How to (Maybe) Survive Combat

This page gathers together some advice on situational awareness and responding to combat threats.

Know where you are

• Pay attention to the member list of the Local chat channel: how many people are around?
  • Keep the local tab seperated out, and an eye on the icons in overview for nasty colours.
  • A spike in player numbers in lowsec or nullsec is probably a good indicator that someone's on the way.
  • Check corp bios, especially for kill policies. Look people up on zkillboard to see whether they have a record of kills and what they might be flying.
  • Note that in wormhole space and Pochven people only show up in Local when they say something in it: Local will be little use in these areas.
• Ping the directional scanner religiously.
  • There are subtleties to the use of d-scan, but for basic situational awareness maximum range and 360-degree scan work well.
  • In a gang or fleet, assign someone spam d-scan (and encourage everyone else to do so when they can spare their attention).
  • Try binding d-scan to an easily-hit button, such as your spacebar and/or a button on your mouse.
  • In wormholes and Pochven d-scan is doubly crucial, as Local cannot help you in those areas.
  • Remember that cloaked ships and Combat Recons will not appear on d-scan.
• Know the ship-names in your group. Having a list of ship-names or a naming convention is a good way to know if that ship warping in is an ally or not.
• Prepare alternate routes and consider dangerous points in your journey.
  • Chokepoints are often busier and more dangerous than other systems.
  • Chokepoints between highsec and lowsec and between lowsec and nullsec tend to have many hostiles.
• Use third-party tools to understand your route.
  • Maps let you see chokepoints.
  • Some maps let you see figures for recent jumps and recent kills in each system.
  • In a fleet, it's worth having a map open in a browser window even if you're not the designated navigator. You might become separated in action, and have to find your own way home.
• Have cloaked scouts available.
  • The Uni allows out-of-corp alts for scouting.
  • If you are operating in an area for a long time, having a cloaked alt sitting ready in a chokepoint or high-traffic system is very handy.

Know your weaknesses

• Are you in a slow ship with bad maneuverability?
• Do you have a MWD or AB installed?
  • An MWD is much faster, but an AB will not be shorted out by a warp scrambler.
• Check your ship's max speed, with heat. What can you outrun? How quickly will you run out of capacitor while running?
• Do you have reinforcements nearby? How quickly can they reach you?
• If you have expensive implants, are you willing to lose them?
  • If not, you're going to want to fly more defensively, especially in nullsec space where bubbles can prevent pods from warping away after a ship loss.

Preparedness

• Reduce your bugout time. If possible, larger and/or more vulnerable ships will want to stay aligned to an escape point and at (at least) 75% speed.
  • Being stopped but "pointing" in the right direction does not help at all. The heading of your ship model is a merely graphical artefact; only your actual speed and trajectory as displayed by the blue arrow on the tactical overlay matter.
• Bring escorts. You can always organise mining and mission ops through the Uni chat channels or (better) the Uni Mumble.
  • If you have dedicated escorts/scouts, give them a cut of the proceeds.
• Plan ahead. It is easy to wandering blindly through hostile space early on in your career, and this can be very educational provided you do it in a cheap, easily-lost ship and clone. ​
  • Have a plan prepared for emergencies: know what you are going to do if attacked. Will you run or fight?
  • In a fleet or gang, agree with your fellow pilots what you will do.
• Have you insured your ship?

When jumped

• Don't panic.
  • Remember that ultimately, EVE is just a game.
  • If you have jumped into a gate camp, you have sixty precious seconds of gate cloak to sit and think out your next move. Don't waste this by rushing into reacting.
  • If you've been tackled in space, you might have valuable seconds available before the tackle's backup arrives.
• Assess what has jumped on you: is it one ship or a fleet? Do you have the means to take it out, or will it be better to try to run?
  • Someone who takes the initiative to attack you usually has a reason for their confidence. If you're a newer player, you might want to default to trying to flee.
  • More experienced players can make more nuanced judgments.
• With luck, you are in a fast-aligning ship and can get into warp. If you are not fast, hopefully you are pre-aligned.
  • You enter warp when you are both aligned to your destination and at 75% (or more) of max speed.
  • It is possible to get to warp early on slow-accelerating ships by having a fleetmate use a stasis webifier on you to reduce your max speed!
  • If you've jumped into a hostile gate situation, you can try the MWD + cloak trick.
• In a fleet, it's often permissible for more-vulnerable ships (e.g. ewar ships) to use their own initiative to warp out.
  • Get your fleet/squad commander's advice in advance if you're unsure about this.

When tackled

• Do you have ECCMs? ECM Bursts? ECM drones? Remember - if they cannot lock you, they usually cannot damage you, and cannot warp scramble or warp disrupt you.
• Do you have energy neutralizers? If you can empty the capacitor of a ship that has you tackled, it will drop tackle.
• If you have a reasonably fast ship with an MWD and you are only warp disrupted ("pointed") rather than warp scrambled ("scrammed"), you might be able to outpace your tackle and MWD out of their tackle range.
• If your tackler is faster than you but you have a reasonably agile ship, you can try to slingshot out of their tackle range.
• If you are in a large, slow ship and you are tackled by something small and agile, and you don't have ECM or neutralizers...
  • you can try to set a flight of light drones on the tackle
  • you can try loading high-tracking ammo into your turrets and firing on them
  • you can try to warp scramble and/or web them if they get close and you have the relevant module fitted. This will slow them down, potentially making them an easier target for drones.
• It is still worth being aligned to an escape-point even in a large, slow, tackled ship, just in case any of your efforts pay off and you get the tackle off you.
• Larger and tankier ships can survive under fire for some time. If you have friendly pilots nearby, try to get in touch for assistance.
  • If you're an EVE Uni pilot and based at one of the campuses, this is a strong reason to be in the standing fleet and on the relevant Mumble channel.
• Overheating might save you, and if you're in danger of losing your ship anyway you have little to lose in burning out its modules.
  • Overheating a propulsion module will make you go faster.
  • Overheating active modules in your tank will let you shrug off more damage. (Don't forget that you can overheat hardeners as well as boosters/repairers.)
  • Overheating weapons will increase your potential DPS when firing on your tackle. If your weapons use capacitor, remember that overheating them might also drain your capacitor faster.
  • Overheating webifiers and warp scramblers increases their range, which might help you counter-tackle.

Saving the Pod

• If you have lost your ship, you might still be able to get your pod out.
• Don't forget to follow the Uni Overview Guide.
• The Pod Saver / Warpout tab is invaluable: switch to it when your ship has been tackled and you know you have no chance of escape.
• Pick a celestial and start spamming the warp button to save your pod.
  • Once you hit the destination, do not stop keep moving in case your pod is being chased.
  • Do not forget to switch overviews to check, as Pod Saver does not show enemies.
• During your second or third warp after escaping, try dropping a safespot bookmark. Then warp to your safe and catch your breath.
• The enemy can use combat probes to find your pod at a safe, so you should move soon to heading home or to another safer location. But probing your pod down will take them time, and the probes will show up on your d-scanner.
• If you lose your ship in a bubble, your pod might not be able to warp out immediately.
  • Work out where the nearest edge of the bubble is, and send your pod towards it.
  • In a busy battle, your opponents might not have time to attack you.

When (um, if!) you die

• Remember that EVE is only a game.
  • It's always better to step away from the keyboard for a minute or two if you're tempted to vent on comms or in chat channels.
• In a fleet situation, stay alert to Mumble.
  • You might've lost your ship, but the fleet might still win the battle. This will mean they can escort your pod home if your pod is still alive.
  • The FC or a second-in-command is often able to plot a route out when an engagement has gone badly.
  • Whether the engagement goes well or badly, there might be a useful debriefing discussion afterwards.
  • If you lose your ship in a Uni fleet, and it was your ship rather than one handed to you by EVE Uni, you can often get some or all of its value from the Ship Replacement Program. Especially valuable ships such as tacklers often get especially full reimbursement. Ask about SRP (once things have calmed down) if you're unsure.
  • You may also want to post further details to After Action Reports on the Uni forums.
• You can comment the killmail on ZKillboard
• Ship losses are often opportunities to learn. What could you have done differently?
• If you lost your ship alone, outside of a fleet situation, it is sometimes (sometimes) worth talking (politely) to the opponents who blew it up.
  • Make your own assessment of your opponents.
  • Some EVE players can be abusive or unhelpful, but equally some EVE players are fundamentally decent people; pirates and nullsec/wormhole PvPers might dispense useful advice to an obviously new player. Relatively classy corp and player bios are an encouraging sign.
  • The best approach is a polite EVE mail hours or a day after the event, asking how they caught you and what you might do better next time.
  • Ignore any suggestions that you can retrieve your modules/cargo by paying them or by travelling to a particular place. Pirates have been known to reimburse novices for ship losses unprompted, but this happens via direct ISK transfer (and you shouldn't raise the topic yourself).
  • You can block anyone if they're unpleasant.