My aim is to do faction warfare as a self-sustaining activity. That means paying for all my faction warfare activity through almost entirely faction warfare activity.

My first step was to find a new home base to act as a staging point. The criteria I had for this was:

• In high-sec, outside of the warzone, so I would never lose access
• As close to the warzone as possible
• A station or system that had manufacturing, reprocessing, research, and clone bay available.
• A high-sec path to a trade hub.

I chose Kuomi for this. It has all the facilities and a short path to Amarr for trading. I set this as my home base and then

I started from scratch, using only a cheap T1 frigate with T1 modules. The entire fit, all in with the hull and modules, costs about 1 million ISK. If starting from absolute scratch and nothing but a Corvette, then rat belts, do combat anomalies, or level 1 security missions in a high sec system until you earn enough ISK to buy a fitted T1 frigate.

With the T1 frigate, the goal of bootstrapping was to get my logistics in place so I can replace my ship and have a few backups ready to go. To me this meant at minimum, buying:

• Bestower hauler to transport fits from trade hub to my staging system
• A couple backup frigates with the same fit.

This would take about 6 million ISK. I was able to earn this by doing level 1 FW missions and ratting in the low sec asteroid belts of rearguard systems.

To put myself in an even better situation, making it easier to replace lost ships and be more self-sufficient, I wanted a few more things:

• Blueprints for my combat frigate hull and modules
• Blueprint for Venture and mining modules

With those extras, I could replace my ships and build backups through a little bit of mining or reprocessing modules.

With all of this ready to go, and a way to get back on my feet if I hit rock bottom and lose every ship I have, I'm ready to go do some faction warfare!

Even in a cheap 1 million ISK frigate I was able to capture Scout complexes in enemy frontline systems. This yielded lots of loyalty points but was challenging because there were a lot of enemies that would either destroy me or chase me off.

I found a better way to earn LP with a flimsy ship is to find a system that my faction owned off on the quiet side of the warzone that was around 50% or more contested and do defensive complexes. You can do a large complex in a frigate since you don't have to kill any NPCs. As long as nobody comes in and chases you off, you can earn lots of loyatly points this way without any combat. Just doing a couple of these can earn you tens of thousands of LP in a short time.

Joining fleets is also a great way to earn loyalty points. You'll learn a lot along the way too. Find fleets whenever possible.

With 4,000 LP and 2 million ISK you can buy a navy frigate blueprint to upgrade from the T1 frigate. To build the navy frigate, it also requires about 1 million in preservation seals and life support units, and another million worth of minerals. You can acquire the minerals through mining or reprocessing, but the rest generally requires plain ISK.

So after earning 4,000 LP and about 4 million ISK, you can upgrade to a navy frigate. The other option is to sell the navy frigate for a profit. You can get about 4 million in profit from selling the built ship.

Some more ISK will be needed if you want to fit the navy frigate with T2 modules. To buy navy modules you'll have to do a lot of FW missions for tags and ISK.

You can also consider selling other loyalty store items on the market to make ISK. The implants are a good choice since they require no special tags to purchase.

From here, keep repeating the process and build up a reserve of ships and ISK. Work your way into bigger navy ships.

If you lose everything, you know how to pick yourself back up, even if it means going back to a T1 1 mil ISK fit frigate.

I tried a level 1 mission and was able to complete it in my cheap 1 mil T1 frigate.

I noticed a few things:

• The missions have you jump several systems away. Generally more than normal security agents.
• Once you warp to a mission, it creates a beacon on the overview that everyone can see and warp to. This can make it very difficult and dangerous to complete.
• Every NPC killed drops a tag, which an be sold to NPC buy orders.
• NPCs drop standard modules at a typical rate of other missions.
• The ISK and LP for doing the missions is not any greater than normal missions.

Overall, I did not find them to be that fun or lucrative but maybe that changes as you move up to higher level missions.

• Fleet up! Whenever you can find a fleet to join, join. You will learn a lot and generally have more fun. There isn't always a fleet around though so I spend a lot of time solo.
• Start your own fleet. Invite another person and do some plexing and chat it up to make new friends.
• Read this amazing guide to solo frigate and destroyer faction warfare called the yearbook. It's updated yearly and this is the 2024 guide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ziv0a6UHa8vuRd1TIpC-wsnbmHHp2EPs/view - The 2025 version is in beta as of this writing and available at https://www.patreon.com/posts/yearbook-2025-128920171