Know Your Enemy - Disruption Cruisers

Commonly referred to as Electronic Warfare or EWAR cruisers, Disruption Cruisers specialise in the suppression and - you guessed it - disruption of opposing ships. Like the smaller Disruption Frigates, each race's platform favours a different form of electronic warfare - ECM for Caldari, remote sensor dampening for Gallente, tracking disruption for Amarr, and target painting for Minmatar.

They may not offer the raw power of Combat Cruisers, but make no mistake - Disruption Cruisers
exist to ruin your day.

The disruption cruisers range from pseudo combat ships like Arbitrator and Bellicose, through to dedicated electronic warfare platforms such as the Blackbird. While they do see varying levels of use as solo platforms, these ships are most at home in a gang environment where they fill a crucial supporting role. In the right hands, against the right opponent, the disruption cruisers can easily be some of the most powerful in their class.

Know Your Enemy - Attack Cruisers

Combat Cruisers may top the chart in terms of raw strength, but Attack Cruisers are the masters of speed and damage application. These ships offer greater mobility than any other cruiser, with bonuses to range or tracking giving them a more flexible engagement envelope than their slower counterparts.

If Sigmund Freud played Eve, he would definitely have flown an Attack Cruiser.

While some Attack Cruisers (particularly the Thorax) make excellent brawlers, the main strength of this class is in kiting. The combination of flexible range and great mobility allows Attack Cruiser pilots to dictate the terms of an engagement on the fly, and makes them particularly dangerous to any smaller ships which might attempt to pin them down.

Know Your Enemy - Combat Cruisers

When strength and firepower are your requirements, look no further than the combat cruisers. These four ships represent the heavyweights of the T1 cruiser lineup, with stronger tanks and (for the most part) higher damage outputs than their attack cruiser counterparts.

Combat cruisers make excellent brawlers, with strong tanks and plenty of firepower.

While the class offers plenty of variation, combat cruisers generally excel when fighting at close to medium range. Thanks to their strong tanks and offensive abilities, these are difficult ships to take on toe to toe, and are typically capable of out-brawling most of the competition. With lower speed however, they have a harder time chasing down or evading targets than their attack brethren.

Know Your Enemy - Attack Frigates

Tech 1 Frigates are one of the first ships that a new player learns to fly, and their value combined with their low skill requirements make them an excellent choice for someone embarking on a career in PVP. In fact the pure enjoyment and versatility provided by these ships leads many PVPers to fly them as their solo PVP vessel of choice long after they're capable of flying larger or more expensive ships.

Attack Frigates trade survivability for speed, and excel at dictating the terms of a fight.

The Attack Frigates are designed for speed and tackling capability. All ships in this class receive a bonus significantly reducing the capacitor need of tackle modules. Combined with their high speed and strong capacitor regeneration, this makes the Attack Frigates an excellent choice for both long range and close range tackle. Attack Frigates are significantly more fragile than the beefier Combat Frigates, however their damage outputs remain similar to their more resilient cousins leaving them very effective if they're able to dictate the terms of an engagement and avoid taking damage themselves. Combined with their high speed (allowing them excellent range dictation) the Attack Frigates can make very effective solo vessels, and flown correctly they can be every bit as dangerous as their Combat counterparts.

Know Your Enemy - Combat Frigates

Tech 1 Frigates are one of the first ships that a new player learns to fly, and their value combined with their low skill requirements make them an excellent choice for someone embarking on a career in PVP. In fact the pure enjoyment and versatility provided by these ships leads many PVPers to fly them as their solo PVP vessel of choice long after they're capable of flying larger or more expensive ships.

The Combat Frigates range from heavily tanked brawlers like the Merlin and Punisher
to flexible kiters such as the Breacher and Tristan.

The Combat Frigates are the most numerous of the frigate sub-classes, with each race receiving two ships targeted towards slightly different aspects of that race's combat style. These are the front-line warships of the frigate class, with strong offensive and defensive capabilities giving them plenty of staying power compared to the other T1 frigates. Their brawling ability makes these ships an excellent choice for solo PVP, as well as for small frigate gangs. Their relative resilience makes them strong close range tacklers, however they lack the speed of their nimbler relatives the Attack Frigates which tend to overshadow them in any fast tackle role.

Know Your Enemy - Pirate Battleships

There comes a point in the life of an eve player when you decide that you simply have too much money, or maybe that you just have a real desire to compensate for something. At this time the traditional remedy is to splash out on one of the true kings of subcapital combat, the pirate battleships. After all, nothing says 'elite PVP' quite so much as a billion isk worth of battleship hull decked out in all the faction finery that money can buy, single-handedly tearing apart a small gang of lesser ships. Like the pirate cruisers and frigates that we looked at previously, the five pirate battleships vary quite considerably from one to the next. The pirate battleships share much the same mix of traits that we saw on their smaller counterparts with common themes of strong damage output, higher than normal speed, and plenty of webbing and neuting for good measure. Due to the price tag associated with these ships, most pirate battleships spend their lives shooting red crosses as a high end PVE machine. In the hands of an individual with both the funds and the temperament to take one into PVP however, they can have a far more exciting existance.

Know Your Enemy - Assault Frigates

Assault Ships (more commonly referred to as Assault Frigates to avoid confusion with their larger relatives) are the real heavyweights of the t2 frigate line. In terms of sheer staying power, no other frigate even comes close to this class - with full t2 racial resists and significantly buffed HP, it's not unusual for an assault frigate to tank twice the amount that its t1 counterpart would be able to. This defensive capability is backed up by some of the most impressive damage outputs to be found among all of the frigate classes, making assault ships some of the most challenging smaller ships to fight.

Know Your Enemy - Rookie Ships

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The Secure Commerce Commission obviously got a good bulk deal on these ships, because they seem to hand them out at every possible opportunity - if you're like me, I expect you have a whole fleet of such ships distributed across the Eve universe, each of them secretly joyous that you didn't just trash them like all those other guys.

When something is as common, and as...well... free as a rookie ship, it's easy to brush them off as worthless. However, could there be more to these ships than simply a container for that free unit of tritanium? In this article, we'll look at just how effective these often underrated platforms can be in PVP.

Know Your Enemy - Tier 3 Battlecruisers

In many ways, the new tier 3 battlecruisers are a class of their own. Where tier 1 and tier 2 battlecruisers were essentially tougher, slower, more powerful cruisers, the tier 3 battlecruisers simply take the hull of a t1 cruiser and attach to it the armament of a battleship. This gives them incredible offensive power against larger targets, at the expense of the durability and flexibility offered by their lower tier counterparts.

Know Your Enemy - Battleships (Part 2)

Throughout some four centuries of naval combat, battleships were the vessel that defined a fleet. While the last battleships of our day may have been decommissioned some time ago, it's good to see that in the distant future they seem to have made a decisive comeback; in Eve, the battleship is once again the unit by which fleets are measured (at a subcapital level, at least).

In my previous post, I covered Gallente and Minmatar battleships, as well as some general points about the class in general. In this post, we'll discuss their Caldari and Amarr equivalents.

Know Your Enemy - Battleships (Part 1)

Throughout some four centuries of naval combat, battleships were the vessel that defined a fleet. While the last battleships of our day may have been decommissioned some time ago, it's good to see that in the distant future they seem to have made a decisive comeback; in Eve, the battleship is once again the unit by which fleets are measured, at least at a subcapital level.

This article will cover Minmatar and Gallente battleships. Amarr and Caldari battleships will be covered in part two.

Know Your Enemy - Pirate Cruisers

Unlike the navy faction cruisers which lie somewhere between their t1 and t2 counterparts, the pirate faction cruisers are the true alpha males of the cruiser line. Pirate cruisers tend to be fairly front-loaded, with high damage outputs, good range dictation abilities and moderate tanks. Like the pirate frigates their abilities vary quite significantly, incorporating features of both of their chosen races (for the most part, they have the same bonuses and general characterstics as their frigate and battleship counterparts). While navy cruisers tended to be simply powered up versions of existing ships, some of the pirate cruisers offer unusual bonuses and exotic combinations of tank and weaponry that aren't really found elsewhere.

At the time of writing, most of these ships are quite rare in PVP (and in PVE for that matter), with the exception of the cynabal which tends to be very popular.

Know Your Enemy - Navy Cruisers

Faction cruisers may be t1 in name and skill requirements, but they are far stronger than their t1 counterparts in terms of performance. As with the faction frigates, there is a clear divide between the navy cruisers (belonging to the four empire factions) and pirate cruisers (belonging to the npc pirate factions). To begin with, we're going to look at the navy cruisers.

Know Your Enemy - Logistics

The Logistics ships are the ultimate force multipliers; there is no other cruiser (except for perhaps the falcon) which provides a greater boost to a gang's effectiveness. These ships are the healers of eve, providing your active tank so that you don't have to and doing it well. While a local active tank might tank a solo opponent or with a bit of bling maybe even a small gang, a pair of logistics ships can keep you alive indefinitely in the face of otherwise overwhelming firepower.

Know Your Enemy - HICs

As their name suggests, Heavy Interdictors (also known as HICs) are the larger cousins of the Interdictor class. Where the light interdictors were fast and fragile, the HICs are slow and tough. Where dictors typically had bonuses providing additional damage output (although they weren't always fit to use it), HICs are designed far more with tanking on mind, with offensive power usually being an afterthought. However, it isn't simply the hulls which have changed - the way in which each class provides its interdiction capability is also very different.

Know Your Enemy - Recon Ships

Recon ships serve as both the t2 variant of the t1 electronic warfare cruisers, but also as the natural progression from both Covert Ops frigates and Electronic Attack frigates. In addition to the electronic warfare bonuses of their t1 counterparts, recon ships also receive bonuses to their secondary racial EWAR type in the same way as the EAFs. Recon ships are quite clearly divided into two sub-classes; Force Recon ships (rapier, arazu, falcon and pilgrim) and Combat Recon ships (huginn, lachesis, rook and curse).

Know Your Enemy - Battlecruisers

Battlecruisers are among the most versatile ship classes in Eve, and one of my personal favourites. Much like their real life counterparts, the battlecruiser is essentially a beefed up cruiser with substantially improved firepower and resilience, while remaining below the level of a battleship. In exchange for these advantages, battlecruisers are quite a bit slower than t1 cruisers and have significantly larger signature radii making them easier to hit (although bear in mind they still use medium weapons, and so are just as capable of tracking their targets as a cruiser is).

Know Your Enemy - Heavy Assault Ships

Commonly known as HACs (short for Heavy Assault Cruisers, their more common if unofficial name), Heavy Assault Ships are the primary damage dealers of the t2 cruiser lineup. Despite their reputation as the warhorses of elite PVP, HACs are actually outperformed by their cheaper rivals the t1 battlecruisers in terms of damage output and tank. What HACs do offer is significantly better speed and range, and it is these properties they are generally used for (it's interesting to note that HACs are generally slightly faster than their t1 equivalent, unlike AFs which are usually slower than their t1 counterpart). HACs also offer increased resists, which makes them very effective in gangs employing t2 logistics ships.

Know Your Enemy - T1 Cruisers (Part 2)

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In the last article we began looking at t1 cruisers, covering both the minmatar and gallente lines. This post will continue where that one left off, by looking at the caldari and amarr equivalents.

Know Your Enemy - T1 Cruisers (Part 1)

Note: This article is now out of date. Head over to the Article Index page to see the updated list.

T1 cruisers are then next true 'all rounder' class after t1 frigates, and thanks to their very reasonable price tag they offer a good next step for those looking to move towards larger-ship PVP. As with t1 frigates, some of these ships are obviously designed for combat, while others are not - that isn't to say they can't be used for it of course! In fact, you can often get a real advantage by PVPing in one of the less popular t1 cruisers, since PVPers typically associate them with newbies who don't know what they're doing. With a decent fit and a bit of common sense, you can prove them oh so wrong!

Due to the number of ships within the cruiser class, this article will be published in two halves. This first half will cover both minmatar and gallente ships, while caldari and amarr cruisers will follow.