If you're starting, focus on a weapon platform. Once you know if you're going lasers, hybrids, projectiles or missiles, skill into that. Then skill in the ships that are made for these weapons. Later on, start branching out. It makes no sense to try to be able to fly everything if you can't fly anything well.

Pick the one you are most interested in, and start with a t1 or navy version of that.

Want to prioritize t3 destroyers, pick which one you like the look of most and pick a relevant t1 destroyer to fly. That will help you get a feel for the size of the hull and what it's capable of. Once you are skilled into the t2/t3 variant your experience will be very similar but with more options at your disposal.

I used the Thrasher a ton while I trained up into the Svipul, as an example. It gave me a sense of how destroyers operate, and the types of content I could reliably do with it. Once I had the Svipul I did a lot of the same type of stuff until I was more comfortable with it and then I started pushing my limits a little to see what else it could do.

T2 ships are specialized hulls.  T3 are versatile ones.  Covops are a lot of people's first T2 ships cuz of how useful a cloaked scanner is.  HACs are a popular choice for both PVE plus corp PVP doctrines.  Assault frigates if you do abyssals and burners or want to be a ramjag pilot.  T3Ds are nice all round ships, especially for PVE stuff.  T3Cs are fantastic but will take a bit of time to get into, I reckon get into those last. People usually won't undock those until all the subsystem skills are lv4 or ideally lv5.  For T3C the main 3 are great all rounders, Proteus leans more to PVP

Assuming you are in a corp. Check which doctrine ships are mostly used and skill into them.

Beside that CovOps is also nice to have, same for Assault Frigs.

First, train up Drones V and all your fitting skills. This helps everything everywhere.

Then, pick the ships you want to prioritize. Ideally from the same race, or at least using the same weapons platforms.

Start flying the T1 versions of those ships. Min/Max your attributes to Per/Wis and get Medium [Weapon System] Specializations up to 3-4.

Then remap your Attributes to Int/Mem and get all your T2 armor & shield skills up to V. You're gonna live in this space for awhile. Milestones are T2 1600 plates, T2 Large Shield Extenders, T2 XL Shield Boosters, T2 Large Armor Reps, and V's in all 4 flavors of resistance bonuses for both Armor & Shield. Also pick up Advanced Weapon Upgrades V and pretty much all of Engineering to IV or V.

THEN go back to Wis/Per for those T2 ship skills and upgrades.

If you are wanting to rush things, throw some money at skill injectors and boost whatever skills are opposite your current attributes. Eg; if you're in Engineer (Int/Mem) mode, then spend your Injection budget exclusively on Wis/Per stuff.

The in-game skill planner is pretty good, but a 3rd party program like Eve-Mon can be really helpful optimizing everything too.

If cost doesnt matter then go for metamorphosis.

But i would suggest just following a faction ship tree so t1 explorer, -> t2 explorer -> t3d: which btw, is not really an explorer at all unless you are looking more at combat exploration sites, hunting explorers, or low class wormhole sites.

What do you want to do?

I did covops -> logi -> HACs -> ewar frigs -> recons -> t3c to start

I’m in wormhole space, so covops was an easy first pick. Logi was for doctrine fleets, and I started with missile/shield skills mostly, so the cerb was an easy pick for isk making.

I personally don’t like t3cs because I’m poor. I basically only got the proteus because I wanted to smartbomb explorers lol.

Honestly it doesn’t matter. There’s a LOT you can do with T1 and faction ships. The T2/3 ships fly almost identically to their T1 versions, just more powerful and much more expensive.

You shouldn’t think of it as “what t2 ship do I want?” You should think of it as “what T1 ship do I really like and want to make stronger by training successive levels of the corresponding spaceship command and weapon skills?”

Let’s say you love flying a Heavy Assault Missile Caracal. You keep training Heavy Assault missiles until it’s 5 and you get T2 launchers, and keep training Caldari Cruiser V until you can now unlock the Cerberus and Tengu. And oh, hey, you already have the shield and missile skills because you’ve been training them with the Caracal! And you know how to fly them because they fly the same! Except Cerberus costs 300 mil and Tengu costs 600 mil versus a 50 mil Caracal.

Personally, I like to first skill support skills, so skills that have general usage for almost all ships.

Examples would be Evasive Maneuvering, Rapid Firing, Motion Prediction, Missile Bombardement or Guided Missile Precision.

Once all of those are on level 4, I expand on ships. Start with the base skill, then make sure you can use T2 weapons and tank, and only once that’s done you should go into T2 ships.

After that, expand into level 5ing all of the support skills that increase damage, range, cap, fitting space (CPU/PG), tank, decrease cap usage and fitting size, and then go into T3, and don’t even bother buying a T3 cruiser before having all the subsystems at level 5.

T3 is not exactly the next step after T2, it’s a different kind of ship, one that requires more game knowledge due to them being so versatile.

You can totally fly a tengu as a beginner, but it will likely not be better than flying a Cerberus at all. In contrary, the tengu needs more skillpoints and ISK to achieve the same performance.

But a Cerberus won’t warp cloaked, won’t ignore bubbles, won’t be a good scanner/explorer and it won’t be able to give good shield transfer or fleet boost.