The past week or so I have made my first steps into T2 ship production. Already made 2 kitsunes but you barely break even on those, so I shifted towards T2 cruisers. The first one I produced was a falcon, now I have two cerbs in the oven. Those will give a nice profit if they sell for the current market value of around 100mil. I bought some of the T2 component bpos as you can skim off some costs by making those yourself.

Furthermore I played a bit on the test server. I found a somewhat ‘easier’ wormhole, and found out again that it’s not very viable solo. I could tank the sleepers in my abaddon but not kill them. Smartbombs work well against the little drones though, even though they do try to stay out of range. Once I brought in Morph (Bela was in the abaddon) in an assault frig to get rid of the cruisers, all was well though. Very nice task for small gangs, like 2 BS and maybe a few assault frigs / HACs to get rid of the smaller stuff. And then fight over the loot afterwards .

The state of the expansion on the test server is still a bit buggy. Some weird things happened while switching ships in station and some other odd things. I hope the patch we will get on march 10th will be somewhat less buggy, but my guess is that it will definitely break some stuff and some of the new things won’t work properly. By the end of march things will be more stable .

Hope CCP has some surprises for us in the storyline, come next patchday. Have a nice patchday all, and remember the waiting is the hardest part !

So when you enter a wormhole system and see something ‘unusual’ off your port bow, proceed with the knowledge that some of the things you know about how your ship performs may no longer be true. Your ship drives may push you faster, your weapons may hit harder, you may find yourself with no shields or less effective armor… and just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, things may change again!

As if the sleeper’s AI wasn’t enough, you can even get buffs or debuffs in wormhole space ! Something that hasn’t been reported on Sisi as of yet. Is this one of the tricks ccp will keep up their sleeve ‘till launch ?

The darkness at the end of the tunnel

The T3 cruiser i put together was a Caldari missile boat. Passively tanked. It worked rather well, but didn’t have the firepower of the drake. This makes me wonder what exactly the point is of these T3 ships, besides the coolness factor ofcourse. It’s handy to turn the cruiser from a missile boat in a gun boat, swapping out a few modules, but I cannot see any other benefits. They don’t seem to be much better than a HAC. Or I am missing the point and / or didn’t set it up right.

I managed to scan down a wormhole. It’s not very easy to get the hang of placing the probes in a 3d environment, but once the red sphere shows up and then red and yellow dots, it’s doable. Some screenshots below .

Once inside the wormhole space, all you see are a few planets and not much else. The onboard scanner revealed 3 sites though, each had 2 battleships in it. They didn’t mess around and had my shields to 75% in no time, so I warped out quickly. Another site had like 8 frigs and a few towers. I could tank them while being scrammed, neuted and webbed, but they tank very well and it took quite some time to destroy at least the scramming frigs. This escalates the site though, spawning 2 battleship and a handful of cruisers ! I didn’t mess about and warped out right away . A friend who was in a cov-ops in the wormhole space reported about 18 sites on the scan probes ! So plenty to scan down . This obviously is a group effort deal, where you will probably need spider tanks and ecm to be able to deal with the sleepers, not to speak of other players who might drop down on you.

All in all exciting stuff ! Will definately be a lot of fun scanning and probing about, come march 10th (or a few days later as things setlle down) !