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To effectively pilot a battleship, you really need two things: the ability to take damage and keep going (tank), and the ability to return that damage (offense).
For offense, you need to be able to utilize the capabilities of the ship you choose. If it's a missile platform, you will naturally want to work on missile skills. Most ships have drone bays as well as turret or missile hardpoints, so it's always a good idea to work on drone skills, no matter what racial ships you fly. For drones, my suggestion is to get drones to level 5 and then set a goal to work toward T2 scout drones, which is a relatively quick goal to meet while giving you access to both light and medium T2 attack drones. Once you get drones to level 5, however, you'll be proficient enough with drones to let it take a backburner for a bit. The supporting drone skills are nice sometimes, but there are some difficulties with them. Skills that improve drone tracking, damage, and range (not optimal range, but the maximum range that you can deploy them against a target) are the most useful supporting skills to have.
As for gunnery, you should try to get that skill to level 4 as quickly as possible, then have at least a few points in each of the supporting skills, as they are all extremely useful. Gunnery 5 should be a longer term goal which eventually leads you to T2 turrets. But in the end, the must have skills for gunnery are the weapons upgrades skills. The first skill, Weapon Upgrades, decreases the CPU need for any turret weapon (this does not apply to mining turrets, unfortunately, despite their need for a turret hardpoint). The second skill is similar, applying to Powergrid needs. Both these skills are extremely helpful for equipping more and more fitting intensive ships and can free up necessary power and cpu for proper tanks or medium fittings.
I'm not an expert at missiles, but you will need Missile launcher operation at least at level 3 as soon as you can. For battleships, the cruise missile is the weapon of choice. They are flexible weapons that have long range, good tracking, and good damage. This means with the right skills you can use them against anything from a frigate class ship (though they're much less effective against frigates) to a battleship or larger. Torpedos are very high damage, slow, and have a relatively short range and terrible tracking. Their primary use is against mainly stationary targets, ie. capital ships and stations. Battleships are usually slow enough for these to be effective, but you're better off with cruise missiles. Supporting skills for missiles are extremely important. The most important supporting skills are those that increase range (usually by increasing the missile's speed), rate of launch, and ability to hit (skills which decrease the effect of the target's velocity or signature radius on damage given).
Now, for the tank...
Again, there are 3 basic approaches here, but you can't really mix and match as much as you can with the offense sollutions, and it is heavily dependent on the ship you are flying. The three types of tanks are: Speed Tank, Shield Tank, and Armor Tank. For most ships (i will discuss one exception to this rule later), it is best to tank according to the race specialty. As far as this goes, Speed Tank isn't considered a racial tanking specialty, so the choice is between Armor Tanking and Shield Tanking. For Gallente and Caldari the choice is clear-- Gallente armor tank, and Caldari shield tank. For Amarr and Minmatar ships, however, you really have an option and can usually get a decent tank out of both options.
For the sake of academics, and because it's useful to know for smaller ships, I'll discuss Speed Tanking briefly. Speed Tanking relies on two things: velocity and signature radius. Signature radius, for most ships, is impossible to minimize (though some modules increase signature radius, particularly MWDs). Velocity itself does not make a speed tank, so the only ships that really have an option to speed tank are frigates, destroyers, and to a limited degree, cruisers due to their relatively small signature radii (basically, the bigger you are the easier you are to hit). Velocity, if you will remember from whatever physics you may have taken, is both speed and direction travelled over a period of time. Both these concepts are important to speed tanking because the ability of a ship to hit another ship relies heavily on how well its turrets' tracking can keep up with the other ship.
The turrets are relatively stationary, so the only speed which matters to them is how fast you are going laterally-- imagine that the turrets are viewing things as a two dimensional image. The speed at which an object travels from one side of the image to the other is the only thing that is important. If the object travels slowly enough, the turret can track it and hit it. If the object travels too quickly, the turret can't keep up, and will miss. The distance of the object being tracked has an affect as well. An object moving at 200m/s at a range of 15km is easier to hit than an object moving at 200m/s at 5km because the closer object is going to seem to cover the same distance (one edge of the image to the other) in less time than the distant object. A loose idea of how easy or hard something will be to hit is to see what the transversal velocity between your ship and the object is. The higher the velocity, the harder you are to hit, and the closer you are the more that higher velocity has an effect on how hard you are to hit. Naturally, the best skills for speed tanking are the navigational skills.
Shield tanking and Armor tanking follow fairly similar theories. Increase the damage resistance so you take less damage, and thus be able to heal faster than you take damage or at least be able to reduce the rate at which you take unrecovered damage. There is one key difference-- shields have a natural recharge rate. As a result, it's possible to passively tank on the shields with the right setup, freeing capacitor resources for weapons and other modules. Active tanks are more flexible, however, and capable of absorbing much higher rates of damage per second than passive tanks.
For both Armor and Shield tanking, damage resistance comes before hit points. If you can repair more damage than you take, the amount of total hitpoints you have is relatively irrelevant. You should only seek to increase the hitpoints of your armor or shield after you are satisfied with your resistances and your boosting or repping ability. Thus, the most important skills to have are the compensation skills and the boosting or repairing skills. Also, you will want to get the shield or armor skills to the point where you can use T2 equipment as soon as possible. For T2 armor hardeners, this means Hull Upgrades V; for T2 armor repairers, you need Mechanic III-V (III for smalls, IV for mediums, V for larges) and Repair Systems III-IV (III for smalls, IV for mediums and larges); for T2 shield hardeners, it is Tactical Shield Manipulation IV; and for T2 Shield boosters, it is Shield Operation III-V (III for small and medium boosters, IV for large boosters, V for extra large boosters).
The tanking skills are more important than the ship-piloting skills or offensive skills. I repeat, the tanking skills are more important than the ship-piloting or offensive skills.
Now... a quick note about tanking choice based on race. Some ships within each race's ships can actually go against their race's tendency toward one tank type or another. One case would be the Dominix, which can be effectively shield tanked or armor tanked (though armor tank still has a slight edge and better supports the Dominix's drone capabilities).
Also, there's actually a fourth type of tanking which can be termed Kiting or Range tanking. It's similar in theory to speed tanking, as it relies on not being hit rather than being able to soak the damage. It essentially relies on your range capabilities to be so advanced that your maximum effective range is outside the effective range of your opponents, and you are fast enough to maintain that range (doesn't take a lot of speed, really). Unfortunately, this is only a reliable tank in PVE due to two factors: Players are more likely to use MWD to get into optimum range, and another player could have range equal to your own.
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[insert Blackadder quote here]
Last edited by Skotticus on Tue Sep 19, 2006 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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