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Post by goodwood on Mar 1, 2018 7:39:27 GMT -6
We spend millions of bucks on training, however how do you know what skill level your sailors are at or what they are trained at.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2018 7:59:10 GMT -6
Are you talking about the specialty training priorities in the Training Tab (Gunnery, Night Fighting, Torpedo Warfare)? Once those become active (you will get a pop-up window during the turn resolution phase), they give a set bonus for their areas that is seperate from crew quality. For example, Gunnery gives a +10 bonus once its active. That bonus is +10 for an elite crew and + 10 for a poor crew as well. Obviously, an elite crew will see more benefit because the bonus of elite status will stack with the Gunnery bonus while the Gunnery bonus would just mitigate somewhat the negative malus related to poor status say for example +10 added to -20 for a total of -10.
You choose which if any of the three training priorities are to be trained on by checking the box next to them and then hitting apply. 1 year later the training will go into effect. You can choose a max of 2 out of the 3 at any one time. Any changes other than stopping all training altogether take 1 year to go into effect.
Crew quality itself is listed in the Service tab for each individual ship. More detailed data, like the actual crew quality number value, which might tell you how close a crew is to meeting the next threshold if you knew what they were (I don't) is available in the ship detail window during an actual battle scenario.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Mar 1, 2018 11:09:13 GMT -6
You do have to put training into perspective. That +10 hit modifier looks decent but consider some of the other factors that affect gun accuracy. If more than one ship is firing at your target (a very common occurrence) that is a -30 modifier. Depending on how radical your maneuver is, simply turning your own ship while firing can impose up to a -70 modifier. There are many more hit modifiers that are commonly applied (smoke, ships fouling your aim, damage to your own ship, the enemy ship turning, etc.) that make that +10 modifier look pretty puny.
That said, I always train before a war. Every advantage helps.
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fishy
New Member
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Post by fishy on Mar 1, 2018 16:57:50 GMT -6
You do have to put training into perspective. That +10 hit modifier looks decent but consider some of the other factors that affect gun accuracy. If more than one ship is firing at your target (a very common occurrence) that is a -30 modifier. Depending on how radical your maneuver is, simply turning your own ship while firing can impose up to a -70 modifier. There are many more hit modifiers that are commonly applied (smoke, ships fouling your aim, damage to your own ship, the enemy ship turning, etc.) that make that +10 modifier look pretty puny. That said, I always train before a war. Every advantage helps. Do you untrain after a war? I always leave the training on. Maybe that's a bad idea?
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Post by jwsmith26 on Mar 1, 2018 17:46:47 GMT -6
Whether to turn off training is a tricky question and can depend on your economic situation as well as the political atmosphere. If you feel you have a temporary advantage, for instance if you believe you are ahead on fire control, you might want to take advantage of that and quickly precipitate another war. You'll probably want to leave training on in that case. If you are licking your wounds and need time to recover from the last war, you may be actively avoiding war for several years, so turn it off. With a big fleet you might be able to build a couple of cruisers with the money you save.
But then the next dilemma is when to turn training back on. It's hard to judge that accurately, and world events can demolish your timing. You'll need at least a year of advance warning before the effects of the training kicks in. When I see the political situation worsening and I've decided that I will go to war with a country I'll typically wait until the tension bar is in the high yellow region, around 7 or 8 to start training. You also need to start thinking about when you bring your capital ships out of mothball or reserve status so they can start training up their own crews. Sometimes the political situation gets out of hand and the war starts before you're fully trained but I think the risk of that is worth the extra money you get to build your fleet by turning off training between wars.
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fishy
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Post by fishy on Mar 1, 2018 20:03:36 GMT -6
You mothball your ships? I never mothball my ships. I'm always worried that war will come suddenly and I will have poor crew. Stuff like "your relationship with GB took a sudden turn for the worse" etc always seem to happen to me when I refit my ships.
So that's how you can get ahead? By saving on training and maintenance?
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Mar 1, 2018 21:25:28 GMT -6
That is *a* way to maximize your advantage, but it is also possible to have consistently successful 50-60 Prestige games without scrapping or min-maxing maintenance. It is a very flexible game, with dozens of ways to be successful.
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Post by fredsanford on Mar 1, 2018 22:49:50 GMT -6
I am on record as saying training is overrated, except in the early game (before director). I never train in peacetime, until I get to orange level tension with another country. And I always stop training as soon as the war is over. Like jwsmith said, the +10 can be pretty negligible compared to other gunnery modifiers. As tech level and fire control advance, this is more and more true. People that say "any advantage is worth it" are neglecting the opportunity cost, which in a very large fleet can be equivalent to the monthly construction cost of 2-3 capital ships. I'd rather have the ships. When playing a major navy (US, UK or German) on very large, I shoot for having ~40 BB/BCs and 100 DDs by the end of the game.
I will use reserve status as a compromise between mothball and active. Usually just the battle fleet. The ships will work up in 3-4 turns.
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Post by dorn on Mar 2, 2018 1:51:22 GMT -6
You mothball your ships? I never mothball my ships. I'm always worried that war will come suddenly and I will have poor crew. Stuff like "your relationship with GB took a sudden turn for the worse" etc always seem to happen to me when I refit my ships. So that's how you can get ahead? By saving on training and maintenance? I usually mothball old battleships especially pre-dreadnoughts. I use predreadnoughts later to increase chance of invasion or if smaller nation to help defend blockade. But in reality even if the battle unleash and they are part of battlefleet which is very rare they are at the end of the row. So practically they are not participating on battle so much. I mothball old armored cruisers which I used for foreign station in late of 1910s. The reason is that at that time the number of armored cruisers decreasing as AI scrapped them so they can face ships far inferior (protected and light cruisers) thus not need training.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 2, 2018 7:23:48 GMT -6
You mothball your ships? I never mothball my ships. I'm always worried that war will come suddenly and I will have poor crew. Stuff like "your relationship with GB took a sudden turn for the worse" etc always seem to happen to me when I refit my ships. So that's how you can get ahead? By saving on training and maintenance? I think the largest one-turn jump in tension I've seen was a jump from 6 to 12 (war) and that is pretty rare. I tend to prefer to have the training active during wartime, I want every advantage I can get because you never know if that one or two extra hits is the one that causes splinter damage to the enemy's exhaust trunks or contaminates his feed tanks and causes an immediate momentum shift. I understand the point fredsanford is making and I do some similar things as well. I don't start training until tension is at 9 and I'll immediately stop training as soon as peace breaks out. That does mean that sometimes I'm caught flat-footed and war starts before my training is in effect. I just play the game a little more conservatively until then. You do spend quite a bit of money per turn that could be used over the course of the game for a significantly larger fleet. For example, in my current game as USA with Very Large Fleets, in January 1916 while at war with France I had a monthly budget of $67 million. Training in Gunnery and Night Fighting had a cost of $5.64 million per month. That's slightly less than what I was paying per month to build one 38,200 ton battlecruiser and one 6,800 ton light cruiser combined. So if you take the three years of war and the 12 months before that (it was in effect when the war started) that means I could have built at least two light cruisers, one battlecruiser and had another BC under construction over and above what I actually built in that time for the money I spent on training. I believe that is the viewpoint that fredsanford is approaching this question from. After peace was signed, in Jan 1917 with low tensions (highest was Germany at 5) I had a monthly budget of $45.8 million and if I was training in the same two priorities my training costs would have been $3.26 million or 70% of the cost of one capital ship or almost 3 complete 6,800 ton light cruisers. That's a lot of money to not have going to ship construction over the course of an entire game. As has been pointed out Gunnery Training as an example is not a decisive bonus if you have it or a decisive disadvantage if you don't. So as is the case in many of the best games, there is not one right answer here. Whichever you prefer can be made to work. I prefer to have it during war but I'm willing to risk starting a war without it in effect to get the peacetime money savings for a larger construction budget.
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Post by oaktree on Mar 2, 2018 8:07:30 GMT -6
Fred is right that the opportunity cost for training does need to be taken into account. It can be quite expensive with large fleets since the training cost is based on your maintenance costs. I do like doing gunnery training early on since the bonus offsets poor firing control. And I find cruiser battles where you miss again and again frustrating - and anecdotally I seem to win cruiser duels much more handily once I have it implemented.
For mothballing it might also depend on your crew quality. I don't like mothballing elite crews since you don't recover that. Much as a I don't refit old 600-700t DD that are doing ASW work if they have elite crews. It's a rust bucket, but it's a very well run rust bucket.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Mar 2, 2018 9:03:46 GMT -6
Another thing to keep in mind about training is that it affects more than just gun accuracy. In a post by Fredrik last year (which I unfortunately cannot locate) he mentioned several other benefits.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Mar 2, 2018 10:22:30 GMT -6
OK, I'm going to correct my earlier post. What Fredrik has said is that crew quality, not training as I earlier wrote, has many different effects. Crew quality is a completely different in-game system than training and is a rating of the crew for each ship in the game. Training affects the nation's entire fleet equally. Below are some things that Fredrik has mentioned about crew quality.
"Crew quality affects hitting, spotting, damage control and ROF as well as night mishaps and misunderstanding of signals.
It is not necessarily so that a better crew will fire faster. In some situations with low hit chances a good crew might conserve ammo while a poor one will fire away indiscriminately.
Crew quality will also affect ROF indirectly in that a better crew will have a better chance of clearing turret jams." -----------
"ROF interacts with hitting in the game in that once a ship has a straddle or hit, it will go to rapid fire with both higher ROF and hit chances until it fails to straddle. And in rapid fire, crew quality has an additional effect, so a better crew will fire faster in rapid fire." ----------
"[Conning Tower Hits are] actually quite harmful. If it penetrates it can cause some or all of:
Reduce Fire control one level
Reduce crew quality by one for the rest of the battle (to simulate general loss of efficiency and senior officer casualties).
Lock the course of the ship for up to 8 minutes (simulating temporary confusion and loss of control)."
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fishy
New Member
Posts: 43
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Post by fishy on Mar 2, 2018 10:55:29 GMT -6
This is all very helpful to know. I will incorporate all this in my game play here on out. Thanks all!
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Post by aeson on Mar 2, 2018 12:06:02 GMT -6
OK, I'm going to correct my earlier post. What Fredrik has said is that crew quality, not training as I earlier wrote, has many different effects. Crew quality is a completely different in-game system than training and is a rating of the crew for each ship in the game. Training affects the nation's entire fleet equally. Below are some things that Fredrik has mentioned about crew quality. Gunnery training might only affect gunnery accuracy, but night fighting and torpedo training have other affects, at least according to the manual: "Night fighting: This will give your ships a bonus when spotting enemy ships at night, and less chance of hesitating before opening fire at night. It also gives a 10% accuracy bonus at night. 20% increase in maintenance. Torpedo tactics: This will make your light forces more alert when carrying out torpedo attacks, quicker to react on flotilla attack orders and give better hit chances when firing torpedoes. 20% increase in maintenance." I feel like night fighting might also reduce the chance of signals being misread at night, but I'm not certain of that.
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