User:Al Pokriskin/Drafts/Advanced piloting techniques: Difference between revisions

First things first, you should know what tools you have at your disposal.

The velocity control (where your velocity is displayed) lets you manually choose what velocity you want to travel at, up to your max velocity. {{button|Ctrl}} - {{button|space}} will stop your ship as long as you are not in warp. If your warp drive is active, but you are still aligning, {{button|ctrl}} - {{button|space}} will stop you and cancel the warp. If you use a custom throttle velocity, you'll have to set it again after you jump through a stargate, since it resets to full speed again.

Double clicking in space sends your ship in the direction you clicked. If you imagine, from the perspective of the camera, a vector shooting out from the middle of the screen, the horizontal and vertical angles are determined by where you click on the screen, and the depth component is determined by which way the camera is facing.

Your ship’s agility will determine your orbit speed: the better your agility (lower agility modifier), the closer your orbit speed will be to your maximum linear velocity. Depending on your agility and the relative speeds of you and the target, your orbit may drop from circular to elliptical, or even to the point where you can’t maintain a stable orbit if the other object is moving too fast.

This draws a line between your ship and the selected object, and adjusts your ship velocity to move you backward or forward along that line in order to maintain the selected range. Like orbit, the default value can be set by right clicking the icon, or you can choose from presets in the right-click menu. Keeping something at range will minimize your radial, transversal, and angular velocities.

Pretty self-explanatory, you jump through the stargate if you are within 2,500 m. In order to jump instantly you can spam the button starting half a second before you drop out of warp (you can see your engines slowing down). You may also want to set a keyboard shortcut to turn the autopilot on midwarp, which will then jump instantly for you if you are following a route. If you do that, be sure you disable the autopilot immediately after the jump.

This changes your camera’s anchor point from your ship to the selected object. You can use this to see where, if anywhere, another ship is aligning, and what kind of weapons it has equipped. Unfortunately missile launchers don’t show up, nor do smartbombs (though the absence of turrets on a turret battleship is a good sign of smartbombs).

=== Warping ===

The bottom line is that you should always be aware of how long it will take you to get to the safety of warp. Whether you’re hauling trade goods or at half structure in the middle of an enemy fleet, good warp awareness can come in really handy.

Another point to remember is that your required speed to align is always 75% of your ''current'' max velocity. Being webbed can sometimes help you get into warp faster, since it lowers your max velocity -- if you're piloting a freighter you can speed travel up by bringing a friend (within your corp, so they don't get CONCORDed) along to web you. This is also why tacklers are taught to 'point, then web'.

When you combine MWD use with a protoype/covops cloak, then you can use the [[Cloak trick|MWD+cloak trick]] to align while cloaked, providing much better security in some situations.

Where you come out of warp is critical. As discussed above, autopilot is bad because you come out of warp so far from the gate that you cannot jump immediately. If you warp to 0 km on a gate, you’ll land within jump range, which is crucial if you want to avoid confrontation.

One last thing about warp within: if you warp to a cloaked ship in your own fleet, never warp to 0 because that will break their cloak and leave them vulnerable. Warp to no closer than 5 km.

The second major topic has to do with tracking mechanics. Damage from both turrets and missiles is affected by how the ships are moving. You can read about the details of tracking [[Gunnery_Guide#Tracking|here]] and try a neat flash-based guide [http://www.hostile.dk/files/eve/eve-tracking101.swf here]; and you can read about the details of missile damage [[Missile_Launchers#Damage|here]]. A boiled down summary:

So, given these facts how can you sway a fight in your favor? Well first you have to assess the situation and decide what angle you want to take. Are you better at offense or defense? The relevant numbers are the time it will take you to beat your opponent’s tank versus the time it will take him to break your tank. Your only goal is to make that first time less than the second time, which you can do through increasing your applied DPS, or increasing your survivability.

The pilot using artillery knows that artillery does less damage per second (DPS) than autocannon. But if he can maintain a range of 20 km, he knows that he can damage his opponent while his opponent's autocannon can't damage him: the artillery will win in the end. So he can set his orbit to 20 km, or if he wants to do more damage, he can keep him at a 20 km range so that the angular velocity goes down and the artillery track more easily.

If you are the slower ship in this situation, it’s an uphill battle but it’s not over. Taking another example:

The frigate pilot knows that he won’t last long if he lets the cruiser's medium guns track him with low angular velocity. But he also knows that his defense will be very high if he can get under the cruiser's guns by establishing a close orbit.

The goal of bumping is to delay a slowly-aligning ship from entering warp (though after 3 minutes of attempting to align, the ship will automatically jump.  This timer can be reset by any effect that disrupts the ability to warp - i.e. scrams and bubbles). They can also, together with webs, delay a ship which is trying to burn back to a gate after jumping into a [[gatecamp]].

Knowing what your modules can do -- their ranges (cold and overheated), the amount of capacitor they're likely to use up, and their effects -- is very important. Even better, know your enemies modules and what they’re capable of. Use the Look At button to see if that guy has artilleries or autocannons. Figure out from their speed in your overview if they’re using an AB or MWD. Once you have some experience, you can often deduce how your opponents will behave if you know which kind of propulsion module and which weapons they're using.

The Thermodynamics skill lets you overheat modules, at the cost of damaging them. Usually this just gets you more oomph -- more DPS from guns, stronger jam strength on ECM jammers, &c -- but overheating webs, warp disruptors and warp scramblers increases their range, letting you catch the enemy earlier, or hold them at a longer range for a short while. You can read a detailed guide to overheating [[overheating|here]].

If you are in the middle of locking someone, you can activate your modules and they’ll instantly turn on when you’ve completed the lock. This can make the difference between a tackled target and a free target.