Difference between revisions of "Clones and Podding"

Revision as of 23:28, 21 July 2009

Your Clone and Your Pod

If you play Eve any significant amount of time, you will eventually end up in your pod, either from a PvP encounter or a PvE encounter. Once you are in your pod you will need to know how to pilot it properly in order to avoid being "podded." Being podded is when someone blows up your pod and then you end up in your clone bay. Since the loss of your pod can potentially result in skill point and implant loss, it is very important that you learn how to avoid this as much as possible.

Before You Get Put in a Pod

Before you end up in a pod, you need to make sure that you are prepared. First thing you need to do is to learn how to protect your skill points. If you get podded, you will end up back in your clone bay in your clone. This is the wrong time to find out that you forgot to upgrade your clone. For this reason you should check regularly to make sure that your clone is up to date. I check every time I finish a skill. If I need a new clone I make sure to buy it right then. If I am out in an area where I can't buy an upgrade, I make sure that I go buy a new one as soon as possible, always keeping ahead of my skill points and never going over what my clone covers.

If you get podded and don't have a clone to cover your skill points, you will lose skill points from your highest level skill. This could be very expensive in terms of time lost training your character. In general you always want to have an up to date clone because "things" happen and petition queues are long for bug related death reimbursement.

To upgrade your clone you have to go to a station with a medical facility. In order to find this, you can use your map and set the map to show you "station services" on the map. Then all you have to do is hover over a system with a lit up dot and it will tell you the name and location of the station. Once you find the station, go to that station and dock in the station. Next open the medical bay in the station; in this screen you will find a button to change the station of your clone and another button to upgrade your clone.

Only buy the upgrade that covers your current points or the next highest if you anticipate exceeding that clone's capacity soon. Through the change station button, you can set where your clone will appear when you die. This station must either be a station that you have visited or a station in which your player corporation has an office. You can change the station to any of the possible stations on the pop-up menu from the current station that you are at.

Using Implants

Since implants are destroyed when you get podded, it is important to know how to use them in a way that wont see you in the ISK poorhouse. Implants are mechanisms that you plug into the head of your character that gives them higher attributes while the implant is in. These higher attributes allow your character to learn skills at a rate faster than they could learn the skills without the implants. Advanced implants are often worth tens or hundreds of millions of ISK and accelerate your learning greatly. To use them, you train up the right skills (Cybernetics skill is a must) and you plug them into your character. To plug them in, all you have to do is stop training whatever skill you are training, right click on the implant and select plug-in. Keep in mind that once implants are plugged in, you can not remove them without destroying them. Installing the implant takes only a couple of seconds.

Once you have the implant in your head, you can start your skills training again. You will notice that the training is accelerated if you used the correct kind of implants. Each skill has a primary and secondary attribute when you get information on that skill. When you increase these attributes through the use of implants, the time to finish training the skill goes down. Keep in mind that since your skills train while you are off line as well, this can be of great advantage.

Warning: If you get podded, any implants in your head will be destroyed and the training time is recalculated.

Those that tend to put in a full set of implants need to be much more careful, especially if they are a really high value set of implants such as pirate Snake or Halo implants. These people are well advised to use jump clones before going into PvP combat. However, it is rare that you will need more than two implants at a time and I would suggest that the avid PvPer use +2s only and only with the attributes they need at the time.

Flying a Pod

Although a pod has no defense or offense capabilities, it does have benefits. A pod can warp any distance in Eve in one warp, even the 300au warp in OJOS-T in the Great Wildlands. The pod also warps instantly, not requiring any time to align. For this reason, it is often possible to get your pod away if your ship gets blown up. The one problem with the pod is that its subwarp speed is extremely slow. This has implications if you are trying to get your pod out of a PvP situation. If you get blown up, don't try to fly 15km to try and get back to the gate.

Getting Out With Your Pod

If you end up in a pod after a PvP encounter, the odds are that the enemy will try and destroy your pod as well to get the final kill on your character. For this reason you want to be prepared to get your pod out as soon as possible. When getting down into low armor or structure, if you are going to go down, it's time to start looking for something to warp to. Any large celestial body will do other than a gate. In fact warping to a moon is probably the safest option in 0.0. If you were in a ship, you would never want to warp to a moon, because the POS would destroy your ship long before you could regain control of your ship after warping. However, POS guns, in fact any computer controlled gun, will not shoot at a pod. Therefore you are essentially covered by the station. To find a moon easily, hold down the alt key and pan around looking for a circle broken by a solid dot on the right side.

Once you are getting to the point where it looks like you will be going down, click on the chosen object so that you see the box around the object. Just before you blow up, start to spam the "warp to" button and keep hitting it as fast as you can. The reason for this is that there is a lot of lag when you "change session" while your pod is ejecting. You need to get that pod into warp as fast as you can because the opponent wont have that kind of lag and will be able to lock your pod fast.

Once you warp out, immediately start selecting another object in a different location. Another moon would be a good choice. Be ready to warp to the other object as soon as you have control of your pod again. Since even an interceptor would take time to get into warp, it is unlikely that they could beat you to the celestial object before you get out.

Choosing to Hang Around

Sometimes when I get put in a pod, I choose to hang around and watch the fight. In a large, multi-ship engagement, the enemy would be foolish to worry about popping pods before ships that are still a threat to them. This allows me to watch the fight. Of course if you are in a warp bubble, getting out of the fight in your pod can be a problem. Whether to hang around and watch a fight or not is a personal decision. If you have 100 million ISK of implants in your head, that will affect the decision quite a bit of course.

Undocking in Your Pod

Sometimes you want to be able to move several ships without having to buy and trash shuttles. The solution to that is to undock in your pod. Dock in a station and wait about 30 seconds then right click on your active ship and select "Leave Ship". You will now be in your pod and can undock. Note that if you clone jump or get podded you cant undock in your pod until you first enter a ship. Simply enter your rookie ship, leave the ship and off you go.

Pod Jumping

If you ever want to traverse a big distance in Eve in a short amount of time without needing to bring equipment with you, there are basically two means of doing so. The first method is to "clone jump" which we will go over a little later. The second method is to pod jump.

To pod jump, you set the station where your medical clone is and then you essentially commit suicide. Either you can arrange to get "help" getting podded or you can self-destruct your capsule by right clicking on your cap display and selecting "self-destruct" from the menu. The result of this will be that you will end up in your medical clone where you set your clone to. This station very well might be all of the way across the Eve universe. Keep in mind that this is the same as getting podded by another player so you will lose your implants if you have any installed and you will have to upgrade your clone again; make sure that you always update your clone before you do anything at all.

You can pod jump as frequently as you want assuming you have the cash to support the purchase of the new clones.

Jump Clones

Another game feature that relates closely to pods is the jump clone. A jump clone is often confused with your medical clone. A medical clone is what you come back in when you die, but a jump clone is just another image of yourself. Please be aware however that if you jump into a jumpclone in the same station that you are in, you will lose a jumpclone and any implants they have plugged in. It is therefore always a good idea to make sure that you never have a jumpclone located in the same station as your medical clone. A jump clone allows you to do two things, first of all it allows you to jump large distances in a few seconds and secondly it allows you to save your implants when going into a potentially hostile situation.

In order to install a jump clone, you need to have corporation or personal standing of 8.0 or better with an NPC corporation. To get this standings you will have to do an obscene amount of missions for a particular corporation. If you are in the target NPC corporation, you will only need to get your personal standing with the corp above 8.0. If you are in a player corp, you or your corporation can get the standing over 8.0. High corp standings are achievable in one of two ways. If a large number of members have some standings with the targeted NPC Corporation, you would need have all of those members run obscene amounts of missions for the targeted corporation. Corp standing is determined by the combined average standing of your members who have any standing with the corp in question. This is obviously very difficult to manage when integrating new members of the corp as they can pull the corp standing down significantly. The second significantly easier way, is to select an NPC corp which very few corp members or no members at all, have any standings with. It would be a really good idea to select a really obscure corp if possible, as any new corp additions will potentially drop the corp standings with that NPC Corp. Please note this applies to positive and/or negative standings. You would then get those few members or one or two select members to run the missions back to back to get standings to over +8.0 with the corp. One or two dedicated people could get the standings up to the required level in a really short space of time. If a member of your corp has never run missions for an npc corp, then they will not contribute to the standings with that corp, but they will still be able to obtain jumpclones if your corp has the required standing with the NPC Corp.

A more manageable approach to getting jump clone standings for an entire corporation is to contract with a third party player organization. There are several player alliances in Eve that own stations in 0.0 which can grant you jump clone install rights. Often these corporations or alliances charge some fee for the privileges. Once you have the standings set from the player corporation, you can proceed to install a jump clone by going to that station, using the medical bay and selecting the jump clones tab.

Installing a jump clone creates the clone at a particular location that you can "jump" into. The actual act of jumping into a clone moves the jump clone to the location from which you jumped. As an example, if you went and installed a jump clone in EC-P8R, went back to Stacmon and then jumped into your clone in EC-P8R and then checked your jump clones list, you would find that you have a jump clone in Stacmon and no longer one in EC-P8R. This is because you are in the one from EC-P8R. You can think of it as switching clothes remotely. You have one set in Stacmon and another in EC-P8R and then teleport into the ones in EC-P8R then you would have an unoccupied set of clothes in Stacmon.

The actual process of jumping to a jump clone is executed from your character sheet. First, however, you must be docked in any station, not necessarily a station with a medical bay. Open your character sheet and then stop whatever training you were doing by going to the Skills section and selecting "Abort Training"; note that you will not loose any training points, it just stops training and is unfortunately named. Now that you have stopped your skill training open the Jump Clones section of your character sheet and select a jump clone and then right click and select the jump option. You will magically teleport to the remote location without any of your equipment or implants. The first thing that you must remember to do after jumping into a clone, is to restart your skill training immediately. When you clone jump, the implants you had are left behind in the old clone. If you jump back into that clone you will get your implants back; this means that you can clone jump just before going out to 0.0 to fight and then back the next day. Keep in mind that you can only clone jump once every 24 hours.

Conclusion

Many pilots out there are afraid to be out there in their pod. However, your pod has advantages that you may not have considered in the past. Pods can warp to POSes without getting shot at, pirate pods can warp past concord and sentry guns without incident. Pods can make long jumps and warp instantly. Being podded is something you have to think of as just another isk cost, one that gets gradually bigger as you gain more skill points in the game. Killing a pod of a 3 year player is likely to cost him quite a bit of cash but killing one of a newbie wont cost him much. If you learn how to use and fly your pod and use your clones you will have a much more relaxing time in Eve.