Editing Skills and Implants (section)

====Expert Systems====

Expert Systems can only be bought with real-world money. These are essentially sets of skills, chosen to support a specific career path, that you can rent for one week at a time. Depending on who you ask, Expert Systems are a good way to try out a career to see if you like it, a starting boost to make new players' first few days easier, a completely useless feature you can easily do without, and a blatant ploy by CCP to sucker new players out of a little cash up front. Or some combination of those things. Here we'll focus on the skills granted by Expert Systems for exploration, and how useful brand-new players are likely to find them. Whether Expert Systems are a good thing or not, and whether you care to use them, is up to you.

Going back to the very first part of this section on skills, you might recall that there are some skills that you should probably train to level 3 as soon as possible. As far as those particular skills, an exploration Expert System will start you out with Racial Frigate 3, Astrometrics 3, Astro Rangefinding 3, Archaeology 3, and Hacking 3. With those skills already trained, you should be able to fly a T1 frigate out into a hisec system, find a wormhole to j-space, and scan down a relic or data site there. You'll have a reasonable chance of a successful hack, if you have a decent understanding of the mini-game and above average luck. Without those skills, you might get stuck finding a site in j-space to hack, and it's unlikely that your hack will be successful without a very heavy dose of good fortune. 

You can check out the rest of the skills that come with the Expert System by looking at the tab in your in-game character sheet (don't bother looking at the EVE website for details, because for some reason they aren't there). Here's a general summary of what you'll find there in addition to the essential skills just mentioned:

Long Range Targeting and Target Management can be useful if you want to use a cargo scanner to check out your cans before hacking them. Signature Analysis and Sensor Compensation are less useful: you don't need fast targeting for cans that don't move, and anyone who could be jamming your sensors could just kill you instead. 

Evasive Maneuvering and Warp Drive Operation are useful skills, but the align time you'll get from Evasive Maneuvering 3 as opposed to the Evasive Maneuvering 1 that you'll get even without the Expert System isn't going to make your align time crisp enough to save your ship without the right modules. Warp Drive Operation will help you avoid those situations where you have to initiate your warp twice, although that isn't a very serious problem in most circumstances. 

There are a lot of shield and armor related skills included that vary according to which racial Expert System is chosen, and how important they are is debatable. On the one hand, a determined and moderately skilled explorer hunter will destroy you with or without shield and armor improvements. On the other hand, your ship comes with shields and armor, and it can't hurt to make them a bit better since you're going to be bringing them along anyway. You probably won't run into any NPC enemies (generally called "rats") that will be just dangerous enough for better shields and armor to make a big difference, but fortune does favor the prepared. 

Probably the most useful of the skills included that aren't specific to exploration are the sort that help you manage your resources and fitting. You'll get Capacitor Management 3, Capacitor Systems Operation 3, CPU Management 4, Electronics Upgrades 3, Energy Grid Upgrades 3, and Power Grid Management 4. Some of these will give you more resources for using modules in-flight, and others will make it easier to fit different modules to your ship. How much benefit any particular one will be for your specific situation will vary, but all things considered it's a decent collection. 

Possibly the best way to determine whether an Expert System is worth it to you is to look at the skills it provides and figure out how much sooner you can start using those skills with the Expert System than without it.  Just looking at the skills that have an immediate and direct impact on exploration, and that you don't get for free as starting skills (Racial Frigate 2 and 3, Astro Rangefinding 2 and 3, Archaeology 2 and 3, and Hacking 2 and 3),the overall training time at the Alpha rate of 15 points per minute is 5 days and 18 hours. 

So, an Expert System that provides those skills immediately will put you almost 6 days into your exploration training from the very beginning. If you queue up those same skills to train normally while the Expert System is active, you will finish training them to the Expert System's level about one day before the Expert System expires and the skills revert to only what you have trained. 

Is that worth it? It's your choice, and hopefully we've made it a little easier to see the whole picture.