Making most out of your crew - by Lice

[papajohns]

Taken from NF forum.


I have noticed that many of the new players have rushed the leveling of their crews just to get qualified for new stuff. That is fine, except for these points.

1. By NOT specializing your sailors to the class you wish (or following the tree to do so), you will suffer GREATLY in skill level for that sailor. Here is an example: To make a Dive Bomber, you need a sailor to level 45. Some guys leave a sailor as a neutral all the way up to level 45 then convert him to the nation, rookie, and divebomber all at once. He will have less than HALF the skill of a "properly trained" sailor that the veteran players use.

2. If you do not have enough points to specialize your sailor, take him off your boat and DO NOT LEVEL him again until you have the points. Even if you have to make a new level 1 crew to get the points through them do this!

3. Plan for the future now: What I mean is you should think about which sailors you wish to have on your CL/CV/CA/BB when you are in a DD. Some guys go for more Repairmen than anything as for support guys, others go for an equal representation of an Engineer, Repairman, and a Restorer. This really depends on your nation and style of gameplay. But plan for it now and start making the sailors with high BASE stats in those areas.

4. Ask questions of the veteran players: Guys, most of you know that I will help anyone that has a question if I am not involved in a heated battle, as will nearly all the others.

5. Play nice to all, don't do the "I Pwnd YOU! hahaha!" You never know who it is you just pissed off by being a poor winner. I had this happen to me in my newbie U.S. crew the other day, sadly , I had to school the poor new guy hard. To you, sorry man but your mouth got you in serious trouble. Remember, some of us play on a second acct. or a smurf name on occasion just to scout out new talent for our own clans.

6. Visit the forums regularly and make a post to let others know you are happy/dissapointed/or concerned about things. TeanNF does visit these boards regularly, but remember they have to translate most of the text, so be patient.


Good Hunting and Good luck all!

Lice (Moderator Retired) :>

[papajohns]

This was added by woodow

Thats a good start, I've been collecting some pics and putting together a rough guide on this topic, but until then, I will add some thoughts to your thread to help out others. If you intend on going the BB route, you should focus and plan ahead for what kind of support sailors you will need in the future, each nation has a slightly different need for its playing style. Let me cover some questions regarding two support types: the restorer and repairer.

When a player takes a hit from an enemy shell, 2 different types of damage are applied to the ship: Primary and Secondary damage. You can get an idea of the damages caused by each shell by looking at its rating; ex: a US 6"/47 Heavy HE shell is rated at 186 (+243). If a DD with no trained restorer recieves a direct hit, you will see immediate damage done to the ship, ie when the shell hits, all the damage it will do is taken immediately from the ships health. Now if a ship with a decently trained restorer is on board, when you recieve that same hit you will see a reduced amount of damage and the restorer will reduce the amount of secondary damage. What happens is that blue triangle (on the health bar) drops to a level where your health bar should be if you took all of the secondary damage. Now, your ship will be on fire and your health bar will slowly drain to that blue triangle. During this burning phase, your restorers will be repairing your ship and raising the blue triangle to meet the edge of your health bar. Once the blue triangle meets the health bar, the repair phase starts.

Restorers have 2 advantages. 1, they allow you to absorb alot of damage before it really affects your ship, for example, you could recieve so much secondary damage that your blue triangle will dip below the level where your engines can no longer overheat or reach maximum speed. Since you have restorers, you will still be able to overheat, and run at maximum speed will the person without the restorers would be dead in the water. 2, restorers also boost the "Soft Defense" rating of your ship the most of any sailors. "Soft Defense" reduces the total damage your recieve from a shell outright, ie reduces primary and secondary damage.

For ship setups, alot of people prefer 2 restorers to 1 repair as in heated conflicts, you will spend alot more time in the restore phase than in the repair phase. You will only truely get a chance to really repair when you can find a quiet place on the map to hide for a bit, so that is why restorers tend to be more valuable. It should be apparent that you will need 1 engineer as a BB (even a CA) as the slower speed of these larger ships can definately use a bit of help for times of need. Engineers raise the maximum overheat speed and increase the amount of time you can stay in overheat alltogether, a big help. For you US players out there, it is strongly recommended that you get 2 Engineers for your BBs as they tend to be slower and need to manuever your ships quickly into firing range.

It seems to me that all support sailors provide a little support overlap, ie repairers help a little with restore depending on their ability levels. It seems though professional repairers have a hidden multiplier that makes them more effective per point in repairing than say restorers, so even if a repairer and a restorer had the same repair ability, your repairer would still out perform the restorer in those functions. Repair and restore abilities are the only ones that seem to overlap, it seems engineering does not overlap, but I could be wrong on that.

On vets and experts. A sailor needs vets and experts to live up to its rated ability. If it has not experts or vets it will perform at lvl 1 ability, thereby nullifying whatever earned levels or abilities that sailor has. As your sailors gain more vets and experts, your ability bars will begin to be filled with a white bar. It is desirable to full your "ability bar" to 100% level. I have a little formula that will help alot of people out with this. First, focus on experts, my strategy is this. Take the total number of sailors in a unit and multiply it by .6 ( 0.6*total sailors), this is how many experts you should focus on making first (do not attempt vet promotes). When you reach 0.6*total sailors + 10 experts, then attempt 1 expert-vet promotion. Whether it passes or fails, wait to gain those 10 experts back, and when you do, attempt the promotion again. By doing this, you will always maintain at least 60% of your usable ability, which is not a bad place to be and you will be slowly building yourself up to the 100% ability bar level. To calculate how full your ability bar is, use the following formula:

{(total experts + 2*total vets)/total sailors in unit}*100

That will tell you the percentage effectiveness of your unit. Also, if you do not have your units completely full, you will not live up to that calculated percentage, so you must have recruits to fill in the gaps. Those recruits also act as 'meat shields' for your valued experts and vets.

Finally, always always always promote your units on time, do not sacrifice any sailor abilities in the interest of faster promotions, you will pay for it later in the game, trust me on this.