So I take it there are long long stretches of boring traveling through space between battles? And if this costs real $$ I would expect battles to be relatively rare.
Au contraire. You can get your face melted right off in real short order. Low security / no security space is never more than a few jumps - and thus, a couple of minutes at most - away.
Don't get frightened by the "equivalent dollar value"* stuff. It's possible to play this game "for free," once you're developed. But everything has a trade-off, and if you come across some 12-year-old kid who plays 8 hours a day on Daddy's credit card . . . .
It's the economics of the game that hooked me. And did I say danger? And risk.
P.S. My investment in this game totals US$34.99/60 days. I manage.
P.P.S. If you want to play, find someone to help you right away. If you're not man enough, try World of Warcraft with the rest of the fairies.
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*Calculating "value" in an online game is problematic. It's easy to find a "dollar-equivalent," but not all players in the game pay with dollars.
If you choose to do (player vs. player) PvP battles, there is a lot of waiting around.
If you choose to stay in empire space and do missions, or mine, etc., you don't have to move around much at all. It only takes a minute or two to warp from one side of a system to another, and there are warpgates to take you to other systems.
nd if this costs real $$ I would expect battles to be relatively rare.
Building a ship costs ISK, which isn't real dollars unless you fund it that way. You can earn ISK a variety of ways in-game.
If you are engaged in big battles on behalf of a corp, they will have ways to build their own ships for you. And a corp that is doing that will have a variety of ways to make large amounts of ISK and collect resources to do so.