Eve: Transverse Velocity

April 3, 2006 on 10:05 pm | In MMO (Live), Eve

Unlike my last two fly-throughs of the Eve galaxy, this time I’m focusing specifically on combat and missions. I enjoyed mining last time, and may again get into it. But for now I like the idea of ridding space of pirates, escorting and guarding miners, rescuing folks and eventually getting into PvP.

But first I need to learn how to fight.

At first, Eve appears to be little more than a direct example of the often mis-used description of early EQ1: “hit auto-attack and watch”. The tutorial asks newbies to first find, and then fight, a drone. Upon arrival, players lock onto the target and then activate their one weapon. They watch damage be taken first by the target’s Shield, then Armor, then Hull until eventual explosion. Mission accomplished.

I quickly learned that this is the one and only time combat is that easy.

First I need to explain something. I am not that smart. I was an average student in High School, was in a Fine Arts curriculum (Middle East history minor) in University and have been out of formal education for fourteen years. Occasionally I’ll read non-fiction, but that’s mostly either related to my career or my hobby. I have lived for more years since my last physics course than I had prior to it. For all of my gaming career, “space sims” meant getting a joystick, learning how to rotate shields, understand which weapons to use and employ manual dexterity and tactics to deliver them. And most of the last seven years I’ve put into MMORPGs have been dominated by progressively greater use of buttons to activate abilities at a hastening pace.

I was reminded of all of this when I first started digging into the fundamentals of combat in Eve.

Eve combat is absolutely not hitting auto-attack and watching. Doing that here would be like doing that in any game: a Fed-Ex to a bind/clone/spawn point. I wouldn’t even classify myself as a novice in Eve combat, because the more I unravel, the more I see what I don’t know. But it is also one of the most unique systems I’ve seen in this genre, and in most others. And it’s hard to know where to begin.

Basically, it involves three equally important parts:

• Economy
• Navigation
• Fighting

Economy

Like Star Wars Galaxies of old, everything about the Eve economy is player directed. That is about where the similarities end between the two games, but this important commonality makes it at least slightly easier to understand what is going on. If one sees an item on the Market (like SWG’s Bazaar, only much more intense), it’s either loot being offered by a player or something crafted by them. There’s other things as well (Escrow accounts, Buy Orders, Courier/Bounty missions, etc), but let’s just stick with the economy.

Through this economy, a player equips themselves with everything. Absolutely everything. Players get to customize a portrait of their character, but this is nothing more than a photograph. Everything about a player is their skills and their ship, and everything about the latter is their smarts and equipment. And, Skills, Ships and Equipment all come from other players, from the smallest round of the weakest Ammo to the largest of the Spaceships. As loot or as crafted.

Smart purchases are just one of many requirements in Eve, because it is so easy to not make smart ones.

Navigation

Ships come in all shapes and sizes. Even starting as one Race does not prevent learning to fly ships of another Race. There’s small Shuttles, basically throw-away ships people use to flit around the galaxy for many reasons. Then there are Titans which are used in large scale wars. And there’s a dozen levels in between.

Players need to learn how to fly these ships. They can either upgrade existing Skills or buy new ones. Eventually they’ll be doing both.

Each ship performs differently because it is designed for something specific. Lumbering Battlecruisers do not turn on a dime whereas a single shot from one of them could ruin the day of a Frigate pilot.

Understanding how flight works is critical (well, obviously). Most times, players pick a destination and fly to it, stopping at some distance from it to assess conditions before heading further in. The Eve galaxy is enormous, larger than even the most aggressive dreams of Dark and Light. However, like Space, there’s a lot of, err, space. CCP did not shy away from this enormity in an effort to ensure fun game-spawned content every few feet. In this specific feature of the game, Eve is more of a sim than a direct “game” per se.

But flying around without paying attention could get ya dead. Someone does not just walk into… Neesher. People first need to assess how they’ll be welcomed by the locals. Are they hated by them? Liked? Indifferent? Is this known to be hostile space (talked about in terms of “Security Level”, from 0.0 to 1.0, with a lower rating being of higher risk)? How recently has someone been destroyed there? How recently has the local police been destroyed there?

All of these questions are asked. So how are they answered?

Map

Most of these can be answered directly in the interface. The Map feature alone is the most intense ingame map I’ve ever seen. As I’ve said before, this reminds me of the Stellar Cartography sequence in Star Trek: Generations. There are scores of filters, hundreds of views, thousands of systems and an infinite way to customize the data to get what you need answered. Heck, even autopilot has options, where paths can be calculated to avoid low security areas and even those that have seen some form of ship destruction recently.

Getting around

One can autopilot across the galaxy, but that’s nothing more than a fun movie with a soundtrack inspired by Trevor Rabin. Once a player reverts to realspace in their destination system, the fun begins.

There’s two primary ways to pilot:

1. Click a target and choose to Approach it, Orbit it or Keep (it) at Range. Approach will land you right at the target. Orbit will, well, result in the ship orbiting the target at a chosen distance. Keep (it) at Range is similar to Approach but stops the ship at a chosen distance. These options are all made available through contextual menus accessible by clicking the target either in the Overview menu or in the general space interface. Obstacles do not halt forward progress, they just slow down the speed of flight.
2. Double click anywhere in space. This sets one’s heading, and upon powering up the engine(s), the ship will fly in a straight line, I think indefinitely. This is useful if wants to have more exact control over their flight path, perhaps to speed up negotiation around obstacles.

In both modes, players have access to a whole host of options, from passive targeting to Afterburners to warp drive. Depending on the speed of the ship, these journeys can be fairly quick, far faster than I remember them being earlier.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to both, though I am not really qualified to discuss those yet. Basically though, one always takes care to know as much about an area before they get there. Even if someone can pilot directly into an astral body, it would be better to land further away and evaluate.

Manual flying does have its advantages, particularly in combat. At my rather newbish level though, so far I haven’t had a problem that automatically orbiting at my weapon’s optimal range and taking shots at the targets while rotating other options didn’t solve. Luckily though, I have been able to warp away from fights gone bad. Lowbie pirates don’t employ Warp Jammers yet.

Fighting

Combat is not really a separate section, as it is intrinsically tied to flight and economy. But this is the part that has required the most education, the part I found completely unintuitive at first based on other MMOGs, but not really so confusing once I broadened my points of reference.

As mentioned, everything about someone’s ship is based on skill and economy. If someone has a ship that can equip a Small Projectile Turret, and they have the skill to operate one, they then need to buy or craft one for equipping onto the ship. The quality of one of these is based on many factors, including stats of the weapon, ammo used and skill level. And this is all prior to combat.

If this sounds like SWG at all, I don’t think that’s far off. But whereas SWG is pulling away from this in favor of a more game-directed progressive-character-growth approach evocative of other diku-inspired games like Everquest and World of Warcraft, Eve continues to drive further into a truer player-directed open experience.

No greater example of this is combat, and no better introduction to this difference exists than Page 26 of the Player Guide.

Here, well into what I consider required reading, Target Tracking is explained. Being able to dish out damage is, of course, based on being able to hit at all. And here begins the road down which one walks to understanding how it works.

Fighting involves all of the typical stuff one can expect in any game. There’s weapons and ammo to consider, velocity as it affects chance-to-hit, multiple target factors, ship integrity and resistances and so on. Heck, there’s even the ability to “tank”, ships equipped with self-repairing systems augmented by other ships providing support remote repairing.

Like a few games though, Eve takes things a step further. Velocity isn’t a single factor for example, whether a target is moving or not. It includes that plus things like “Transverse Velocity”, the speed at which ships are moving in relation to each other on separate paths, true multiple-target coincident fighting, the optimal range of a weapon with diminishing returns based on being too close or too far, how that range affects the damage potential, how the ammo and refire rate and target tracking speeds all do as well, when to properly activate weapons, shield rechargers, warp jammers and so on, and when to deactivate them to converse power before one runs out. While most games feature stats for weapons, Eve pushes the envelope with variety and situational usage as well as decision making by the end user.

All of this together results in fights that are just, well, different. The best way to experience this quickly is to partake of Missions. The newbie missions are mostly delivery and exploration type objectives, but when one is done with the tutorial, they’re introduced to another Agent. And of course are free to explore the galaxy for any and all such agents.

Targeting a single ship of “Low” threat is very different from entering a swarm of Pirates who all are firing you at the same time. The ways in which one must navigate through such a swarm, keeping some outside of their optimal range for distance while keeping others within one’s own optimal range, while monitoring shields, avoiding surprises, monitoring new arrivals and so on results in a look and feel, and a host of decision making, very different from a WoW experience.

And that’s just from my experiences as a soloer. I haven’t even seen group battles, though I’ve heard of them.

Next

I have no idea what I’ll learn next. That’s part of the appeal really, of any game. But already I’m playing a game I somehow missed my first two times through it. I think it was because I was so focused on making money that I immediately went to the most direct way in which to do so: mine and sell resources. I never truly explored the other aspects of Eve, and of course, the game has changed considerably since beta, as all MMOGs do.

While there’s some element of “auto attack” in this game, it’s to a depth I’ve never seen before, resulting in not so much “auto attack” as much as a focus on different elements than normal. It’s also very much in real time.