You can adjust your overview settings by right clicking on the arrow right beside where it says Overview and selecting the Settings menu option.
Once there you will start by modifying the filters tab. Make sure that anyone who is in your corporation, alliance, gang, has good or excellent standings do NOT appear. Also make sure you filter out all concord and NPC fleet ships (leave rats filtered on but turn off things like customs officers and so on). In addition make sure that you filter off all cargo containers, drones, sentry guns, secure containers, and so on. The only things that should be on are rats, player ships and gates. The reason that we leave gates filtered on will become apparent later in the course. There is a setting to filter out neutrals, however there is a problem with it: if you check it off, everyone except those with standings will be filtered out. That includes war targets! Unless your corp has set them to negative standings, they will not appear on your overview. Unfortunately, by leaving neutrals checked, you may get a lot of people on your overview that you don't want, however, we can make it as good as possible.
Now
we need to adjust the colours. Look at your
background colours
tabs and make sure you have the colours set so that all people in your
alliance, corporation, gang, and with good standings are various shades
of
blue. Next make sure that the icon colours match the colours of the
background.
Finally you need to set the valid empire targets to blink. This means
that you
set pilots at war with you and pilots with sec status below -5 to
blink. That
way you won't ever have to check anything to make sure the guy can be
popped in
empire or that he will pop you.
The
next step to adjust the order of the icons and
background colours. To understand how this work know that Eve evaluates
from
the top, down. The top color and icon is more important than the bottom
one and
will override the bottom one. So if you have security status coloring
on top
and alliance member on bottom, Eve will color the pilot according to
their
security status and not according to their alliance or standings. This
is bad
because you could end up shooting friendlies. In 0.0 the standings of
the pilot are more important
than the security status of the pilot. If friendly pilots pirate you,
you
should take that up with your CEO or officer and he will handle it for
you. You
should not shoot at alliance, corporation, gang or high standings
pilots, no
matter what their security status; nor should you return fire if an
alliance, corporation
or gang member fires on you (unless you are both just playing around of
course).
Your
final order for your color tags and icons
should be the
following:
I would advise you to turn on all of the color-coding and most of the icons because the more information you have on the overview, the faster you can react to changing conditions in the game. The only icons that I don’t use are the skulls for low security status pilots, reserving that for bounties, and interactable agents.
You will also want to reconfigure your colours according to your taste. However, you want to make sure that valid Empire targets (those below - 5.0 security status and those at war with you) are blinking and no others are blinking. This means that you will know at a glance if the target is a legal empire target or not.
Finally
you will want to set up your columns in
the
overview. The columns that you should have visible are the following
columns in
this order:
The
'TAG' column is no longer necessary since in
the invention
of the fleets and broadcasting targets. The ‘CORP’ and
‘ALLY’ columns
should be
resized so that they can display 6 character sized corporation and
alliance
tickers. The ‘NAME’ column should be set up so that you
can read longer
names
and the size column also appropriately resized. The size column gives
you an
idea of what kind of ship you are facing; you will quickly get to learn
the
sizes of various ships.
Once you have your settings modified you should have your overview set up to ‘Tactical’. You will probably want to keep several sets of overview settings. You might have a setting for empire that only shows valid high-sec space targets (and unfortunately neutrals). You could have another setting that you use for ratting, another for 0.0 space and yet another for mining ice.
You can save or load your overview settings in the overview settings panel; just right click on the arrow beside ‘Overview’ - the settings can be changed over in a flash. This gives you a chance to create presets; you can have a setting for ratting, another for ice mining and still more for other specialized tasks.
Other
things you can do to assist in reducing the
lag
incurred in certain situations are:
Once you have this set up you will be ready to get into action quickly, while minimizing your chances of firing on something you aren't supposed to.