The useful amount of vets depends on the sailor. Sailors eventually cap in ability and tons of vets don't provide much added benefit after that point. Since there's often money involved in gaining those vets, you need to know which sailors have the highest ability caps.
BO - early on, shell spotting is a problem, but eventually your range lines will be far longer than your shell range and that's just as annoying. Split the difference and stop at 100+ vets.
Gunners - Accuracy and Reload are capped for each set of guns, the bigger the gun the higher the cap. But eventually, even 10/10 gunners will hit the BB5 gun caps, the only question is at what level do your gunners get there. 130+ vets is usually good enough unless money is no object.
Repairers/Engineers - The caps on these abilities are quite high and hard to hit. Overheat time and Repair rate can usually take all the vets you can throw at them. I stop at 130+ vets per sailor just for affordability, but the best crews are running 180+ vets.
Aircraft - Different aircraft stats cap at different levels, but Pilots too are a sink for vets. Fighters can use all the vets you can give them, bombers a bit less so, but both benefit from 150+ vets per sailor to allow them (once they reach high levels) to cruise around enemy ships and ignore automatic AA fire. Vetting a Scout plane is up to the individual... if you're a set-it-and-forget-it scout user, then you don't really need vets, but if you actively manage your scouts then vets help it stay alive longer under fire.
Seaman - Consensus on seaman varies because their benefit is difficult to measure. But they improve the skills of all the other sailors on board (subject to cap limits) and as far as we know the Seaman ability is either uncapped or ridiculously hard to cap. If you use a seaman at all, give him at least 130 vets (Mine has 280) and don't expect much out of him until level 90.
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