After 100 vets its almost pointless to add more. Gunners are the easiest sailor to hit
caps with and once they do all those vets become useless.

@ V2 - I believe you guys. I've been playing around with the math and your right; removing
crew def will hurt performance. On the flip side of that, all of my gunners have been
fully upgraded to the highest % of Veterans allowed. Right now, they are performing great.
So I guess my feeling is that if they are doing good now and I want them to stay on the
same ship, the only way to do that is to prevent them from getting more rookies. Also let
me further clarify by saying that I wouldn't be doing that to my A-1 crew that is gunning
for a BB6, but rather for maybe the C or even a D team. I'm leveling three crews right now.

@ Lionel: removing recruits from your sailors at your level will do nothing but hurt their
performance and slow down your expert gain. Trust me when I say mega knows what hes
talking about. Theres alot of people who give bad advice on the forums but hes not one of
them.

Yes mega, but it isn't the big ships that are a problem. Iowa has a big displacement.
Smaller ships like CLs don't have Engineer 2s to increase speed and they are easily more
effected by the heavy weight of the sailors.

Once capped (and as the cap changes with levels using 120 is the only time it would not
change), you can remove recruits from gunners to save weight for more bulge. Will not
increase the speed of your ship (as at 120 you should be speed capped). Will though allow
for extra bulge. Without knowing the new caps I haven't stripped as many recruits off AA
and main gunners as I could but did remove enough for 20-30 more bulge without sacraficing
anything... worth it to me.

too much math.

dont make your crew lighter until high level. the lost speed from crew should be made up
from engineers, not by taking experts/recruits off.

At high level the only ship that I would consider taking recruits off is the iowa, where
you can go 42 knots with a lighter crew but only 41 or 40 with heavier crew. But since i
switch around the 12 ships i have in the US shipyard so much, i dont feel like taking and
refilling recruits all the time so i keep them at max recruits all the time.

In late levels once your gunners are past the cap, it is possible to start pulling off
recruits to save weight and still maintain the cap. The real problem I have with this is
not fully knowing the cap anymore as little over a year ago they raised sailor ability
caps (and I have no idea by what percent or amount) This would be a situation where
having the maximum amount of vets (40% of crew) would allow you to remove more recruits
and still maintain the cap (only really useful on gunners as I can see, Overheat endurance
time is uncapped to my knowledge so the more ability the better, My UK crew is probably
only one rep capped or close to it). BOs get trimmed down as guidelines become too long.

It can be difficult to compare different variations. Below I am using the same 400 crew
size, one is vet capped with no other crew, one is vet capped with the remainder experts
and the final one is vet capped with full rookies. Gives you an idea of how vets and
experts build a crew up.

40% vets no other crew (4*160 + 0) * (160/400) = 256
40% vets full experts (4*160 + 240) * (400/400) = 880
40% vets full rookies (4*160 + 0) * (400/400) = 640

The below example shows that recruits do not really provide any ability, can only keep it
even or lower.

0 vets 1 rookie (4*0 + 0) * (1/'400) = 0
0 vets full rookies (4*0 + 0) * (400/400) = 0

The point being that recruits do not add to true ability (at least to my understanding)
but only really provide the potential for loss of ability by removing. Now I am going off
of formulas that were found by someone else so if NF treats this oddity different I'm not
sure.

Yes, you're right. I don't know why I got the expert/veterans backwards. I've long since
filled my sailors completely with expert/veterans. I know that the numbers shouldn't be
bogged down with, but I think that if my crew was 100% vets, I can carry 1/4 of the crew
and function as if the sailor was full of rookies. If I cut the crew by 1/2 then the crew
should function as if it were full of experts and if it was more than that, then I would
come out ahead. At this point, there is no reason to do that, yet. At some point in the
future I'll have to see what happens.

Vets are ranked higher than experts. This is why they are multiplied by 4 in the
equation. In the math, each vet provides the ability of 4 experts (experts are not
mulitplied by anything.. while each vet is multiplied by 4). Suppose a simple way to look
at this would be:

100 Experts 0 vets
(4*0+100) = 100
100 Vets 0 Experts
(4*100 + 0) = 400

with 100 vets instead of experts you come out with a number 4 times as high, ultimately
multiplying the rest of your values by a number 4 times as high. This is the difference
between vets and experts only, the math above takes into account no differences in total
crew size.

For comparision I will use the same scenario as before but use vets instead of experts
this time.

100 Vets 0 Experts 200 recruits, sailor can hold 400

(4*100 + 0)*(300/400) = 300
(4*100 + 0)*(400/400) = 400

The percentage difference remains the same, the difference being your true potential will
be higher using vets but the loss from unfilled crew will remain consistent based on a
percentage.

The numbers are not something to get too bogged down with, I was just trying to use the
formulas number to explain what happens when you leave rookies off of a sailor. Its
easier than trying to show the difference in spread and reload based on different crew
size. These numbers are ultimately used to calculate the sailors in the games as well as
determining if a sailor is capped (however the caps have changed and yet to see new values
to compare to).

@ Blazer - Ok, I got the speed question cleared up, but I'm stuck on the math. I thought
that Experts were ranked higher than veterans? I think you may have said it backwards (I
get confused myself as most other games veteran is a higher rank than expert). If so, then
would the math look like this instead (4*100+0)*(300/400)=300