Lords of Space

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

Ok I’m a new blog that doesn’t mean I can’t start participating in the blog-arena with the other eve-celebrities, and so I’ve decided I’ll start participating in the blog banters . This topic really strikes a cord because I’m an Iphone owner who hates Apples, in fact I’m a macbook and iPhone owner who hates Apple (don’t ask it’s a long story). But the fact is I sincerly think people are underestimating the power of modern phone gaming. Look at the iPhone 3GS and even the ZuneHD (it’s not a phone but I can almost gaurantee we’ll see a phone version eventually of it with similar hardware).

We’re talking small devices with the power of small computers. yes eve is a big game, theirs no doubt, but the fact of the matter is its doable. Yes right clicking is an issue, but really eve on the iphone wouldn’t be for those people that want to go ganking in highsec and need lightning reflexes it’d be for traveling a bit or doing a trade run while on the train with your 3G. Lower res textures, lower poly models and the new hardware being released on the latest smart phones, could easily handle a eve-micro platform. Things would have to be different for sure it wouldnt be just a shrunken copy of eve. You’d have to make collapseable chat tabs and work on a multitouch input to make control as easy as possible.

Connectivity is an issue, but to be honest, I live in the caribbean and our cellular internet is about as stable as our home internet trust me I work for an ISP. So why not? All online games have to deal with their environments, ya you can loose ships from internet cutting but thats the same at home, and really if your using a mobile client chances are your going to play a bit safer in highsec even.

People tend to shoot lower than they need to when they look into their imagination of whats possible, sure porting cosmos and an IRC style chat for talking to friends, and even skill maintenance would all be doable and probably easily deployed to the most hardware platforms, but i stand to visualize the farthest something like this could go with the state of the latest technology, why not have a eve-client on the iphone properly done with opengl, with optimized textures and sounds and models to reduce load and size, i dont see why it wouldn’t be atleast feasable and for those Capsuleers like myself that sit around 23/7 thinking about eve it’d be awesome!

Just thought since I was doing the whole introductory thing today, I’d also talk about my current Skill Plans while I’m logged in and posting.

Lord Helghast (my main), is pretty much the jack of all trades character currently, he can fly mainly galante ships and can easily solo most L4 missions (actually just moved from a highsec-L4 area (Jel) to another highsec-L4 area, that’s not near lowsec, as in Jel I kept getting damn lowsec L4’s and it was driving me insane no way I’m risking 100+M ISK of Megathron and Fittings because the damn agent keeps sending me into lowsec with it. So far so good in the new Fed Navy L4 spot no lowsec missions.

Lord’s currently training for Mining Barge V, as I said hes a jack of all trades and well during the week I mostly do Veld mining with Nakiti as I’m normally only on 2 hours a day and L4’s can tend to take 2-3 hrs.

After Mining Barge V, I plan to get Exhumers IV so that I can move from my retriever over to a Mackinaw and a Hulk, as I do ice mine in my retriever when Naki and Doc are Ice Mining but its just too damn slow, so the Mack will be nice so i can participate in more corp-mining ops, especially now that we have some Orca’s in the group. The hulk, well the hulk will just mean finally breaking the 4M ISK/hr barrier i seem to be hitting currently on my Retriever with Veld mining, which will be nice.

After i get into the hulk, Lord will be going on a top-up skilling run, basically training all the generic skills from 2 and 3 up to 4, Electronics, Armor Rep, Hull HP etc, as right now i have a few to 3 and a few to 4 but i want to get things up to a nice even setting. And as 4’s for pretty much all skills are relatively short (1 day each) I figure getting everything to L4 atleast will give me a nice boost to my skills and won’t take inherintly long. After that I want to skill up my drone and hybrid gunnery skills (finally want to get T2 hybrid ammo, and Sentry Drones)

Lord FunkyMunky is a bit different as hes just starting (1 week old), he probably has the most defined skill plan to date of either character, hes training straight for a hulk, and then an orca, and the necessary fittings for both (basically added the #1 battleclinic fit for both and did optimize in EveMon).

As it turns out the learning skills recommended by evemon take Funky right up to the end of the 1.6m SP 100% boost. So as he finishes the learning skills, i’ll have the learning skills to finish boosting the regular training, in all within 1 mth i should be in a hulk with both of my characters.

In reality I actually cheated a little on LFM’s skill training i slipped in a few basic skills to finish the tutorial, and also I trained 1 day, to get a Bestower so that while hes busy training for the hulk, he can atleast haul my ore for me during my weeknights of mining on the main. It’s working out quite nicely. For those that know me LFM started as a caldari, so why the crosstrain to a bestower? It’s a better looking ship than the caldari hauler, but thats not the real reason, the real reason is after some forum research it turns out the best L3 Industrial is the bestower for hauling amount, and as i said i didnt want to burn a lot of time out of my skillplan on the hauler, so I only wanted to go to L3. The nice surprise about this is that while the Amarr have the best T1 L3 hauler, it turns out their T2 Transport is also the biggest of all races, which is eventually where i want him to go (transports).

For those going for an alt just thought i’d give you a heads up, on my skill path the books were bought up front at lowest price possible, and totalled around 45M ISK, on top of that I also got him +3 Impants for all except charisma (charismas useless on my alt) and those ran me 10M a piece so in total around 90M investment in my Alt not to mention eventually the hulk and fittings but after that he should be pretty much self dependant. And will definitly pay for himself eventually, as well as be a big help after i eventually get him trained into a remote repper to help on the harder L4 missions.

Well I figure’d I’d elaborate on that naming issue I mentioned in the introduction. You see normally I go by the callsign Phantam just about everywhere else except eve, Lord Helghast was kind of a joke I made on a friend of mine who is a killzone fan, but since changing your name in eve isn’t exactly easy it’s stayed that way since Day 1 (of my original foray into New Eden). When it came time to create my alt I tried making a user called Phantam to get back on track with my normal names, well that didn’t work somehow it was already taken. And then i took a look back in my local chat channel with my corp and one of my friends is Doctor Wholen, but he has like 4 or 5 alts and their all named Doctor Something! It’s kind of funny when you see him logon and all these doctors pop online at the same time, not to mention the user list full of “doctors”. I really should ask him if hes actually a doctor LOL, perhaps just a throwback at Doctor Who (the show)… But the other nice feature of this “prefix” is you can kind of tell which characters are his and who isn’t when talking in the channel.

For 3 days when I rejoined i thought Nimz and Korin were 2 seperate people until he told me it was just his alt… While with the Doctors I always knew they were 1 and the same. So I decided Lord would be my alt as well, Now funkymonkey… well thats not really something i can explain other than I like monkeys and it was 2am when i created the account.

Well since I’ve been playing eve again now for the last 2 months after being away for almost 6 months of RL it’s really great to be back. Pretty much no one remembers me except my few corp mates that I really did become close friends with. I’m no longer with Cruentus Anumi (No I didn’t spell it right lol), Apparently while  I was gone most of the members i knew disbanded from it and several went their own way, a few of the hardcore like ed (ihateu2) went over to either goonswarm or one of the other big PVP alliances. Since I was just starting back into eve I decided to follow Korin and Nakiti over to Korin’s corporation “Phoenix Evolved” as he seemed to be less into the warring and more into the other various eve areas (industry, mining, missions etc) which seemed to be a perfect fit especially till i got my skills back into the swing and trained up.

We’re a small corp 11 players, don’t ask how many of those are alt’s actually it’d surprise you But the fact is we get along and crack each other up and help each other out when we need help and that’s what really matters when it comes to finding a corporation to join, good people that are interested in the same type of gameplay as you.

I’m starting this blog as a way to try to document some of the goings on in both the corporation and in New Eden in general. Maybe one day i’ll be in the blogpack or capsuleer even For now it’s kind of nice just to have a place to vent again.

Now as you might notice I mention this is a starter home, well i eventually plan to move over to my own domain where i’ll have a bit of more freedom with plugins and themes etc. Especially since I am a programmer/webdeveloper so it only makes sense but as cash is tight now podlogs, is a great solution for the intermediate time. You might have also notice that this isn’t called Lord of Space, it’s called Lords of Space, well that’s because unlike my first foray into New Eden my main character Lord Helghast isn’t alone in his journey, as of last week I now have my first Alt, Lord FunkyMonkey! Ya I know strange name eh, I’ll explain that in my next post I think as i’ve gone on rambling for a while now for a “introduction”