Guide to AIR Career Programme
[GUIDE] Air Career Programme
by Hippla Tsero » 20 Jul 2022 20:00
This guide is aimed at newer players, more veteran players and multiboxers (people playing multiple omega accounts at the same time) like myself.
I started experimenting with the Air Career Programme because the 750,000 Skill Points (SP) provided seemed like a pretty sweet deal. But I wanted to know whether it’s worth the effort and share my findings with the community.
Basics The AIR Career programme is divided into four Careers and this Step-By-Step guide will take you through a quick way to finish all of those, providing you with tips and guidance.
• Step-By-Step Guide - Career Agents and SoE Epic Arc • Enforcer • Explorer • Industralist • Soldier of Fortune
This follows the naming of the revamped Career Agents.
Each of the Careers is divided into 10 sections and each section has individual tasks. Each completed task provides Career Points (CP). To get the 750.000 SP, one does not have to complete every task available though.
You will get following SP:
• 100,000 SP for graduating from each career- that means reaching 750 CP out of the 1000 available in each career • 50,000 SP for reaching 750 CP overall • 75,000 SP for reaching 1,500 CP overall • 100,000 SP for reaching 2,250 CP overall • 125,000 SP for reaching 3,000 CP overall • Total: 750,000 SP
It is possible to finish the AIR Career Programme quite comfortably in about 12 hours of game-play. A hyper-optimised approach, utilising Fits with high SP requirements, could probably finish the Programme in as little as 8-9 hours.
Considering the current price of Large Skill Injectors (LSI), even a brand new player can get more than 100M ISK/h worth of SP, whereas 80M+ SP characters can calculate with 360M ISK/h worth of SP per character (considering using LSIs instead of accelerators).
Multiboxing: Large parts of the Air Career Programme are easily multiboxable. But some tasks will increase the time it takes for completion slightly. I have personally tried running it with 4 characters in parallel (twice) and 2 individual fresh characters for testing purposes. Note: I have added details about multiboxing to this guide, not because I believe that one has to multibox to enjoy EVE, but because I think that the AIR Career Programme is valuable also for more veteran players. In ISK value (as SP) it can easily compete with other common multibox activities like Moon Mining, Ishtar ratting, etc. as you can see in the napkin-math above. Even if you don’t care about the SP, I recommend to all veteran players to run the AIR Career Programme at least once for multiple reasons:
• New Career Agents - worth seeing the gorgeous new environment and dialogues, as well as how new players are being guided into playing EVE • Faction Standing Boost through the Career Agents and the Sisters of EVE Epic Arc - if you don't know which one to choose - Caldari standing helps reduce Broker Fees in Jita - that's always nice to have. • The Air Career Programme also serves as a reminder of the beautiful complexity of EVE Online and how many things new players can and should experience.
For newer players, it is a great catch-up mechanics and introduces you to many more factettes of the game than the Career Agents. It will surely help you figure out which activities you like to focus on.
Step-by-step Guide
Fits: I will be providing example fits and explanations via EvE Workbench. All fits are minimum SP requirement fits and Alpha-friendly and you can gladly upgrade them. For cheaper options, I will be providing some alternative fits for the SoF career. By searching in the ingame fitting window for “AIR” you will find a range of viable frigate fits provided by CCP for most of the combat/exploration part of the Programme.
Step 1 - Career Agents Get started by moving to one of the 12 Career Agent Systems. If you have previously finished the career agents in a particular system, simply move to one of the others and the agents should be available to you. The Career Agents can be done in about 3h and I recommend using the AIR Sunesis, as it has all needed modules already in cargo. The Uniwiki has some tips on how to complete it efficiently.
During the Industrial Career Agent, you can mine Veldspar and and Kernite. Doing so will allow you to save you upwards of ISK 5M but also means the Air Career Programme will take a little longer. To complete two tasks in the Air Career Industry tasks [Resource Harvesting] and [Refining], you need to mine one Venture of the respective ore (Veldspar and Kernite). Alternatively, you will buy the resources later on in a trade hub and do the quicker Distribution missions and salvaging tasks instead.
Tip: Should you decide to take the slightly longer route, you will find the ore in the following missions: Kernite: Industrialist (Producer) - Making Mountains of Molehills (9 of 10) Veldspar: Industrialist (Producer) - MMoM (1 of 10) and MMoM (4 of 10), as well as Industrialist (Entrepreneur) - Balancing the Books (3 of 10)
As part of the Industrialist (Producer) Career Agent, you will receive Blueprint Copies (BPCs) for the following two items:
(Civilian) Shuttle (Racial) Frigate
Build those instead of just buying them from the market to start finishing tasks in the [Manufacturing] section of the Industry Career.
While doing the Career Agents or later on the Sisters of EVE Epic arc, you will have plenty of idle time, even when multiboxing. Use the downtime to do following tasks:
Project Discovery [Submit 50 - these can be fails as well]
Social
[Join Fleet - with yourself is ok, we don’t judge!]
[Send Eve mail - to yourself - it’s ok]
[Add contact - anyone random and remove them again]
[Send Message - wish someone random a nice day]
[Salvaging] If you always have a Salvager equipped, you can salvage while still fighting with rats in most of the combat-related missions. This should not be a priority though.
[Scanning] Again not a priority but if you have a Core Probe Launcher equipped, firing 8AU scans regularly while running the Career Agents will get you a few successful scans without any down-time
Once you are done with the Career Agents, do not leave the Career Agent system just yet. Complete the following tasks:
[Combat sites] Fly in between the Anomaly Training Sites until you completed 25 combat sites - entering the site will count as "completing" it [Exploration - Gas Sites] Fly in between two gas sites up to 15 times till complete [Exploration - Hacking] Fly to either a data/relic site and continuously hack the container until you have hacked the container 25 times. The container will “respawn” 5 seconds after each successful hack
Step2 - Sisters of EVE Epic Arc - 51 missions to greatness You can run the SoE Epic Arc every 3 months and there are plenty of guides out there. Using the AIR Sunesis will allow you to comfortably finish it within 4 hours. For new characters or Alts, use the FREE AIR Enforcer Expert System you received in your Redeem Queue for finishing the Career Agent earlier.
One could stop after 20 Epic Arc missions but I recommend completing it, as it will contribute to the completion of many AIR tasks, including [Enforcer - Epic Arc - Complete an Epic Arc]
If you don’t know which Standing to choose in mission 49 of the SoE Arc, Caldari is a solid choice as it will decrease the Broker Fee in Jita.
Tip: If you are NOT using my provided Sunesis fit but a cheaper Frigate/Destroyer fit e.g. the ones provided through the ingame fittings by CCP, you might struggle with Kristan Parthus (high DPS) in Chasing Shadows (Mission 48) and Dagan (high self-repair requiring more than 100 DPS) in Our Man Dagan (Mission 50). Get a friend to help you or upgrade your ship accordingly.
Step3 - AIR Career Programme Careers :roll: Now we will focus on the four careers of the AIR Career Programme, one at a time. There is a lot of flexibility on how to approach completing the Programme and plenty of space to optimise the time it takes to complete tasks. For each of the careers, I will present some of the quickest ways to mix different tasks and take advantage of game mechanics for a quick completion. This assumes you are starting from zero and you won’t do any of the activities in our regular EVE life with the particular character(s) you are using. If you use an industrial character, you can skip obvious tasks. If you use a PvP character, you can skip blowing yourself up 20 times etc. Using the expert systems received through the Career agents for each of the sections is recommended to speed things up and give you access to most fits and mechanics required to complete the Programme.
Industry
The Industry career doesn’t have obvious "cheese" mechanics but you can still optimise the time it takes to complete tasks and choose the ones that are the quickest. Find the tasks in order of priority here and my suggestions on which ones to skip. Use the FREE Industry Expert System you received as a redeemable reward from finishing the Career Agents.
[Research - Copy/ME/TE] Buy and use a BPO that is quick to research and cheap - if in Jita/Perimeter, get (Mjolnir/Scourge/…) Rocket Blueprint or similar from an NPC order. If you are doing it in a different trade hub, get the respective small ammo of the Empire (e.g. Amarr - Multifrequency S, etc.). The four research tasks should take less than 10 minutes to complete.
Tip: Use the Facilities Tab in the Industry Window to quickly find a station that allows you to research your BPO.
[Build a Cruiser/Detroyer/Frigate/Shuttle] You should have completed the Shuttle and Frigate during the Career Agents. For the Cruiser and Destroyer, you can ustilise the BPCs that you will receive in your Redeem Queue for reprocessing 16k Pyroxes and and 14k Plagioclase (tasks of the [Refining] section.
Alternatively, simply buy a BPC from the Contract Market and buy the material required right from the market. (See screenshots below). You can then sell those ships at a slight loss to the market complete the next section.
[Market] Earning 1M ISK on the market can be done in multiple ways. Usually when you sell all your loot/rewards you receive from Career Agents, SoE Epic Arc etc. this completes quickly. If you haven’t managed so far, simply redeem all rewards you have gotten so far (in your Redeem queue) and sell those + the ships you’ve built in the previous task at a trade hub.
[Resource Harvesting] While a time-consuming task (around 2h for everything), this can help you save ISK 5M or more, if you use the resources harvested for the following [Refining] task. It can pretty much be done afk in a belt in High-Sec.
Tip: Find belts with the respective Ore in the Agency -> Resource Gathering -> Asteroid Belts
[Refining] The easiest way here is to simply buy all the resources and refine them. The ore will cost around 10M and lose half its value when reprocessed on a character without refining skills. If you have done the [Resource Harvesting] task, you can also use those resources.
[Salvage] or [Distribution Mission] to wrap up the 750 CP required
[Salvage] Salvaging 50 wrecks can be done very quickly with a salvaging Destroyer like the AIR Catalyst Salvage. However, one needs to find 50 wrecks. You can either (a) find a friend that runs missions and provides you with bookmarks to their wrecks, (b) bookmark your own missions you will run in the Enforcer career and return with your salvager later (wrecks stay for 2 hour) or (c) Always have your salvager equipped on your AIR Sunesis and salvage while running Career Agents, SoE Epic Arc, Security Missions or while blowing yourself up in 20 shuttles per character as part of the Solider of Fortune career. (d) use mining drones while running the Career Agents, SoE Epic arcs and Security Missions - this requires you to train the salvage drones skill and is thus not the optimal solution
[Distribution Mission] These can be done quicker than the [Resource Harvesting] tasks and should be preferred if you skipped mining and finished [Refining] by buying the resources from the market.
Skip: [Mining Mission] These take an unnecessary amount of time and should definitely be skipped.
Enforcer
After completing the Career Agents and the SoE as described in the first part of the guide, you will have made great progress towards completing the Enforcer Career. You should have following sections complete [Career Agent Missions], [Security Agents], [Combat Sites], [Epic Arc], [Standings]
The [Market] task requires you to spend 1M ISK. There are multiple moments in this guide where you will probably buy something. Just complete it if it isn’t yet.
To wrap up the 750 Career Points needed, I recommend using the AIR Sunesis or any other DPS ship you used so far to run Security Missions. You can speed up the Soldier of Fortune career [Combat] section by using a different ship type for running Security Missions than what you used up to now. I.e. If you used a Destroyer, now use a Frigate or Cruiser to run the missions and kill 75 ships.
Run Security Missions until enough tasks in sections [Loyalty Points], [Combat], [Bounties] are completed. Once you get 350 Loyalty Points with a corporation, spend them to wrap up [Loyalty points].
Skip: [Abyssal Deadspace]. While it’s viable, low-level Abyssals do not contribute to [Loyalty] points, don’t give [Bounties] and have generally very few ships, making [Combat] take much longer.
The Soldier of Fortune
This Career can be done with Alts or with a friend pretty quickly but might be challenging for newer players - go get a corp and some friends quickly. It’s what EVE is all about really!
Use your FREE Soldier of Fortune Expert system. Note that you will have to train Capacitor Emissions Systems I & Weapon Disruption I as it is unfortunately not provided through the Expert system but required for an entire section + an individual task under the EWAR section.
Simply start by making yourself a bookmark in your favourite Trade hub (ideally close to the Hub). Using two of the provided AIR - Gnosis fits (40M ISK) with your Alt(s) or a friend. This will allow you to do the following sections/tasks in less than 20 minutes. The cheaper version will utilise two fits with the Air Griffin and AIR Bantam but will take a bit longer.
[Capacitor Warfare] Use an Energy Neutraliser and a Nosferatu on each other and wait till this section is complete.
[Support] Use drones to damage each other and use Shield Booster and Armor Repairs to finish this section. If you can upgrade your Gnosis to T2 Light drones or even better Medium/Heavy Drones, this will go even quicker.
[EWAR] Use each EWAR (web, paint, point, scram, weapon disrupt) 5 times on your Alt/Buddy. Takes less than a minute.
After that’s done, there are multiple options on how to complete the Soldier of Fortune career. The quickest way depends a lot on the availability of a friend or an Alt.
[Social] You should have completed most tasks here. I skipped the [Join Corporation] task here, as you can easily complete the Soldier of Fortune career without it.
[Duels] & [PvP] & [Destruction] I found the quickest way to get those done is to have a friend/Alt and use either the Trade hub bookmark from earlier, or kill yourself right outside the station:
Get in a Shuttle and warp to your friend/Alt who sits in a DPS ship like the AIR Sunesis Start a Duel and get yourself blown up until you died 20 times to get [Destruction] completed for you This will get [PvP] done for your friend/Alt Every Duel has a 5 minute cooldown - if you want to get [Duels] done at the same time, simply wait 5 minutes for each time you kill the shuttle of your friend/Alt. You can speed up this process by not waiting out the 5 minutes and instead do Duel requests whenever you have a friend/Alt in the same system throughout running the AIR Career Programme. NOTE: You are perfectly safe to initiate a Duel with someone - no one else will be able to take advantage of your Duel timer. Change DPS/victim roles with your friend/Alt and repeat With up to 20 destroyed Shuttles, the DPS ship you use for this could have a Salvager which would contribute to the [Salvaging] section of the Industry career.
Tip: You can duel someone as long as they are in the same system. Simply click their name (from watchlist, chat window, fleet, etc.) and request a duel.
Skip: [Faction Warfare] The current Faction Warfare system is not ideal, as it’s not easily available to everyone or all your Alt characters. I therefore recommend skipping it. Skip: [Combat] Following the steps above, you will not require finalising the [Combat] section (killing 75 ships with a Frigate, Destroyer and Cruiser respectively)
Exploration
Once again, use your FREE Exploration Expert System before starting this career.
The Exploration task will take advantage of Thera and the fantastic work of EVE Scout, an initiative by Signal Cartel. Join the ingame channel: EvE-Scout and load the EVE-SCOUT // Thera bookmark folder provided in the MOTD.
[Project Discovery] This should be done while travelling, waiting for scans etc. Failed attempts count. [Gas Sites] and [Combat Sites] should be completed right after the career agents. If not done yet, go back to a Career Agent System at the end of the Exploration section.
[Scanning] & [Wormholes] & [Navigation] & [Advanced Navigation] Get in a T1 scanning ship or switch to your Core Probe Launcher on your AIR Sunesis. Find any Wormhole and repeatedly scan it down till you have all your [Scanning] and [Wormholes] tasks complete.
Head over to Thera - in the Bookmark folder simply look for the quickest way to get there. If you don’t feel comfortable with going through Low/Null, simply look for the quickest route through High-Sec iE
Once in Thera, use the EVE Scout website and sort by Regions. Fly into regions you haven’t been to yet to finish [Advanced Navigation].
Tip: You can take advantage of the ingame map -> Personal -> Systems visited to see which regions you have yet to visit.
If you don’t feel comfortable with Low/Null yet, you can of course stay in High-Sec but it will probably take you longer to complete these sections. If you feel comfortable with Low/Null, you can probably find plenty of Data/Relic sites to finish a task in [Advanced Hacking] as well.
Skip: We don’t really skip tasks here, with the caveat that [Advanced Hacking] isn’t necessary to complete and will take more time if you multibox.
Congratulations! You have finished the AIR Career Programme, gained 750k SP and hopefully learned something on the way.
