Strategic design

Just a short thought.  Longer thoughts later today.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm getting Ripard into a tackling Proteus, which involves training Gallente Strategic Cruiser and the five Gallente Subsystem skills.  I always find it funny how people say, about the various Strategic Cruiser Subsystem skills, "Just train them all to five; they're all rank one skills so it doesn't take very long."

This was genius game design on someone's part at CCP.  A typical specialized ship skill, trained to level five -- Recon V, say -- takes about 30 days depending on your attributes.  Meanwhile, if you do follow the advice and train all five Subsystem skills to level five, plus train the Strategic Cruiser skill itself to level four, you're looking at about five days for each of those six skills.  Or about 30 days, put another way.  ;-)

Recon V or Heavy Assault Ships V or Logistics V always feels like a slog, even though you only have to put the skill into your queue the one time and then you can forget about it until it's done.  You could log out of EVE for that whole month if you wanted to.  Meanwhile, you're probably not going to sit in your new Strategic Cruiser until your subsystem skills are in good shape, which means logging in every day or two to keep the training queue going for 34 skill trains.  But despite the fact that it's tons more work, it doesn't feel like a slog because you can see constant progress.

Like I said, genius design on someone's part.