Recommendation for Your Very First PVE Fleet as FC

[Amoni Panala]

Background
I wanted to draft a curriculum for new FCs to help them go from zero experience to confidently taking out cruisers and battlecruiser fleets with individuated roles and such. This is a long term goal that, with the break I'm planning to take and other things in my life coming to a head, I have no idea if I'll realistically reach that goal so I figured I'll at least put the very first thing in this curriculum up. Maybe it helps, maybe it just causes chaos. Either one is acceptable to me.

While JFC is about training FCs for PVP, in my experience FCing PVE fleets can really help you develop some of the more operational aspects of running a fleet. So while I would never say those two things are equivalent and I'm not advocating that FCing PVE fleets will net you the same experience as FCing a PVP fleet, I think FCing a PVE fleet for your very first fleet is a good way to get started FCing.

The pros:

• You get to practice explaining all the new player stuff without worrying about timing for an engagement
• While PVE can be dangerous, there are a lot more elements in your control than you would have in a PVP fleet
• There are usually guides and definitive answers to questions that would otherwise not be available for PVP

The cons

• PVE fleets are experientially different from PVP fleets

The Fleet
As a new FC, my recommendation is that you take a fleet of sniper destroyers ( rail cormorants, artillery thrashers, rail catalysts, and beam coercers) out to Pochven, find a rogue drone site, and kill the rogue drone. This will increase everyone's standings with the Triglavians and EDENCOM and it will give you experience FCing a fleet. If you have someone scouting out the system ahead of you and finding a sleeping rogue drone site, the actual work in Pochven will be fairly simple. You basically sit at your optimals and have everyone shoot the rogue drone then warp off once it's dead and filament back home.

Your biggest threats will be:

• Other players dropping on you for quick and easy kills
• Someone getting left behind after killing the sleeping drone and getting blapped by whatever wakes up

You can mitigate the risk of these things by having the fleet align to where you want to go and then you, as FC, warping the fleet in our New Eden-renowned blob everywhere you go. If you accidentally warp yourself instead of the whole fleet, warp back to the fleet and try again. You aren't the first FC and you won't be the last FC to do that. Experienced FCs, myself included, still occasionally warp ourselves when we meant to warp the whole fleet. It is just one of those things that's easy to do by mistake. The other half of risk reduction is to have your scout, as well as yourself, constantly hitting dscan. If you use dscan properly, you'll see any PVP trouble coming before it lands.

Prep

1. Find a date and time that work for you.
2. Make a forum post outlining all the details of your fleet and post it in Events *
3. Make a new event in the in-game calendar or, if you are not yet Sophomore, ask some in the JFC to do it for you
4. Order ships from Production so that people can get them off contract rather than trying to source them from Jita or Dodixie **
5. Make sure you have Internal-15 'Pochven' or Border-15 'Pochven' to get to Pochven and Glorification-15 'Devana' to get back home
6. Make a fleet and set up your MOTD with all the information you want people to be able to refer back to then save those settings for the day of the fleet
7. Make sure you are familiar with the Getting positive Triglavian and EDENCOM standings guide and ask questions if there is anything that isn't clear
8. Make a safe in your staging system
9. Make sure you have the Pochven bookmark folder available in your list of shared folders

Day of Fleet

1. Get to your staging location early (likely Stacmon - The Quad, but I'm not the boss of you)
2. Make sure contracts are up and message someone from Production or ping a Production Officer in ping-misc on Discord to ask when the contracts will go up if they are not already
3. Get your in-game fleet going and put up the advert 5-10 minutes beforehand so people can find it (make sure it is visible to corp and alliance and that you are hiding your location)
4. Ping in the ping-misc channel on Discord using @everyone to remind folks you're taking out a Pochven standings fleet
5. Give approximately 10 minutes for stragglers and nincompoops who waited until the last second to decide they're going
6. Give people your version of the New Player Speech which should explain all the basics of fleets (align, warp, broadcasting, watchlisting, anchoring, etc)
7. Set safeties to yellow
8. Warp to the safe you made
9. Activate filament and yeet the fleet to Pochven
10. Have your scout +1 looking for threats as well as a site
11. Once a site is found, kill the appropriate NPC
12. Warp the fleet to the safe in your Pochven bookmark folder
13. Activate filament and take the fleet home

* Be sure to specify that space is limited on these fleets and it will be first come, first serve up to 15 pilots total (make sure you include yourself in that count or you're going to have a bad time telling someone to kick rocks)
** Production requires 5 days advance notice on an order. If you are scheduling it for shorter notice than that, reach out to Production before putting in an order to confirm whether or not they can still fill your order

[Sir Blackstone III]

Thank you for posting this; very clear guide and I hope you'll be able to continue developing this before you need to take your break - or when you get back