EVE Echoes – Now What?
stargrace 
This little mobile game has really captured my heart – though to be honest I’ve never actually played a mobile game before. My phone was absolutely devoid of any games until I installed this one. I play it so frequently that I’ve been debating picking up a tablet to play it on just for a larger screen option. My kids have an ipad they use, but I’m not confident I’d ever get a turn.
There was a whole slew of issues this week that lead to getting 135k skill points mailed out to players, and then yesterday another 200k skill points were returned due to some skill point issue. Needless to say I’m working my way through Tech 6, on the way to Tech 7, which is over 1100 hours of training. It really slows down, even when you have omega.
Figuring out what to fly and how to fit it has never been my strong point, even in the desktop version of the game. I’m flying a venture II and have that fit for mining, and have been doing pretty well with it. I spent most of yesterday mining in a -0.2 area and then hauled all of the ore back to my base in order to reprocess it. I’ve got almost everything I need to craft another ship – but what I’d really like to craft, is the Thorax Prototype I have a blueprint for.
In the meantime I hunted down a fit for the caracal trainer that I’m currently flying. Trainers are not quite as powerful as the non trainer counterparts, but they’re not complete garbage, either. This one is a Tech5 ship – and I had it fit with railguns which was NOT impressing me at all. I swapped over to missiles which seems to be the way to go. I’m at least able to take down small and medium anomaly as well as complete TechV missions which reward 85k ISK – as well as bounty which rewards more, and a chance at loot.
I have a pet peeve with datacores. In the PC version of the game you work with a research & development agent to earn these. Faction quest in order to work with higher ranked officials. In the mobile version these seem to only come from scout anomaly. The issue with that is they are VERY rare, and they are VERY sought after. Datacores are required for backward engineering and discovering blueprints. They are incredibly expensive, and you can fail in your research. Of course you could also end up engineering a very valuable blueprint.
I felt like I was being forced into industry just by the sheer difficulty of combat – I know it’s easier in a corporation and doing things as a team has always been the preferred method of playing EVE (whether desktop or mobile) but I play because real life is busy and unpredictable, so even if I arranged to do something with my corp, chances are I’d end up having to leave randomly before anything actually happened.
All of that being said, the game is getting a fair amount of my time these days. It’s easy to pop in, you can jump while offline, and I’ve always loved the EVE universe. Hopefully I can craft myself a better ship soon, and start feeling a little bit more powerful.
Yesterday someone came into the cluster I was mining with the intent of combat, but I rarely ever go AFK while mining, so I simply warped away. Hopefully they found someone else in the system to sharpen their combat skills on.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!