Advanced piloting techniques

How to manually pilot your ship

This may have been done before, but I've become interested in the personal skill aspect of ship piloting, and I thought I'd compile some of the little things I've picked up over the past couple months into one place. I did this over the past two weeks while I was hauling things around, so it's kinda long but I would appreciate any feedback even if you just skim it. If it's useful I may try to pretty it up. Here goes:

Rookie manual piloting guide, or: Skills that you can’t buy on the market

This guide is meant to be a compilation of the various things that separate capsuleers from monkeys. There is more to piloting a ship than locking a target and pressing a button, after all. I won’t be going into too much detail here – you can find more specific guides somewhere else. I also welcome additions and corrections as long as they are made in a loving manner.

The question I want to answer is, in a one on one fight between two equal ships, how do you get the upper hand and come away with the win? A similar question would be, in a swarm of 15 tacklers hurtling towards an enemy fleet, how do you keep yourself alive when frigates are popping all around you?

Capsule Controls (A Beginner's Reference)

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

Autopilot The autopilot is capable of setting a route to one or more waypoint systems, and automatically flying your ship there. However it warps to all stargates at 15km, so travel time is significantly higher than manual flight. You will also be a sitting duck for gatecamps if you decide to go into low-sec space with autopilot on, so for the purposes of this guide, keep it off! Besides, the whole point of this guide is that you can pilot your ship better than the computer. I only use the autopilot in combination with 2D maps, to plan out travel routes.

Tactical overlay The tactical overlay button puts range markers on your solar system map so you can get a better sense of distance. One useful feature it has, is that if you mouse over one of your modules while in the tactical overlay, a bubble will appear around your ship that shows the range of the module.

Directional and system scanner The system scanner recently received an overhaul and is now much easier to use. It will scan the system for Cosmic Signatures, which are a less advanced version of actual sites found with exploration. If you have scan probes fitted, they will integrate to form a much more powerful system scanner. Look for an exploration class for more details.

The directional scanner a tool on every ship that can scan a radius of around 14 AU around you. It can pick up anything seen in the overview, and you can actually use specific overview settings to filter the results. You can then narrow the direction of the scan from 360º to 180º all the way down to 5º to figure out where something is. Some good ideas are a filter for scanning for probes that are looking for you, scanning for ships at a gate from a faraway recon safespot, or looking to see if there are cans in an asteroid belt to flip (kidding). If you turn on brackets in space you will see the icons for gates and planets and stations, etc. You can then click on your own ship and use the little box to line yourself up with those places for precise scanning. There is a video and a class recording in the Library.

The Overview The overview is the primary way you get information about what’s going on around you in space. If it’s set up properly, you should be able to play the game just by looking at overview information, and not even looking at your ship and what it’s doing. I won’t go into the details of overview settings, but suffice to say it is very important. In this guide we’ll mostly be concerned with its ability to display an object’s distance and velocity (including radial, transversal, and angular components). In addition, by looking at the ship icons in the overview, you can tell whether you have been locked onto (flashing yellow targeting box), or have been aggressed against (solid red box).

Throttle The velocity control (where your velocity is displayed) lets you manually choose what velocity you want to travel at, up to your max velocity. Ctrl-space will stop your ship as long as you are not in warp. If your warp drive is active, but you are still aligning, ctrl-space will work. 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-click Double clicking in space, basically makes your ship go to where 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. Then the ship aligns to that vector.

Approach The approach button simply aligns your ship in the direction of the selected object and increases your velocity to the velocity you’ve set in the throttle. This maximizes your radial velocity and minimizes your transversal velocity. This is the same as the “align to” command, but “align to” is used for objects at warp distances, and approach used for objects at subwarp distances (less than 150 km).

Orbit The orbit button tries to put your ship in a circular orbit around the selected object. The value can be set by right clicking and manually entering a default orbit distance, or by right-clicking the object in the overview and choosing from some preset distances. Orbiting maximizes your transversal and angular velocities, and minimizes your radial velocity.

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.

Keep at Range 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.

Warp Starts the process of warping to the selected object greater than 150 km away. To warp to something it must be an object in space, or a ship in your fleet. You can adjust how far you will land from your target when you come out of warp, from 0 to 100 km. Again the default value on the button can be changed by right-clicking and presets can be found in the right-click menu. For example, warping to something 150 km away within 100 km will move you inline toward the object 50 km.

When you press the warp button, first you have to align to the target. There are two steps to aligning which happen at the same time: lining up the target with your ship’s movement direction within 5º, and increasing ship velocity to 75% of the maximum. How fast this process takes depends on your ship agility. Once you are aligned you will see your normal engines cut out, your warp engine will turn on and you will no longer be able to stop the ship until the warp bubble collapses. Until your warp engine actually turns on, you can still be locked and fired upon.

Jump Pretty self-explanatory, you jump through the stargate if you are within 2500 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.

Look At This changes your camera’s anchor point from your ship to the selected object. This can be useful for visually determine what kind of weaponry the target ship has equipped – yes you can tell the type, size, and amount of turrets on a ship just from looking. Unfortunately missile launchers don’t show up, nor do smartbomb launchers. One example of what you would use this for is to see if a battleship you’d expect to have turrets, actually has any showing. If they don’t, they might have 8 smartbombs.

Using this button to ogle other people’s ships is also a good way to pass the time while waiting for uni fleets to get going. I’ve split this reference into 3 sections: Capsule Controls, Flying Manually, and Knowledge is Power.

Flying Manually (For Fun and Profit)

The first topic you should know about is warp mechanics. Warping is critically important for moving around space, and manual piloting of your ship has a big impact on how well the warp drive will work.

When you press the warp button, several things happen. Your ship begins to align as described in section I. You lose a certain amount of energy from your capacitor based on skills and the distance of the jump (if you cancel the warp at this stage the energy is still lost). Once you are aligned, you warp to your destination at your ship’s warp speed. The two important aspects I’ll focus on are controlling the align time of your ship, and controlling where you drop out of warp using “warp to within” and bookmarks.

Align Time

Pods align instantly, and shuttles nearly so (about 1 second). So if you are paying attention, and have no lag, it is nearly impossible for you to be locked before you warp in these vessels (especially because your signature radius is so small). Frigates have a typical align time of 3-5 s, cruisers might be more like 7-9 s, and battleships, industrials, and larger ships can take 20, 30, or more seconds to align for warp.

To first order, your align time is simply dependent on your mass. Higher mass makes it harder to accelerate, decelerate, and turn the ship. Simple physics! Every ship has an agility modifier, which you multiply with the mass to get an “effective mass” that determines how agile your ship really is. Modules like nanofibers or inertial stabilizers reduce your agility modifier and therefore reduce your align time. Eve Fitting Tool (EFT) can give you an approximate align time for your ship loadout.

So where does piloting come in? Well, for one thing you can pre-align your ship to a target so that you warp instantly, even in a massive ship. One little quirk is that because the EVE universe has a top and bottom, if your ship’s engines are off, you slowly drift back towards horizontal. If you want to stay aligned you have to keep your engines online, even if it’s 20 m/s. Of course to be truly aligned, keep your velocity above 75% of max. If you are in a frigate, you tend to orbit a lot and pre-aligning might not be practical. But in a larger ship in a dangerous situation, pre-aligning might save your hull. Some people will tell you – always fight pre-aligned.

Another way you can use manual piloting to improve align time is to “pump the throttle,” as I like to call it. If you notice, there’s a difference in align time right after a gate jump, and right after being squeezed out of a station. That’s because it is harder to turn your ship if it has a lot of velocity. When the computer aligns the ship it tries to maximize velocity at the same time as it turns the ship. If you come out of a station in an industrial and align to something 90º away, you will have an agonizing wait while you make the turn at max velocity. If you align to something 180º away, your velocity will drop drastically as you turn around and you’ll see the ship turn much faster.

So the maneuver in this case is to close the throttle to cut your velocity manually if you know you’re going to need to make a turn, then open it up again so you can warp. Obviously you need to decide whether this will be worth it. If you are in a situation where turning the ship will take much longer than building to 75% velocity, then I would pump the throttle. If you guess that the align time will be fairly short it might not be worth it.

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 piloting can come in really handy.

“Warp within” and bookmarks

Where you come out of warp is critical. As I mentioned at the beginning, 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.

Likewise if you’re warping to a hostile gate, you’ll be at a decisive advantage if you drop out of warp at your optimal range. The easiest way to do this is by warping within X km, where X is your optimal range. Remember you can set X to anything between 0 and 100 km by right-clicking on the warp icon. If you have bookmarks around the gate you have even more options for recon, or for warping past the gate, or somewhere unexpected. For more information about bookmarks, there’s a really good thread on the forums: http://www.eve-ivy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15375

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 for 30 seconds. Warp to within at least 5 km.

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The second major topic has to do with tracking mechanics. Damage from both turrets and missiles is affected by how the ships are moving. To really understand tracking I recommend the official guide at http://www.hostile.dk/files/eve/eve-tracking101.swf. Some basics:

• the higher your transversal velocity, the harder you are to hit with turrets.
• the higher your absolute velocity, the less damage you take from missiles.
• the smaller your signature radius compared to the weapons being fired, the less damage you take.

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? In fact 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 damage or increasing survivability. It might work better to use examples:

Two identical ships, but one is using artillery (long range, bad tracking) and one is using cannons (short range, good tracking).

Let’s say I’m the artillery pilot. I know that artillery do less damage per second than cannons. But if I can maintain a range of 20 km, I know that I can damage him but he can’t damage me – I’ll win in the end. So I can set my orbit to 20 km, or if I want to do more damage, I can keep him at a 20 km range so my transversal goes down and my guns track easier.

If I’m the autocannon pilot, I know I have to get up close in order to do any damage. Once I’m there, if I go into orbit I’ll have maximized my transversal so I’ll see an advantage because my guns track better than his.

You might notice that in this situation, whoever has the higher speed and agility is going to have a decisive advantage, because they will control the range of the fight so their guns are doing maximum damage, and they will be able to set an orbit around the other ship such that they will take minimum damage.

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

A frigate vs. a cruiser

As the frigate pilot, I know that I won’t last long if I let his guns (or missiles) track me with 0 transversal. But I know my defense will be very high if I can get under his guns by establishing a close orbit. Getting in close without getting hit is a problem though. People tend to use a zig-zag or a spiral path of approach. Instead of approaching in a straight line, I can approach at 45 degree angles by double clicking in space between the enemy ship and the edge of the screen. The reason for the spiral is to keep my vector changing and narrowing on the target, while never sliding through the cone in the middle of the screen where transversal is low. I hope he doesn’t have drones!

As the cruiser pilot, I know that medium weapons will do less damage against the frigate – and even worse because the frigate will have the speed advantage, he’ll be very hard to track. But I have a couple options. One is to deploy drones, which have a much easier time tracking and orbiting fast ships. Another is to minimize my transversal so I can get some good hits off. As the frigate is approaching, I can try to keep at range, and that will make the computer attempt to turn the ship to minimize the transversal. Remember for turning the ship, having a low velocity allows me to turn faster.

But if he gets in an orbit around me, it’s not over yet. If I have a decent velocity I can make his orbit elliptical, and when he goes around the narrow ends of the oval his transversal will be lower than average. Changing directions frequently (double-click!) will also make him adjust his orbit and possibly lower his traversal. This works even better if I time my direction change well: for example, as he is moving across the top of my screen to the left in his orbit, I can make a quick right turn and this will cause him to have to chase me – with low transversal – for a little while.

You can also double back on your tracks to try and escape an orbit, or web range. Details on these maneuvers can be found here: http://www.eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=2_40&page=6

A cruiser in a mission with frigates and battleships. Don't try this at home.

Let's assume for fun I'm in an autocannon ship and all the enemies are turret based as well. I might be suicidal running a mission with battleships in a cruiser but this is just as an example of the thought process. First thing in a close range heavy fire situation, always keep moving. I'd have my afterburner on constantly. Next I'd have to figure out what was doing the most damage to me. It might not be a battleship - a lot of that damage is reduced because of the size difference. It might be an elite cruiser. Whatever it is, I'd orbit it to minimize the damage I'm taking. Then I'd set my drones on the frigates that are warp jamming me, and using the overview, pick out ships that have a low transversal for me to attack.

Now obviously I'll need a massive tank (T3 cruiser maybe?) to actually pull this off. Normally you have dedicated tanking ships who can take the beating, and separate damage ships because it's too hard to do everything yourself. But the point of this is twofold: For one thing, a lot of these maneuvers will fail in missions because there are just too many ships and well..have you seen the last scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"? So just like in other games, pilot skill is going to shine more in small gang or solo fights. The second thing is that...missiles are really good for PvE. By staying at long range you eliminate a lot of turret dps being thrown at you.

Okay, a couple more things about turrets and ship maneuvers. Turrets have the feature/bug that if the target is at a range of 0 m, they do no damage. So if you hug a turret ship close, you can mitigate a lot of damage that way.

The last thing is bumping. Bumping is basically the act of throwing your ship directly at an opponent at high speed, to turn his ship around and mess up any aligning he’s trying to do. The faster and more massive your ship is, the better. Against a slowly-aligning ship, you may be able to keep him from entering warp indefinitely.

"There Is No Knowledge That Is Not Power"

Information is everything. Whether it’s a scout or a ship scanner on a logistics ship, any information you can gain will give you an advantage. And along with this is experience and judgment, which you can only pick up through practice.

Know your modules

Know what they’re capable of and how to use them best. 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 if they’re using an AB or MWD. Predict the enemy’s capabilities.

For example, the reason people bring stasis webifiers is to control the velocity in a fight like described above. It’s important to know what the range of a stasis web is so that you can plan to escape its effects if need be. It’s important to guess if that BS has smartbombs so you can orbit outside of 7.5 km. Etc, etc.

Thermodynamics

You should also know what the overheated range of a webifier is. Thermodynamics is one of the biggest “edges” you can have in a battle. It’s described nicely at this page, but basically you “overclock” your modules so they perform better but they take damage. http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Heat.

Adapt

Make smart decisions about fitting for different circumstances. There are a lot of specialized tools, from remote reps to Ewar drones, that shine under the right conditions.

Running Hot Modules

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.

Cycles

Some modules have activation cycles which you should be aware of. Keep track of how much energy they’re using and pulse them if necessary to keep as much capacitor as possible.

There is no six

Someone once told me to watch my six, but I don’t even know what that is.

Weapon Grouping

Staggering vs. volleying guns: The advantage of firing 8 lasers at the target all at the same time, is that you do a large chunk of damage at once, which can break through a passive tank’s prime recharge rate (~30%). Also, if you think you may only have time for one shot, then by all means volley. However be aware that the downside is that your capacitor will take large hits at once, possibly hurting its recharge rate.

Self-destruct

Self-destruct starts a two-minute timer which you can cancel at any time. If you survive the two minutes, all your fitted modules and ship will be destroyed, and you’ll collect the insurance. It also denies your enemies a killmail.

Ejecting puts you in your pod and leaves your empty ship out in space to be boarded by your enemy if they have the sense to stop firing. With tech 3 ships, ejecting or self-destruct will save you the skill point loss from losing your ship.

But that will never happen now that you’ve read this far! I’ve pulled this information from a lot of different sources, and I hope it was helpful to do so. I also hope that this guide gave you a good sense of the importance of pilot skill in EVE, as well as a starting point from which you can find out more detailed information. Fly well o7

Kellath Eladrel