Battleship captains, i need some advice.

I just finished cruiser 4 and am hours away from completing battleship lvl1
It's gonna take me quite a long time to get enough money to purchase one, was wondering what skills in particular I should be training to take full advantage of my new ship.

I also will have battle cruiser done as well. So i may buy one until i can afford a battleship. (Even though I've heard they are a waste of money)

Depends entirely on what you're going to do with the ship.

Several different builds are associated with each races ship. You could be long range sniper with large guns, range extenders and other various weapon mods that push your range out to 140km or more. If range isnt for you, then maybe close quarters is for you and fit short range weapons with NoS's and drones if you have the capability. Could just armor tank and soak up damage while other ships make the kill. There's always ECM and the highly effective turret range and target range reducers.

Naturally, every races' ships lean in one direction or another. Gallente like close-in, Caldari far away. Amar's are great tanks and Min are all-round.

So what's your race?

Gallente.

I take it that in this game it doesn't pay to be a jack of all trades so to speak.
I would like to be able to handle all ranges reasonably well. But i get the feeling that i would be outgunned by those who choose actual specializations.

i also want to do something that we are lacking in the corp to help cover holes for fleet battles.

Gallente = Blasterthron.

A favorite of Gallente pilots is a Megathron loaded with heavy blasters. I have no idea what you would do about smaller ships, but get close to another BS with a Blasterthron and you can do major damage.

Check the eve-online forums to get a better idea of a Blasterthron loadout. I dunno myself because I use crappy Caldari ships ( fuckin' missle nerf ).

Close in weapons for gallentes.

We love drones. SO start training up those skills. You can handle long range guys easily by using your MWD and some intelligent strategies. But thats a whole new post.

What hte corp needs is some ECM guys. I think we have one guy who has some training in ECM. Read up on it and see if its your game.

I have heard that they are going to nerf drones soon.

PS- I'm Caldari and am pissed the more I read on how they nerfed the whole race. I'm thinking shield tanking my BS but I have no clue after that.

I'm the guy that's started in on the ECM route as well as cruisers/BCs. So far, they've been extremely useful at various times. Here's a quick list of the module types and what I've seen them to do. More experienced guys, chime in if I miss anything.

ECM burst: short range burst of energy centered on your ship, breaks locks on you. Can't be used in empire space near gates or stations, as it can hit friendlies.

ECM: long-range module that works on a single targeted ship. Breaks locks on you.

Sensor damper: long range, single-target module that vastly slows down the other guy's ability to lock on to you or anyone else. Best used with some form of ECM to break his lock and then fuck his ability to lock back on.

Tracking disrupter: slows down enemy turrets and cuts their effective range. Long-range single-target module. Best used out of range of return fire.

Some of these modules come in racial varieties, meaning they work best against certain race's ships. I've not got the chart of sensor types in front of me, but a quick look through the marketplace and infoing each race's ships will tell you what you need to know. Just look for the sensor strength section in the ship info. Example: if a race's ship has mostly gravimetric sensors, use a gravimetric jammer against it for best results.

Sensor strength isn't just a straight up comparison of numbers. So far as I can tell from the forums, the various sensor strength numbers now reflect percentages. Example:

You have a jammer that's got a jamming strength of 4 for all sensor types. You try to jam a ship with a 10 sensor strength. Some math in the background later, it works out that you have a 40% chance of breaking through his sensor strength each time your jammer module cycles.

Note: ECM modules eat a pretty fair amount of cap. And since most ECM mods are mid-slot items, space for putting in Cap Rechargers is limited. You can put power managers in your low-slots if you want to run a few EW mods at once. You should also train up the various electronics skills to cut back on the cap use. You will also need a good deal of CPU to run more than a couple of EW modules.

Tracking disrupters are, I've found, of little use against missile ships. For those you'll be a bit better served by some form of actual ECM to break his lock on you. Sensor dampers can help too. Against turreted ships, though, tracking disruptors REALLY cut down on damage output. I found it worthwhile to outfit one on my mission-cruiser for the big 'boss' rats at the end of each mission.

Yeah I'm working up my EW stuff as well, since I'm quite a bit behind on BS time due to the time lost on Corp training. I will be getting a Blackbird very soon and outfitting it with webbers/jammers/disruptors. I already have a few named items sitting in the hangar that I played with on some NPC rats.

There's a couple cruisers that are being selected as the 'EW' specialists.

You'd make a differnec ein mining ops with just a cruiser to jam shit.

It would be nice if we had some BB's made as well. Once everyone has BS skills the money will start flowing since we will be able to mine whenever we want. This will allow us to start causing trouble for BoB and company. I think at that point we are going to need a steady flow of Blackbirds and and Feroxes since they are EW ships at heart. I am still working on my money skills. Mining is at 5 now and I am working on refining 5 at the moment. Refining effiency is next.