied up in learning Capital Ships I through V.  Since I do not need that for any of my current plans… and frankly cannot afford to buy it just to train it for fun… a titan will probably remain that far away for the foreseeable future.  The funny thing is that, for the first time in the game, I am actually in a position where I could purchase and fly one, if I had the ISK.

And where will I head for the next 10 million skill points?  Well, there are a lot of skills to trained up to hone my options.  I am about max’d out on the Scimitar, but the hictor skills still have some room.  And I just noticed the other day that I still have a couple of skills that would affect heavy missiles that I could train up.

There is always another skill to train up in EVE.