If you’re feeling $pendy, buy Research Project Management. Whether you’re feeling spendy or not, buy: Minmatar Starship Engineering, Mechnical Engineering and Connections. Then buy and inject: Social, Laboratory Operation, Research. Start with training up Social to level 3, then inject Connections and train that to level 3 as well, and finally level 4 of Social to cap it off. We’re not at all specced for anything that uses charisma as a primary or secondary attribute, so its best not to dwell on them more than you have to.

The reasoning behind the social skills will become clear…… Now!

Standings

Most of my alts – especially my mule-alts – don’t bother with standings. Having a perfectly neutral standing to everyone means it won’t affect my corporation’s faction-standing composition. As an example, 0.0 across the board will not affect my corp’s standing to Minmatar, but if the character has 0.01, then it counts and drags the average down.

This doesn’t mean a whole lot to the solo player, or to larger corps, but if you run a high-sec POS in a small organisation, it can get really annoying, since you need faction-to-corp amalgamated standing equivalent to the security rating of the system where you want to put up your POS. So 0.6 systems need 6.0 standing, and so on.

But what does this have to do with Eilean? Not a lot really. This isn’t a tutorial on POS management, but having access to one will make your life easier with the research might be doing now and definitely going to be doing in the future. What this is, is a primer on standings, which is most certainly something Eilean needs if she wants to get into invention.

Now, you could get away with just buying your datacores on the market. In fact, that would be the easier option. However, you’ve just trained a load of skills you need for different research agents, so you might as well make better use of them, right? But you can’t, because you don’t have good standings! Onoes!

As it happens, there’s an excellent standings guide elsewhere on the interwebs. The catchy-named ‘Faction Standing Repair Plan’ works just as well for those with neutral standings as for those with negative standings looking to fix them. So here I present your new bible: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1263174&page=1#2. You can ignore the first post unless you’ve been pirating and want to repair your security rating. Stick with the second post in the thread and you can’t go wrong.

People often shrug off this guide in my experience, but I’m telling you that I personally went from 0.72 faction standing to 5.73 over the course of a long weekend. It is mind-numbingly boring work, but I stand by its effectiveness, and I didn’t even bother with a lot of the COSMOS missions. The only bit that’s going to sting is the Data Centers, which require 20x of various rat factions’ tags. These get hideously expensive sometimes, so only do the ones you’re sure you can afford.

Start this plan once you’re done with those social skills. Don’t think about stopping until you hit the ‘Data Center’ stage; every single soul-crushingly boring tutorial and circle agent mission is a step towards your goal, and you don’t want to miss any.

…So get to work!

The Money Bit

As I bought a load more t2 component science skills, my overheads are likely more than yours, but here goes:

• 3x 10mil for the extra t2 component skills (High Energy Physics, Laser Physics, Rocket Science)
• 10mil for Mechanical Engineering
• 10mil for Minmatar Starship Engineering
• 40mil for Research project management
• 270k for Research
• 270k for Laboratory Operation
• 18k for Social
• 180k for Connections

Ow, ow, OW! This is easily the most expensive day so far, costing me a total of 90,738,000 ISK and bringing my running total to a quite-alarming 201,868,890 ISK. nearly doubled in costs over the course of a week. Ouch.