Five Minutes of Sheer Terror: Eve Combat for the Uninitiated

The Basics: Shields, Armor, Structure, and Capacitor

Let's start off talking about the four basic "health" monitors of a ship.  Three of these are represented by the three bars to the right of the ship pictures in those videos and just below the ship picture in the image below, while the last is only known to the pilot of the ship.

The three bars represent shield, armor, and structure, which are depleted from damage in that order.  Shields slowly recharge on their own, while armor and structure do not, though ships can mount modules that can repair armor and structure or boost shields.

In general, ships "tank" (rely defensively) on either shields or armor; it's better to have a really strong shield or armor tank rather than a mediocre one of each.  There are generally two types of tanks; active and passive.  Active tanks rely on shield boosters or armor repairers to repair fast enough to outpace enemy damage, while passive tanks rely on a large buffer and high resistances to last long enough to kill the enemy before they can be killed themselves.  Passive tanks tend to work best with shields, because they will still recharge without a shield booster, but passive armor tanks are fairly common on some battleship hulls, such as the Abbadon and Megathron.

Generally, structure is extremely weak in comparison; once a ship has been dropped to its structure, it doesn't have long to live.

The last item is capacitor, often abbreviated as "cap".  A ship's capacitor represents its energy reserves; most weapons, shield boosters, armor repairers, electronic warfare, and other items require a certain amount of capacitor to use.  For most ships, running out of capacitor is a death sentence, as it removes their ability to take part in the battle offensively or defensively.

Guns, Guns, Guns....

When it comes to inflicting damage on your enemies, there's a lot of different options.  Each one does one or more of four types of damage; electromagnetic (EM), thermal, explosive, and kinetic.  Ships' shields and armor have different resistances to each type of damage, which can be modified with modules and rigs. 

Generally, there's three general types of weapons: guns, missiles, and drones.  Each one comes in various sizes appropriate for different ship classes (small ones for frigates, medium ones for cruisers, and large ones for battleships, generally).

• Guns come in three different types; projectiles (autocannons and artillery), hybrids (blasters and railguns) and lasers (pulses and beams).  Each one uses a different amount of capacitor, does a different type and amount of damage, and is more or less accurate.  Each comes in two general range classes (short and long respectively in the parens above).  In addition, you can use different types of ammunition in each type, which lets you fine tune your damage and range.  Guns require you to lock on to the enemy before you can fire, and are highly dependent on the target's transversal velocity for hitting.  However, unlike missiles or drones, their damage is instantaneous.
  
• Missiles (including rockets and torpedoes) have a few advantages over guns; they always hit, though their damage is very dependent on the size of the target and its speed (a smaller, faster target will take less damage than a larger, slower one), the type of damage they inflict can be tailored (so if your opponent has low thermal resistances, you can use thermal missiles), and even if you're jammed, you can use friend-or-foe (FOF) missiles.  However, missiles also take time to reach the enemy and FOF missiles automatically go after the closest enemy target, meaning that a good opponent can force you to waste missiles on drones or cycle ships in and out to keep you from doing enough damage to kill any of them.  Missiles also take no capacitor to fire.
  
• Drones are basically small, dumb ships that can be launched and perform a variety of functions.  The most common are combat drones, which fly out and shoot at the enemy, but there are electronic warfare drones and shield and armor repair drones.  Drones have the disadvantage of being able to be blown up and having to fly over to the target to engage them, but they can also be set to attack anything that attacks their controlling ship, which means that a lock is not always necessary for them.  Sentry drones, which you might have heard mentioned a few times, are drones with no mobility, but with a fairly high amount of firepower and a much longer range than the normal drones.  Like missiles, drones also have the advantage of not requiring capacitor charge.
  

All of these can be used in combination; most ships have a drone bay, for instance, and will carry a few drones even if their main weapons are autocannons.  In general though, you want to have weapons that your ship is made for (most Minmatar ships get a bonus to projectile weapons, for instance) and weapons which all have the same general range, so that you can bring them all to bear at once.

Special Weapons, Electronic Warfare and Other Items

While guns, missiles, and drones are most of what tourney opponents throw at each other, there are a lot of special weapons and electronic warfare that get tossed around as well to try and influence the fight.

• Energy neutralizers (neuts) and energy vampires (nos) are "cap warfare" weapons.  Neutralizers deplete the enemy's capacitor, but take capacitor to use.  Nos (short for "nosferatu," the name of the basic energy vampire) draw down the enemy's capacitor and add it to your own, but are limited in that they can drain cap from the enemy until their capacitor is proportionally equalized with yours.
• ECM is a type of electronic warfare, and what people are talking about most of the time they talk about "jamming" an opponent.  ECM has a percentage chance, based on the sensor strength of the target and the jamming strength of the ECM module, of preventing the enemy ship from locking any targets (and breaking all locks they had when they were jammed).  Each jamming cycle lasts for about 30 seconds, after which time the jamming ship needs to try and jam the target again or it loses its effect.  ECM can be countered with ECCM, which boosts the sensor strength of a ship.
  
• Sensor dampeners (or damps for short) are another type of electronic warfare, and have two modes.  They can be configured to either reduce the locking range of the target ship (making them unable to lock ships that are too far away) or increase the locking time of the enemy ship (making it take much longer to acquire locks on targets).  They can be countered with sensor boosters (which basically do the same thing in reverse), or by closing the distance with your enemy.
• Targeting disruptors are another electronic warfare flavor, and can be configured to either slow the tracking of enemy turrets (making them less accurate) or reduce their effective range (making them do less damage).  They can be countered by tracking computers, which work in the opposite way, or by reducing the enemy's transversal velocity or closing the distance.

• Stasis webs (or just webs) are a close range "propulsion warfare" item that will reduce the enemy target's speed by a significant amount (around 60%, depending on quality).  This makes them easier to hit and makes it hard for them to get away from you.
• Microwarp drives (or MWDs) and afterburners (or ABs) are modules that give a ship a boost to speed at the expense of depleting your capacitor.  Afterburners increase your speed by about 125%, while MWDs can increase it by over 500%, but they also reduce your capacitor size by 25% and use a lot more capacitor when running.  MWDs can also be shut down by warp scramblers, while afterburners are not.Basic Tactics
  

Now, giving a treatise on Eve combat tactics would take ages, and really isn't that necessary to understand the basics of what is going on in the tournament, which is a slightly artificial situation anyway.  However, here's a few simple ideas that see wide use and are referenced a lot in the tournament that you probably want to know about.

• Concentrating firepower tends to be the rule of the day in Eve combat due to how damage works.  This is why you'll hear commentators talking about a certain ship being called "primary," which means that the enemy fleet commander (FC) has called that ship as the primary target, and optimally all of their weapons are being trained on it.  The idea here is to overwhelm the enemy tank and knock the primary target out of the fight as quickly as possible.  The only time this doesn't tend to be ordered is if the volley damage from any one ship in the fleet can instapop the enemy; it doesn't make much sense to have four battleships all fire at the same frigate if any one of them can destroy it on their own.  Electronic warfare is generally use to prevent this sort of thing, like we did in our match last weekend.
• "Speed tanking" is a tactic that used to be extremely common in Eve but has become less so after the last expansion, which changed how speed mods work slightly.  Speed tanking does not rely on a damage buffer provided by shields or armor, but on moving fast enough that you can outrun missiles and drones and the tracking of turrets.  In general, ships made for speed tanking rely on drone or missile damage, since guns become inaccurate at the speeds they are travelling.  They also tend to be paper-thin -- if they run out of capacitor for their MWDs, get webbed, or simply maneuver wrong and lose their transversal velocity, they crumple in short order.
• Jammers and dampeners can be used in concert to keep an enemy from locking on to a target, even if they can't be jammed reliably.  With the sensor resolution (lock time) mode, a dampened target that manages to beat a jamming cycle may be unable to lock a target before they get jammed again.  Used like this, ECM and dampeners can be an even more potent weapon.
• "Tackling" refers to the practice of sending out ships to pin down the enemy with webs and warp scramblers so that the big guns can beat on them.  In "real" Eve combat, you tend to see light ships like interceptors performing this role, but in the tournament you don't see as many ships specializing in this role, since anyone warping away from the battle is immediately disqualified and the playing field is limited in size.