EVE Evolved: Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers
by Brendan Drain 
Sep 6th 2009 at 6:00PM
Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, Classes, Expansions, Game mechanics, Crafting, PvP, Endgame, Tips and tricks, PvE, Opinion, Hands-on, EVE Evolved
With
EVE Online's
Apocrypha expansion came an entire new class of ship. Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers represent a new wave of technology in
EVE. Rather than being simply improved versions of the existing Tech 2 ships, Strategic Cruisers are modular ships reverse engineered from
ancient Sleeper and Talocan components. They allow players to design their own ship from a base hull and a set of five subsystems. Each subsystem has four options, with a fifth possibly in the works. Original designs called for the ship to improve as it was used, but this was replaced with a set of rank 1 skills and
you lose a level of one of them if your ship is destroyed. A fully fit Tech 3 ship originally would have cost you upwards of two billion isk but prices have since dropped to around the 600 million mark and they're still falling. As these ships have become more affordable, I've had a chance to see some of them in action and see first hand what they can do.
Join me in
this visual gallery article where I dish out some information on Strategic Cruisers and then examine a few of the different ways these ships can be fit to fulfill different roles. If you have a particularly inventive setup, feel free to post it as a comment.
Tags: apocrypha, ccp, ccp-games, eve, eve-evolved, eve-online, featured, legion, loki, opinion, proteus, sleeper, strategic-cruisers, subsystem, talocan, tech-3, tengu
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
SgtBaker said on 1:13PM 9-07-2009
They're kinda like HAC's on 'roids.
Except they cost helluva lot and attract entire sectors worth of enemies camping you around the clock just on the remote chance they might get on the killmail.
When they're priced around 150-200m they might be interesting to use, until then.. good for EFT warriors and spinning in hangars. :-)
Reply
Brendan Drain said on 2:03PM 9-07-2009
Personally, I think they're worth the isk now depending what you're planning to use them for. For example, we now have three legions in our wormhole expedition team. They can each solo class 3 anomalies quite quickly, which is something those pilots couldn't do with another type of ship.
There are a few very useful things they can do that other ships can't or that other ships have trouble with, like the command recon and the invisible setups I listed near the end of the gallery.
DrewIW said on 3:31PM 9-07-2009
"Except they cost helluva lot and attract entire sectors worth of enemies camping you around the clock just on the remote chance they might get on the killmail."
This.
Whenever a T3 ship is reported in the local intel channels, the entire constellation suddenly comes alive with probes and gatecamps.