User:Mocam/EFT and EVEMon

>> WORK IN PROGRESS <<

I'll need to wait on the EVEMon changes to see about properly documenting this. The changes include .NET 4.0 updates which may cause problems. As such, I'm considering changing prerequisite info to "must have EFT and EVEMon installed".

Thoughts on additional areas: Put together a stock 'class announcement' section that can be copied and pasted with links to the appropriate areas. This can provide consistency of announcements as well as all pertinent links to required materials for the class.

>> Category list -- reinstate prior to publshing -- Curriculum2010Project Category:Syllabi Category:Tier 3 Classes Category:Classes

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Preface

This course is intended to cover the usage of EFT and interfacing it with EVEMon. These are two out of game tools designed for EVE Online. They are used to aid players in experimenting with ship fittings and establishing training plans based upon the differences between what skills a character has and what skills are necessary to pilot a ship effectively as defined by the EVE University Doctrine.

This course will give students a solid working knowledge of how to effectively use these tools to organize training plans with specific goals of flying specific ships, with appropriate fittings on a given vessel.

Class Information

This chapter contains the standard information of this class pertaining to scheduling and class contents. The general information should be sufficient to create a proper class topic for scheduling on the Eve University forums. Additional information relevant to the teacher is listed under Notes for the teacher.

General information

Duration: 01:00 Location: Teamspeak

Class contents:

• How to use EFT
  • Creating ship fits
  • Evaluating performance with increased skills.
• How to use EVEMon
  • Setting up skill plans
  • Increasing training efficiency
• How to use EFT and EVEMon to establish a goal

Student requirements:

• Teamspeak
• EVE API User ID and API key; limited keys only

Notes for the teacher

Required materials:

• Teaching channel
• Link to API: http://www.eveonline.com/api/default.asp
• Link to current version of EFT:
• Link to current version

Class contents

Introduction

Welcome.

This course is on how to use EFT and EVEMon. The goal of this class is to get you familiar with both programs, which when used properly can help you maintain focused training goals to quickly progress your character towards a specific goal.

Talking on Mumble is for the instructor to provide information and by instructor invitation only. There will be a Question and Answer portion to this class but if you have questions, please type them in the Class.E-Uni channel so they can be addressed by the instructor.

For this class you will need access to your API ID and key. This is available from: <provide link from above into the class window> - use your EVE login and password to gain access to your API information.

As part of this class, we will have you change your API key. For those that use multiple machines, other tools that require the API or have applications pending for titles or ILN membership; you may choose not to do this.

Note: EVE University does not keep your API key nor expect it to be the same after it has been used. This is why you are asked to provide it again for titles, joining the ILN and other such changes to your status while you are a member. The API keys are yours and the Uni only uses it to validate pertinent information. Feel free to change it any time after such validations have completed.

EFT and You

EFT, when used properly, can be a very valuable tool. It can enable you to quickly evaluate a ships capabilities without having to put it at risk or spend ISK to see how fittings might work on a ship in game. In other words, how much incoming DPS you can tank as well as how much you can lay down in missions and for how long due to capacitor use. For PvP, there are tools to evaluate your ship in PvP situations.

Setting up for the class

The first thing that we will cover is making sure your EFT and EVEMon are installed with the latest updates.

1. EFT Latest download version Link: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=548883
2. EVEMon, once installed, will,by default, keep itself up to date but EFT won't. Link:

Importing Your Character

The first thing that we'll cover is importing your character into EFT.

1. With EFT open, bring up the Character Editor. This should be open by default.
2. Create a new character, with whatever name you wish to give it.
3. Click on 'Import', which will bring up the information provided by the API.
4. Enter your User Id and API key into the text boxes and Connect. This will bring up a list of characters that you have on your account. Select the one you're interested in and click OK.

EFT Fitting Screen

At this point, your character is set up and ready to go. So now that you've got that done, let's go through fitting a ship out. For our example, we'll be covering a missioning ship fit, a Raven, Navy Issue, AKA the CNR.

1. Open the ship browser.
2. Scroll down to Battleships, expanding that sub menu. Select the Raven Navy Issue by double clicking. This will bring up a blank fitting screen.

Before we actually start fitting the ship out, let's go over the fitting screen. There's a whole lot of information here, so we'll cover it a box at a time.

1. Current Setup – EFT supports multiple setups of each ship, and you can pick from however many you have here.
2. Character – These are all your characters that you've created or imported.
3. Ship Resources – Each ship is limited in what it can fit by resources; CPU and Powergrid for modules, Drone Bay space for drones, turret slots and launch bay slots. Finally, there are a limited number of calibration points for installing rigs. Top to bottom in the first column are Turret slots, Launcher slots, and calibration points. Second column has your CPU, Powergrid and Drone Bandwidth, which determines how many drones of a particular size you can control.
4. Ship Parameters – This covers your Shield HP, Armor HP and Structure HP along with resistances for each. On resistances, top is shields, bottom is armor.
5. Defence – This is how much incoming DPS your ship can take. Top number is sustained DPS, or how much you can take while pulsing a booster or armor repper from the time rats start shooting until the next downtime and beyond. The bottom number is the maximum damage tank, which is only sustainable as long as you have cap. If both of them are the same, then you have a permanent tank.
6. Capacitor – This will show you how long you can run the modules on your ship. It lists the size of your capacitor, usage and recharge.
7. Firepower – This shows your sustained DPS as well as volley damage. By default, it does not account for reload times. It does include your drone damage, if any.
8. Targeting – There's a TON Of stuff in here. From the top left going clockwise you'll find targeting range, maximum number of targets, Signal Strength and Scan Resolution. Targeting range and max targets are self explanatory I think, but the other two are not.
   1. Scan Resolution – This determines how long it takes you to establish target lock. If you right click it, you'll get a drop down menu which will let you see lock times on various ship types. This is pretty handy in general, although I don't often use it.
   2. Signal Strength – This is something that gets more indepth coverage in the EWAR class. Why is that you ask? Because this is basically your resistance to being jammed by Caldari EWAR. For more info on this, take the EWAR class.
9. Mobility – Another fairly obvious one. From left to right, you have your maximum speed, time to align and enter warp, and how fast you go when you're in warp.
10. At the bottom are some miscellaneous bits of information.
    1. Signature – This is the signature radius of your ship as currently fitted with modules active. You can make this go through the roof by fitting a MWD and making sure it's on.
    2. Cargohold – How much stuff you can jam in the cargohold!
    3. Dronebay – How much space out of total available is used.
    4. Price – This one is what the fit will cost. However, it cannot take into account the price of any items bought on contract. Only market prices are available.

Fitting the Ship

With that done, let's start adding modules.

1. The first thing we'll fit are the rigs.
   1. Under Ship Modifications > Energy Grid Rigs, install 3 Capacitor Control Circuits
2. Next up, low slots
   1. Under Engineering Equipment > Power Diagnostic Systems, add 2x Power Diagnostic Systems IIs
   2. Under Turrets & Bays > Weapon Upgrades > Ballistic Control Systems, add 3x Ballistic Control System Iis
3. Third stop: Mid slots
   1. Under Shield > Shield Boosters > Xlarge, add a single X-Large Shield Booster II
   2. Under Shield > Shield Boosters > Boost Amplifiers, add a Shield Boost Amplifier II
   3. Under Engineering Equipement > Capacitor Rechargers, add a Capacitor Recharger II
   4. The last 3 slots are for hardeners, and will be left empty at this time.
4. Final stop, high slots!
   1. Under Turrets & Bays > Missile Launchers > Cruise Launchers, add 7x Arbalest Cruise Launchers.
   2. Under Drones > Drone Upgrades, add a Drone Link Augmenter I

Ok, all fitted out. At this point, there should be a bit of red on your fit screen. The two notable ones that we're concerned with are your CPU usage(802/720)and your Character. The drop down there should say 'Without skills'. At this point, select the character you imported earlier. In some cases, this will correct the problem, in others not so much. For the time being, to get it all green, use the 'All Level V' profile.

As a side note, if your ship is ever close on fit, and over CPU or Powergrid by 5% or less, EFT will point this out to you, and suggest an implant that can be plugged in to allow the loadout to fit.

So, now that you've fitted a ship out, for the most part, what do you do with it? The first thing we'll cover is using EFT to evaluate your tank for missioning. To do this, first off we'll have to load the damage profiles for EFT. If you right click on the Defence icon(it looks like a shield), then the drop down will be pretty short. We're about to fix that. Go to the folder where EFT is stored. In there, is a file named 'config.ini'. Open that up in note pad or a similar program. At the end of the file, copy in the following damage profiles:

DamageProfile=Angel Cartel,480,0,719,3058
DamageProfile=Blood Raiders,613,570,60,0
DamageProfile=EoM,0,618,1718,0
DamageProfile=Guristas Pirates,0,570,3504,0
DamageProfile=Mercenaries,90,634,424,108
DamageProfile=Mordu's Legion,0,30,70,0
DamageProfile=Rogue Drones,86,91,281,964
DamageProfile=Sansha's Nation,1945,1598,0,0
DamageProfile=Serpentis,0,1627,1320,0
DamageProfile=[Faction] Amarr,1204,1349,0,0
DamageProfile=[Faction] Caldari,0,795,944,0
DamageProfile=[Faction] Gallente,25,781,1127,0
DamageProfile=[Faction] Minmatar,615,310,815,1633
DamageProfile=[ammo] Antimatter,0,5,7,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Null,0,6,5,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Spike,0,4,4,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Multifrequency,7,5,0,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Scorch,9,2,0,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Aurora,5,3,0,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] EMP,9,0,1,2
DamageProfile=[ammo] Phased Plasma,0,10,2,0
DamageProfile=[ammo] Fusion,0,0,2,10
DamageProfile=[ammo] Barrage,0,0,5,6
DamageProfile=[ammo] Tremor,0,0,3,5
DamageProfile=EM,1,0,0,0
DamageProfile=Explosive,0,0,0,1
DamageProfile=Thermic,0,1,0,0
DamageProfile=Kinetic,0,0,1,0

Once that's done, restart EFT. So, what can we do with these now? Well, we can see how well our ship tanks. First though, we'll need some hardeners for our shields. Under Shields > Shield Hardeners > Kinetic, add 2x Ballistic Deflection Field Iis. Then go to Thermal and add a single Heat Disspation Field II.

Now, look at your ship's defence numbers. There are two of them listed there; 255 and 376. This means that as it is currently set up, we can go out and tank 255 dps for ever, and 376 dps until we run out of capacitor, which in this case is 3 minutes and 8 seconds as is shown by our Capacitor section. However, this is based on the current damage profile, which is a uniform damage distribution. In other words, it's based on incoming damage being equally split between resistance types. However, we're fit for Guristas, so we'll change it to that. Right click it, and in the drop down should be Guristas. Click that. Now you can tank 1095 DPS against Guristas, with a sustainable tank of 743 DPS.

Importing Your Fits to EVE

You can now import your fits from EFT directly to EVE. In order to do this, you will need to click on the arrow next to "Create a New Setup" and choose "Export to XML". This will load up a window where you can save your fit as an XML file. You will need to save this to wherever your EVE settings folder resides on your computer in the Fittings folder, which you may need to create. This will be the same folder as your logs folder and capture folder reside. A common file path is Desktop > My Documents > EVE > Fittings

Once you've saved the fitting there, you will need to import it within EVE. To do this, you will need to log into EVE and click on your ship fitting button. Once there, click on the Browse button in the upper right corner and click on the Import button on the bottom of that screen underneath the list of ship types. You can click once on the name of the file you saved previously and you'll see the fitting appear on the right side of the Import Fittings window. Click Import and it will import the fitting to your list of saved fits within EVE, ready for you to outfit quickly.

So, now that we've gone over EFT, let's talk about what EVE Mon can do for us.

EVEMon and You

So, now for EVE Mon. Setting up your characters in EVEmon is very similar to doing it in EFT. Once that's done, you can monitor skill training without being logged into EVE. However, this is not what EVE Mon is really about. What it is about is planning out skill trainng. First off, we'll create a basic, long term skill plan. This is the sort of plan that is going to take a while, and at the end of it, won't do much else beyond get you sitting in the ship. For our example, we're going to use a Chimera.

Creating a Skill Plan

1. Create a new skill plan: Go to Plans > New. Type in a name, whatever you want to call this. Once that's done, the skill planer window will come up.
2. At this point, go to the Ship Browser tab. Go to the Carrier > Caldari > Chimera, and click on it once. To the left of the ship browser, you'll see the statistics on the Chimera. At the top, next to the very small portrait, there is a link to battle clinic loadouts. Click that. This will bring up a list of Chimera loadouts on Battleclinic. At this point, I have a warning. Not all BC loadouts are good. In fact, better than 90% of them are complete crap fits, only worthy of being in a failmail. That said, there are some good ones, but I'd recommend either the Uni's ship setup forum or Scrapheap Challenge, end shameless plug.
3. Sort them all by rating, and select whatever is the highest rated loadout. Click 'View Loadout', then 'Add To Plan'. This brings up a list of skills. Click OK to create a skill plan out of it.
4. Close the loadout windows and go back to the Plan Queue. Now, total training time on this will vary greatly, but for me this plan will take 198 days to finish. Because it's so long, EVE Mon will suggest learning skills to decrease your training time. It won't always, but if it does, it's down at the bottom as a link titled 'Suggestion...' Go ahead and click that. This will bring up a bunch of, or in my case, one, suggested skill to shorten the plan. For me, it was Empathy 3.
5. From here, you can further optimize it by checking the implant calculator, which is up top. Click that. This lists your attributes, along with your current implants. Bump them all up by one. As you can see, every time you increase the level of implants in your head, the training time decreases. This way, you can see the effect better implants would have on your overall training time, and if you would require a higher cybernetics skill, whether that extra bit of training would save you time in the long run.

How do EFT and EVEMon Work Together?

Right, so now that we know how they both work on their own, how do they work together? Well, it goes back to that Navy Raven we set up in EFT earlier. For those of you who had a red flag on your character screen, you'll see what I mean immediately. Otherwise, just deselect your characters and you'll see that way as well. If you place the mouse on the red block next to the character drop down, you'll see a mouse over window pop up with a list of modules and required skills. These are skills that you do not have which the module requires. However, this is the smallest part.

One of the things that EVE Uni teaches is not only how to fly a ship, but to fly It well. This is where EFT can really help you set out a plan to fly a ship WELL.

1. First off, right click on the Cruise launchers you have fitted to the ship. One of the submenus there is going to be one that says 'Change Affecting Skill'. That's a list of all the skills that have any effect on the module at all. For the Launchers, you get all the missile support skills (Guided Missile Precision, Warhead Upgrades, Target Navigation Prediction, Missile Projection & Bombardment, etc.).
2. In general, for flying a Battleship, it's recommended that you have all related support skills for all modules on the ship to level 4 or 5. In addtion, you should be able to fit a tank of entirely T2 modules. This doesn't mean you have to fit T2 modules, just be able too.
3. So how does EFT help with all this? Well, any skills listed in the mouse over menu by your character's name are the skills required to fit the modules, and you have a list of all the skills that affect the modules. Add all of those to your plan in EFT for this specific ship, and EVE Mon will then optimize your skill plan with learning skills as needed. In addition, you can tweak the time using the implant calculator to see if you can further reduce the training time overall.