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Brave Empire: What To Do
One of the most attractive aspects of EVE is the limitless potential for what you can become. Everyone starts from the same beginning, the same empty wallet and rookie ship, but after that it’s up to you. You can become a space dictator or space diplomat; a miner or mover; a hired-gun or a contract killer. Wait, those last two are the same thing. Never mind. While there are many, many corporations and alliances within the game that specialise in perhaps one or two aspects of gameplay, one of the things that makes Brave special is that you can choose to play the game however you want to, with the only caveat that we insist you are having fun while doing it. ‘Maximising fun-per-hour’ is not just a catchy slogan, it is core to our purpose.
Let’s have a look at what you could be doing right now.
Making ISK
Money makes the world go round. And keeps the servers running. If you’re not rolling in it in real-life, you probably won’t be trading PLEX as income, so finding a reliable income stream is key to keeping EVE a game and not a chore.
Mining
While shooting rocks for hours on end isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, it’s a reliable source of ISK and a crucial way to contribute to the alliance — without materials we can’t build all of the ships we need to fly and explode. But it’s also a great time to chill on comms with corpmates, discuss fittings or strategies, and occasionally kill wannabe hotdroppers that poke your bait Procurer.
Also, it’s not just rocks that can be mined. Ice mining is profitable and contributes to POS fuel, while gas mining can both find you venturing into wormholes in search of valuable gas clouds, and experimenting with POS-based manufacture of booster drugs, a crucial part of some PvP fits.
Exploration
If you prefer to work alone, then exploration might be your favoured option. Fly solo through system after system, scanning for the abandoned structures that can be looted for valuable materials. It’s a great chance to really hone your solo skills; avoiding gate camps and explorer hunters will teach you the importance of the d-scan and how to avoid the bad guys, and the occasional big score will make up for any losses.
Industry
If you’re more the stay-at-home type, then perhaps manufacturing and industry is more your speed. Strike deals with local miners for materials, decide what blueprints are most in demand by the alliance, and get those production furnaces burning. Shipping is expensive, so local manufacture, especially of ship hulls, can be extremely profitable without needing to overcharge your corpmates. And every time someone loses a ship they’re going to need to replace not just that hull, but guns, ammo and modules as well.
After a while, you might even decide to venture into T2 manufacture, a complex web of skills and invention percentage balancing that can (if the random number gods are on your side) bring in huge profits.
Ratting
Of course, one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to make money — both for yourself and the alliance — is through ratting: killing NPC ships in asteroid belts or cosmic anomalies. As well as bringing in ISK, it also raises the ADM (Activity Defense Multiplier) of the system you’re in, making it much harder for enemies to capture our space (or “entosis our sov” in EVE lingo) … so make sure you spread the love around!
Newer players can acquire a free Vexor from the Brave Dojo, along with tips for its use; then, when you’ve got to grips with the mechanics of dealing with dozens of rats at a time, you might graduate to a VNI or even larger ships, as you take on ever increasingly challenging anomalies. Eventually you can graduate to running incursions, wormhole escalations, even perhaps carrier ratting if you’re extra-Brave.
Boss Mode
In an entirely player-owned sandbox game with tens of thousands of real participants, someone has to make the occasional decision about where to go and what to do. While Brave’s directors and department heads are some of our most experienced players, there is always the opportunity for anyone to step up and take the reins.
Teaching
EVE is hard. Like, really hard. And it’s also pretty unforgiving when you inevitably make mistakes. Since Brave attracts more than its fair share of newer players, volunteering to teach classes to newbros is one of the most useful ways to help the alliance and get your name known. The Brave Dojo, our education division, runs the class schedule, but anyone can give a class, on any topic they think other players will find interesting. Make sure you let the Dojo know in advance, since they can help with organising and publicising your class; they can even provide ships to use, should it be necessary.
Running things
Finally, once you become bored of logging in and actually playing the game, perhaps you can ascend to the lofty heights of our legendary AFK leadership, where you’ll never be heard from again. I joke, of course — the work that goes into running an alliance of several thousand people is complex and challenging, from keeping our IT infrastructure (Jabber, Mumble, Core, the wiki, etc.) up and running, to coordinating with multiple different player groups to organise fights or manage standings and recruitment. But for some people — and maybe for you — it’s an aspect of gameplay that contributes to making EVE unlike any other game you’ll ever play.
Be Brave
These are just some of the possibilities open to you within EVE’s original and best new-player-friendly alliance. Your EVE experience is what you make it — it’s up to you to find your own niche and carve out your own destiny.
And always remember that you’re Brave: stay classy, have fun, never not undock, and fly dangerous.
7o