Skill Training Plans - Ship to ship, or optimized by attribute?

Remapping attributes and focusing only on the skills using those attributes is faster than using a generalized attribute mapping and mixing skills by about 20-25%. But you can only remap once a year (excluding bonus remaps), you give up a lot of flexibility for the faster skill training.

At the beginning you need to get your basic skills done, and those are distributed among all attributes and you should use a more generalized remap for that. I would only start with a specialized remap at the earliest with 10-20 million SP. You need to understand the skill tree well enough to plan around one year in advance, or you might regret some missing skills you have to learn with a bad remap.

If you want to specialize your attributes, I would first get all the basic skills done, most of them are in Int/Mem, and then learn the ship specific skills on a Per/Will remap.

I agree with @MadScientist, whose answer is pointed towards new players. For the older characters, however - those approaching 25 or 30 million Skill Points - I offer the following analysis:

Ship to ship training:

• Pros:

  1. Good if you want to focus on one or two types of ships, or a single race.
  2. Short term, general plans that can be changed and modified on the fly

• Cons:

  1. Less SP over time. Possibly as much as 25% less SP per hour compared to optimized plans.
  2. The long skills will really get to you.

Attribute Optimized training:

• Pros:

  1. Good if you want to focus on entire Categories of skills.
  2. Easy to group lots of different skills together and train vast swathes of things over time.
  3. Long term, focused plans that shorten train times by up to 25%
  4. You will be much more inclined to use a third party skill planning program. While this is also a Con (see below) the Pro is that these programs can do more than just skill plans. If someone new to my alliance isn't using a skill planner and an offline fitter, we pretty much beat him over the head until his fits and skills improve.

• Cons:

  1. Focused skill training is hard to break from. If CCP releases an Expansion with a shiny new skill that doesn't match the current attribute set, it's gonna have to wait.
  2. Changing your mind about training a particular set of skills is rare. Even if you decide not to fly, say, Amarrian ships, then when you train under Perception/Willpower, you leave out the Laser Gunnery skills, the Amarrian Spaceship Command skills, and that's about it. However, this may shorten your skill plan below a one year period, which is not optimal.
  3. You will need to use a third party program to properly map your skill plans. It's possible to just use Excel, but don't. Go and get EVEHQ or EVEmon or something.

Clearly, I am a proponent of the latter, especially for alts and players who know what they are doing. New players can benefit from optimized training, but they are not going to have a whole lot of fun while doing it. That being said, a stack of +5 implants in addition to optimized attributes takes a character from 1530 SP/hour to 2700 SP/hour. Heck, just optimizing the training is worth 600 SP/hour or so. It ends up being the difference of about 5m SP (and change) every year.