1. Go get WineBottler and install both the wine and winebottler applications. You may be able to do it with just wine, but I didn’t try.
2. Spark up the winebottler application and click the “Add empty prefix” buton.
3. Name the prefix, choose where you would like it to live, and save it. I named the new prefix “RoM” and put it in my home directory so I could easily find it.
4. Now fire up the wine application. You should now see a wine glass on your top tool bar. Click it and click “Change Prefix“. Double-click your new runes of magic prefix and confirm. Close that window.
5. Click the wine glass again and click winetricks.
6. You have to install 3 components, but I had trouble when installing them all in the same go, so I installed in two passes. I first installed vcrun2005 and wininet and hit apply. Then I opened up winetricks again and installed ie6.
7. Go to the the Runes of Magic site, find the “client download” link on the left nav bar. Scroll down to the “Multiple file Download” section and download all of the files.
8. Place these files in your <PREFIX>/drive_c/ area in a new directory. In my case, I created the directory with, “mkdir -p ~/ROM/drive_c/install”. You can just surf around in finder and create the folder there if you like.
9. There may be a better way to do this part but this works. Click the wine glass icon again and click “File Manager“. Select “Run” from the file menu and browse around to find your ROMSetup.exe. Run this to install the game. After the lengthy install process, launch the game from the last prompt in the install process. Prepare for a long patch process (which happens automatically).
10. After the patch process (takes an hour or so on my fast connection), go ahead and start the game.
11. I haven’t figured out how to make a launch icon yet (I just started using winebottler today), so I use wine’s file manager to launch the game. You will want to launch “Runes of Magic.exe“.

That’s it. After launching the app and clicking “start game”, it will take about a minute to get the login screen. I had to set the graphics fairly low, even on a MacBook Pro. I’ll update this post when I figure out a more elegant way to package this up. This was my first pass and since it’s fairly easy to get it running, I figured I’d share.

Edit: You can make a batch file in your <PREFIX>/drive_c directory called rom.bat. My rom.bat looks like this:

Then just start wine, click the wine glass icon, click DOS Prompt, and type “rom” and enter.

When I started looking around for quests, I remembered why I lost interest in the game before. At level 43, I had finished most of the quests I could without grouping up. The daily quests are nice though. They got me over the hump to level 44 and opened up some more quests. I was having a hard time advancing though as it was hard to kill monsters 3 levels higher then me needed for the quests.

The solution I came up with was to do some cheap upgrading of my gear. I spent about 400k gold and ended up almost doubling my damage output. If you’re leveling in RoM and are running into killing efficiency problems, I suggest spending a modest sum to upgrade your gear. The first thing to do is find a nice arcane transmutor guide as you can’t get good gear cheaply without it. In my case, I “tiered” my weapon up, I bought a cheap “Vahto’s Spell” accessory set which has a 15% magic power bonus, and I spent about 100k on vendor refining stones and made sure all of my good gear was +2. Since Vahto’s Spell set is considered an end game set, I will probably work on getting some nice stats on it (but not too nice yet).

With all of these upgrades, I can now kill mobs of my level with one flame spell about half the time. The mobs I need to kill for quests (3 levels higher then me or so) fall after two or three flame spells (6 to 9 seconds). I never seem to have mana problems although I expect that to change when I get into instances.

I wonder how many folks have given up on RoM because of the complex weapon upgrade system. I like the system because you can really tailor your weapon to suit your needs in a lot of ways, but I’m sure some folks are completely put off by the amount of information you have to keep in your head to upgrade gear. The WoW system of enchants probably suits more people.

On another note, with all of the standings grind and not spending ISK, I am almost at 1 billion ISK. My net worth is over a billion and has been for a while, but I’ve never actually had 1 billion ISK in the bank at one time.

I’ve narrowed down my “permanent” possessions down to my Ishtar and various tank fittings for my combat main and a transport ship for my indy alt. Usually, when I arrive in a system I go buy an industrial ship for courier contracts (so I don’t have to trade goods and fly 2 ships to the destination) and fit it for cargo and tank. Then I get right into the missions.

I’ve learned a few more things about the standings grind which are useful. The connections skill and social skill make a big difference in the length of the grind. I should have trained these earlier. A high quality level 3 agent is much more efficient then a low quality level 4 agent as far as standings gained per hour given that they are the same type (both personnel or both administration for instance). Of course, a high quality level 4 agent is still best, but one should experiment a bit.

The standings grind is so painful that I probably won’t set up any other toons to do research. It’s just too much work to get the machine running. Two characters with 5 research slots will make about 120M ISK a month. That should be plenty for now.

While being a nomad, I feel completely cut off from my corp and corp-mates. There are only a handful of active members, and they mostly live in a wormhole. Most of the members are active when I’m asleep, so the only communication I have with them is via eve-mail. Moving around like a hobo only adds to the isolation. When my grind is done, I’ll have to have a chat with the CEO and maybe find a new home. I’d like to end up in some nice 0.0 territory, maybe up north. I miss gate-camps and roams.

It’s like floating in the ocean, the slosh of pod fliuds as my Taranis accelerates into warp. I don’t get this feeling in any bigger or slower ships. It’s part of the reason why I fly interceptors. I’m probably entering the last minutes of my life as I move in quickly to tackle a Raven in the belts. His friends will probably kill me, but I should stay alive long enough to allow my gang to kill him. He and his friends should have found some other place in Syndicate to hunt in.

It’s a skeleton crew, only volunteers since they know they may die. If they live, they will have earned enough money to retire. The escape pod is in good order. I hope they make it. Their families in Poitot will do well even if they don’t make it back. You can get a lot of loyalty out of a good crew if you take care of their families.

I wonder what really happens when I die. Does my consiousness continue on? Do I just feel nothing? Do I really continue into my next clone, or do I just die here while a new person replaces me? Is my soul destroyed during the rebirth? Do I still have a soul? I’ll find the answers soon enough.

My ship is in good working order. The new armor plates whould help me last a bit longer. The guns are in good condition ready for the overheating abuse they are about to receive. The MWD and signature damper are green. The sun is at my back. It’s a good day to die again.

• L3 or L4 courier missions. These things are just awful. They give you a very small amount of standings increase, and the rewards are horrible. On the forums, you’ll hear people tell you that they can knock off 10 of these an hour and get a storyline every 2 hours. In my experience, it doesn’t work out this way. The cargo size ranges from 3000m3 to 8000m3, and the number of jumps ranges from 1 jump to 7 jumps. With a mid level agent, I was averaging 4 to 5 jumps. Each trip took about 10 minutes on average in a blockade runner. I shudder to think how long it would take in a hauler. Also, none of the courier agents give out just courier missions. There are combat missions and mining missions as well. Since my indy pilot can’t do combat missions, I had to pass on those, which means I had to take the mining missions. This brings me to the next best group of missions.
• L4 Mining missions. If you’re well skilled, have at least a covetor and a hauler alt, you can knock off any of the mining missions in about 30 – 45 minutes. The standings increase for the time is somewhat better then courier missions, and the LP awards are better. It’s like watching paint dry though, and some of the missions involve an initial bit of combat to remove pirates or rogue drones.
• L3 Combat missions. They give about the same standings increase and awards as an L4 mining mission, but they take about 10-15 minutes to run on average including overhead. If you’re just looking for standings, don’t bother looting unless it’s while you’re killing stuff. I pass on the faction related missions, since my caldari and amarr standings are pretty low now. I still need to be able to fly in their space.
• L4 Combat missions. If I had gone with my gut instead of reading some forum posts, I would have gone with these whenever I could. If you’re reasonably skilled, you can complete L4 combat missions in 30 minutes on average (including blitzing some). The standings increases are more then double L3 combat missions, and the rewards and loot (where you’re looting while killing) are much better. If you have to pass on faction combat missions, you may want to find a place where there are 2 agents nearby for those times when you get 2 faction missions in a row. Currently, I’m bouncing between a good L3 and L4 agent 2 jumps apart.

The lesson is that if you have combat skills, you should consider sticking with combat agents for any standings grind where they are available. EVE is not a perfect world, so sometimes you’ll have to do missions in a suboptimal way because no other agents are available. Usually though, you can find at least a L3 combat agent for any corp to make things go faster.

My methodology was probably a bit flawed, since my indy and combat pilot are fleeted up for combat missions, and my indy pilot was doing the courier/mining missions alone. This actually makes the combat missions even better if you can do them alone.

To decide whether this is worth your time, you will need several pieces of information. First is the going price for data cores. Go to the eve-central market aggregator and search for “datacore”. For the purposes of this exercise, ignore the subsystem datacores. Go through the list and get a feel for how much the buy and sell orders are for each datacore and decide on several you want to pursue. The average sell price for the datacores I chose runs around 250k ISK each so we’ll use that number for further calculations (a bit conservative at today’s rates).

The next piece of information you need is how many research points an agent will give you per day. Here’s the calculation shamelessly stolen from the official eve-online wiki.

RP/day = Field multiplier * (1 + (AQ + 5*N)/100) * (SS + AL)^2

AQ = Agent Quality
N = character’s Negotiation skill level
SS = character’s specialist science field level (eg “Quantum Physics”)
AL = Agent Level

The field multiplier is 3 for starship datacores (which cost 150 rp per datacore) and 1 for others (which cost 50 rp per datacore). Agent quality can be found in the info page of the agent. This calculation seems to use the base quality, not the effective quality. I’ll verify once I have more experience and come back and edit. It turns out that aq will average around 0 until I grind rep with some other corps.

This means that with a negotiation skill of 4 and specialist skill of 4, I’ll be pulling in about 76 research points a day or about 1.5 data cores a day. So 375k per day per agent with 5 agents for 30 days is about 56 million per month. This number can go up a lot if you’re willing to train negotiation to 5 (a 10 to 12 day skill) or go out and grind up better research agents.

So is it worth it? I’m going to give it a go and report back in a couple of months.

At my present skill level with a good L4 agent in hi-sec, I can earn about 6000 LP per hour and a paltry 4-5 million ISK. I’m really only in it for the standings though, and they are still better then level 3 combat missions. My current strategy is to fleet up my two characters and use one of them to run the courier missions. Once they both have good enough standings, they will run missions in parallel.

If you are about to start some standings grind, don’t forget some social skills to make the grind as profitable as possible. Negotiation, Social, Connections, and the sector connections skills like “High Tech Connections” or “Trade Connections” are the main ones to look at. Some of the skill books are pricey, but I think they are worth it if you have a long grind ahead of you.

If you get into data core research, read one of the nice guides on research agents. Aside from “Research Project Management”, many of the science skills like “Mechanical Engineering” or “Electromagnetic Physics” will increase the data core yield of an agent. Negotiation will also increase the yield. At my target skill levels (3 in science skills, 4 in Research Project Management), I should make about 40 to 45 million ISK per month in passive income per character. If I had the patience, I would consider filling up my character slots with researchers. That takes a lot of skill training away from my main though, and I don’t know if I can tolerate that.