i bumped all your old ones in hopes of getting them sticked but this was a much better idea :D

Very nice.

Stickied.

If you have a calculus teacher or stats teacher; send him a link to this. lol. Looks very
useful so far, well done.

12) Special sailors
=============

Due to popular demand - Some Submarine stuff :

** A ** Sonarrange (Sonarmen)

- Only Sonarmen contribute to the range of sight while submerged
- They only work in support slots
- Sonarmen do NOT stack at all. The sonarman in the sternmost S-slot contributes only
** UPDATE March 2nd : The sonarman with the most true ability contributes now **
- Sonarrange is only dependent on the sonarman's true potential ability. No other sailor,
ability, ship, nation, FCS or anything else plays a role.

I will talk of Tactical Sonarrange (TSR) in 'ticks' of guidelines. It describes the
distance from the center of your ship to an enemy ship at which you will see it 'in color'.
TSR1.0 is the distance between two major tickmarks on your guidelines - no matter in which
zoom you look at it.
The real sonarrange - at which you will see the shades of ships - is greater then the TSR
by 3.0 as long as you have a sonarman on board.

The TSR of a submarine without a Sonarman on board is 3.0
As soon as a sonarman is on board, it 'jumps' up to 9.25, even if he has 0 recruits and/or
0 ability.
To get further TSR, you need more true potential ability on your sonarman.

TSR 9.25 > 0
TSR 10.5 > 620k
TSR 11.75 > 1160k
TSR 13.0 > 2130k

It will hardly be possible to go above that, since it requires an ability far beyond 3mil
and even an elite BO at lvl120, classed as Sonarman doesn't get there with a 'normal'
amount of vets.

** B ** Compressed air reload (Planesmen)

- only planesmen decrease the time required for reload your compressed air
- they only work in support-slots
- planesmen do not stack (just like sonarmen) and if you mount more then one nonetheless,
the one with the higher true ability contributes only
- Compressed air reload is only dependent on the planesman's true potential ability. No
other sailor, ability, ship, nation or anything else plays a role.
- Planesmen only work if they have more then 90% of their recruits filled up. If you start
with less, then not only will your air-gauge be empty at start, but you will refill your
air at the rate as if you had no planesman aboard at all
- there appears to be no cap

Now the reload time :

With no planesman, one with 0 ability or one with less then 90% recruits you will have a
'base-reload' time of 4min and 30 seconds.
As soon as you have an effective planesman, following formula describes the compressed air
reload time :

T(rel) = 112 - 20 * (true ability/10^6) [seconds]

Pretty easy actually : 50k true ability per second faster reload - here are some examples :

(IJN Planesman +14 potential base, 100 vets, full experts, classed on time, boosted)
lvl44 (500k) -> 102 seconds
lvl67 (1mil) -> 92 seconds
lvl97 (2mil) -> 72 seconds
lvl120 (3mil) -> 52 seconds

a lvl30 Planesman with 0 vets and 1 expert would reload in 112 seconds where the same
Planesman with 0 vets and 0 experts needs the full 270 seconds.

Since the fix of bugged abilities will probably never come, although it was presented by
me some 2.5 years ago with several, allready coded, proposed fixes - here's just a short
overview of how it is now (and was for as long as the game has caps)

9) aircraft
=======
This is a not activated ability - it has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on anything related to pilots.

10) fighter
=======
The true Fighter ability is responsible for how well your pilots in their planes can
attack other planes. It works the exact same for scouts, fighters, bombers or even
transport aircraft. It is just one of the two parts in the additive aircraft
attack-formula, the other part consists of aircraft stats.
Only the sum is capped and level dependent so this explains why high level pilots do just
as well in lower tier planes as in higher ones... (speed of planes and the flawed way of
calculating the distance for attacks of planes is the other reason)

11) bomber
========
Bomber ability is the only ability that is responsible for resistance against enemy fire -
both AAW and gunfire from Fighter (or other) planes. Again - for scouts, fighters as well
as bombers.

Some examples on the effect of the abilities without going into detail with the numbers -
that's not my job.
(lvl120 pilots with a fix number of vets and experts in the same planes)
Pilot number (displayed fighter ability / displayed bomber ability) < , > or = second pilot

FP1 (2000/2000) = FP2 (2000/2000) obvious, isn't it?
FP3 (2000/ 0) < FP4 (2000/1000) still...
FP3 (2000/ 0) = FP5 ( 0/2000) what one plane lacks in attack, the other lacks in
defence. None will be shot down.
FP4(3000/1000) < FP6(1000/3000) ha! Indeed the difference in resistance is more pronounced
then the attack difference - due to the cap and non-linearity of the first part of the
equation.

Taking all this into account - you want true bomber ability on all your pilots - as much
as possible!! A high fighter stat is nice and important too but its effect become less
pronouced at a higher level. By not classing your pilots above the minimum class, you not
only keep more growth in bomber ability, you also keep the increased crew growth, which in
fact gives you even more fighter ability as well.
A non-classed "Fighter pilot" will beat a similar (same crew composition and base stats)
"Ace" or "SQLdr" hands down every single time.

All that is only valid right now and was in the past of course. If someone ever decides to
follow one of my bugfixes, it'll all change to the way it is supposed to be and any sane
person would think it is.

That's probably the last thing I'm posting here - take it for what it is, use it as a
rough guide to setup crew but don't take the game too seriously. And no matter how
'perfectly adjusted' your crew is - it has nothing to do with the fun you should have in game.
There are many things that are not even mentioned here in my posts, including numbers of
caps, nation bonuses, inverse effects due to ability overflows and so on. I do not intend
to cover those as it would be almost endless and only frustrating, so please do not even
ask me.

Adalbert out.

** E ** Overheat speed with crew

Thanks to a few (really only a few unfortunately) members that actually were interested in
what I wrote here and took some time to try to help I've decided to post this formula here
finally as well.
SoloAD from the russion server found a really easy interpretation which I am going to
present here rather then my exponential expression - so thanks for that.
******

To get the overheat speed with engis on board, we just need to ammend the overheat ratio
from the topic above with the engineers' ability.



With :
OHR_ship = Overheat Ratio of the ship used
OHR_engine = Overheat Ratio of the engine used
And the sum over N_engineers means nothing else then that you have to calculate the true
ability for every engineer on board and then add it up. The same like with all other
formulas on here before really...
N finally is the number of engineers on board.

It still remains, that you have to round down your result and also only use two 'after
decimal digits' of (OHR_Ship * OHR_engine).
And the overheat speed is calculated simply by



just as stated before.

****** EXAMPLE *********
Yamato with 'normal' crew, b/v/e with filled up sailors.

Yamato - overheat ratio 23%
BB V hvy engine OH ratio 120%

Crew (rookies, experts, vets, max crew, displayed engine ability, true ability /1000)
Engi 1 lvl93 +12 base (50,540,108,698,2549,2477)
Engi 2 same like Engi1
Engi 3 lvl80 +11 base (50,440,104,594,2065,1767)

Base Speed = 24 knots

With Engi 1 alone you get :

24 * (1+0.23*1.2+2477/18000) = 24* (1 + 0.27 + 0.1376) = 33.78 = 33knots

Engi 3 alone gives you only :

24* (1+0.23*1.2+1767/18000) = 32.83 = 32knots

Having both Engi1 and Engi3 makes it :

24*(1+ 0.23*1.2 + (2477+1767)/(18000*sqrt(2)) = 24* (1+0.27+4244/25456) = 34 knots

All three give you

24*(1+ 0.23*1.2 + (2477+2477+1767)/(18000*sqrt(3)) = 35.65 = 35 knots

I hope you get the idea... and you can just make a small tool to calculate it for you.
Even an excel worksheet works well for it.
***********************

The overspeed formula leads to another interesting result regarding the stacking of
engineers. For overheat speed it's obviously not linear like it is for overheat time.

The 1st engi works to 100% of his ability (no surprise) Adding a second engi - makes BOTH
engis aboard only effective to 71% - or more precice to 1/sqrt(2)= 70.71..%
3rd engi : all work at 1/sqrt(3) = 57.73%
4th engi : 50%
5th engi : 44.72% and so on...

Mixing engineers of different levels may reduce your overheat speed. If you have one engi
with 2000 ability that let's you overheat at 34 knots and another one with 200 ability and
you put them on the same ship, the combined ability will be only (2000+200)*0.707=1556 or
LESS then the better engi alone. Meaning you could loose a knot of overspeed.

If you have engis of the same true ability (same level, base and crew pretty much) there
is another way to interprete the data:

let's see if someone understands what I'm trying to express with the numbers below :

1 engi = 100.0% = 100/1 = 100
2 engis = 70.7% = 141/2 = 100 + 41
3 engis = 57.7% = 173/3 = 100 + 41 + 32
4 engis = 50.0% = 200/4 = 100 + 41 + 32 + 27
5 engis = 44.7% = 224/5 = 100 + 41 + 32 + 27 + 24

well.. some explanation would help I guess :

Your first engi works at 100% of his ability. If you add a second engi they both work at
71% of the combined ability or (71% * ability *2) = (142% * ability). Now you can write
this differently. Assuming you want your first engi to be 100% efficient still - the
second one is only (142%-100%)=42% efficient. So :

1st engi = 100%
2nd engi = 42%
3rd engi = 32%
4th engi = 27%
5th engi = 24%

So a 5th engi appears to be working at less then a quarter of his ability only - for speed
freaks only.

Now to make it clear again - this last part is not the way overheat speed is calculated!
It is only another way to interpret the formula if you have engis of the same ability.

** C ** Base speed

The base speed of a ship (yes I know you can all see it - but for the overspeed
calculations it will prove necessary) can be calculated



with HP beeing the horsepower of the engine you equip, DP the Displacement of your
ship and DPstandard.. well the standard DP that you can find in the tables
(www.trainworld.us for example).
C(ship) is a constant value that is different for each ship.

Extracting this constant from in-game-data is VERY time consuming and it is subject to
change with lots of patches. Reading it out of the data files might get you in conflict
with SDE.

You can see in the following graph that the constant C is only dependent on the ship and
not on the engine as the values for the shown selected ships are overlapping no matter
what engine is used.

Some values for C are :

Fletcher : 3758
Timmermann : 6137
Lion2 : 25658



LordKelvin has made the effort to extract 'c' for all US ships. You can find it here :
http://www.navyfield.com/board/view.asp?Num=111152&Sort=A01

** D ** natural overheat

Natural overheat is the speed that your ship is able to overheat to if you have no
engineer on board.



with the overheat ratio beeing the product of the engine overspeed ratio and the ships
overspeed ratio. You can see the Ships overspeed ratio when buying a a new ship and the
engines overspeed ratio as the percentage behind the horsepower when buying an engine.
For example Lion2 with the heavy BB5 engine
Ships overheat ratio = 28%
Engines overheat ratio = 120%
--> Overheat ratio = 0.28*1.2 = 0.336

Important here is, that you only disregard anything behind the second digit after the
decimal. So in the existent case, it would be 0.33 only. Also you have to round the result
down to the next full number.

So with a base speed of 23 knots your natural overspeed would be 23*(1+0.33) = 30.59 ->
30 knots.

8) Engine
=======

The engine ability is a little more complex, so this topic is divided into parts
A : Basics
B : Overheat time
C : base speed
D : natural overheat speed
E : overheat speed with crew


** A ** Basics

- ONLY engineers contribute to overheat speed and time
- They only work in the support slots or BO slot of premium ships
- It is only the true engine ability (calculated as shown prior in this guide) that
matters for these calculations

** B ** Overheat time

- The maximum overspeed is limited to 70 percent above the 'base speed'. Different ships
need a different amount of engis to get to the max speed. (thanks SirDante for that cap Info)
- Engine ability stacks linear for overheat time and all engis.

You can calculate your overheat time for every sailor or for all your engineers using :



remember again... calculate the true engine ability for all the engineers aboard your ship
and simply add them up.

The result value is the number of seconds that you can overheat extra - meaning you have
to add it to your engines base overheat time. And it does NOT matter which engine, which
ship - the amount of 'overheat seconds' added by your engineers stays the same.

Don't rely on the released values for engine overheat time too much as they are sometimes
off by 1 or 2 sec - just run your ship without an engineer and stop the overheat time.
Thanks chagrin for that input, now all values are close to 100 percent correct.

And here's a little graph showing how much a single engineer actually does. I did it for
boosted +12base KM,+12base UK engi, a +10 UK with 100 vets and a 'normal' growth of
experts, as well as for +10UK non boosted and even without vets - just to compare.

6) Repair
======

The repair stat is responsible for rate of repair and the rate of burning.

- All Sailors aboard your ship contribute to repairrate and stack linear, no matter on
which position
- Repairrate is capped at 280DP/sec which you reach with 35mil true repair ability

Calculate the repair ability for every sailor aboard and add them up. I have dropped the
actual formula for repairrate, as it is discontinuous and not linear and might be a bit
confusing to look at. Instead here is a graph that gives you the repairrate for given
values of repair ability.



and the same graph for higher abilities to make it easier to read :



Don't forget the BO in your calculations!! You can see his (unboosted) abilities every
time he levels up.

Now to the burnrate - meaning the rate at which you loose DP while burning. Here's the graph :



not too important as you get above 5,500,000 repair ability quite fast and it is capped
there at 25DP/sec - even at 55,000,000 ability (my crew with extra reps) it is still
the same.

7) Restore
========

The restore stat contributes to Soft Defense (SD), nothing else.
Smedd posted the first conclusions on SD on the NA-servers. After reducing the SD cap,
altering the way it was calculated increasing the cap again... it is all back to the way
it was when I started playing the game.

If you don't know HOW it works in general - read Obst guides again... I'm going into more
detail here.

1) Every sailor aboard your ship contributes to SD (even the BO) and stack linear
2) Restore ability is the one that matters here
3) You can have a maximum of 900SD
4) Restorers get a bonus in that ability and produce the most SD of all sailors.
Eventually you will hit 900SD without a single restorer through the comined abilities of
the other sailors.

Now to the calculation



or if you don't remember what I said in the first post about ability :



For our young folks confused by mathematical symbols... just calculate SD for every single
sailor aboard and add them up.

If you have 100SD you will take only 90% instant damage of a hit and burn 10% - thus
giving time to repair. Effectively to kill you in one 'hit' you would need 110% of the
damage of what your ships DP is. It goes up linear to 900SD and is capped there. Just take
a look at the graph :



You can clearly see the cap at 900SD. Although my formula will give you the values for SD
even above 900, it has NO further effect anymore once you reach that value.

SD also helps your ship to repair further. So if you take damage with 0 SD you will loose
20% of that hit on your DP which you will not be able to repair. With increasing SD this
value drops and is capped at 900SD, where you only take about 2.2% permanent damage (the
little red arrow on the health bar shows you how far you can repair) - again a picture :



An example - you have a ship with 20000DP, a crew with 500SD and get hit by an evil ship
wich gets 10000attack from it.
1) You take 50% immediate DP reduction = which brings you down to 20k-5k=15k DP
2) if you had no repair ability you would burn the remaining 5k down to 10k DP
3) you will be able to repair until you hit your prior DP minus 10% of the hit or 1k
bringing you back up to 19k DP

0) Ability
=======

Ability is what effects the performance of every sailor in Navyfield. If you are new to
the game or have general questions on what ability which sailor should be good in, please
refer to Obst guides- infact I think every player should read or have read them.

*** www.nf-guides.com ***

Now to how ability is calculated in the game for a SINGLE SAILOR - it is more then just
the displayed value.



With
N(vets) = number of veterans
N(experts) = number of experts
N(tot) = total number of sailors = rookies + experts + veterans
N(max) = maximum number of sailors (as displayed)

******
I will be referring to this true ability in all further guides. Remeber - you have to
calculate your every's sailors ability with the formula above if you want them to work.
******

Since SDE recently introduced that ability percentage of every sailor is shown you can
also calculate the true ability by

(skill percentage * displayed ability * max crew),

which is mathematically identical.

Now some immediate conclusions that we can draw from that formula.

1) keep your sailors maxed out at all times - reducing the number of rookies not only
decreases the chance to get more experts, but also reduces the sailor's true ability, thus
making him perform worse.

2) Class all sailors right when a promotion becomes available. Not only do you loose the
extra ability bonus when you don't, but usually the recruit gain per level increases after
a promotion. And as you can see the mere number of experts and vets influences the
performance of a sailor and not the displayed ability percentage directly.
{ exception : pilots loose recruit gain per level after promotions }


1) BO Potential
===========

A higher value on potential for the BO lets your guidelines grow and mark shells further.
The marking range of the FCS is the only other variable that matters for guideline length.
Your guideline length in tickmarks is :

--> 11.1 * (true BO potential / 1000000) + 12.6 * marking range [km] <--

So the marking range only gives you another starting length of the guidelines, the BO's
potential needed to get one more tickmark (90k true ability) stays the same for all ships,
guns and FCS's.


2) Accuracy
========

Sayoyin has made the discovery where to find all those values and spend an immense amount
of time and effort in finding formulas that describe it. You can find his whole
explanation under http://www.navyfield.com/board/view.asp?Num=94981&Sort=D07
I have just shortened it and rearranged the interpretation for better understanding. Give
him the reccomendation for his work on accuracy.

Now the best part :

Yes, there is an accuracy cap. You reach it when your gunners true acc-ability is

--> 4706 * lvl of gunners + 1000000 <--

It is independent from your ship, FCS, guns or whatever else. Once you have reached that
value, your gunners do not get better accuracy by adding vets for example.

If you start with a +10 gunner, boost him and give him 100 vets (which seems to be normal
allready), your gunners will be at the accuracy cap surprisingly soon.
Here are some numbers - all +10base, boosted, 100vets sailors.

UK ACC gunner - lvl63
UK rel gunner - lvl85
KM Gunner - lvl64... and the others are in between.

Now that is only the cap. And if you have looked sharply - there is the level of your
gunners as a factor in the formula. Meaning - the cap increases every level. (your gunners
accuracy just increases faster then the cap, so once you have hit it - you stay over it)

Your spread however is determined by the accuracy itself, which is a number calculated by :

Accuracy = (FCS + GunRev) * ((3 * true ability /1000000) + 1)

Where "FCS" is the accuracy revision of your FCS and "GunRev" is the accuracy revision of
every gun. Most of them are 0 - the guns that block have that value set to 25.

So what determines your spread now :

1) FCS
2) The Guns accuracy Revision (assume 0 for the guns that don't block for now)
3) Your gunners true ability UP TO THE CAP. <- there's the catch
[Once your gunners have reached the cap, there is nothing you can do to make them better
except level up to increase the cap value]

The FCS has by far the greatest effect on your spread. The part that is affected by your
crew makes up only around 35% of the final accuracy value.


3) Reload
=======

Reload is capped at 50% of the published gun-reload-value for boosted gunners and slightly
above for unboosted ones. Once you have reached the cap, your reload will stay the same,
no matter how high your ability goes (well.. that's why they call it a cap).
Reload speed is generally linear to true reload ability with small discontinuities. So if
you reload 10 seconds one day, gain 10000 true ability the next day and get down to 9
seconds, then another 10000 true ability will give you 8 seconds and so on until you reach
the cap.
However if you watch the reload-clock at the bottom of your screen, you will notice that
the indicator on it doesn't run smoothly but 'jumps' a little. So you can reach a point
where loosing one recruit could mean a 1 second longer reload time - however this is
generally unsignificant.
The value to reach the cap is NOT dependent on FCS, ship, gun level, nation and only
minute to the gun used.
In most cases it is at :

--> 2070k true reload ability <--

for faster reloading guns (like most AA guns) due to smaller steps in their reload process
it can be as low as 1950k true reload ability.

Now the required level to reach the reload cap for selected gunners (100 vets, rest
experts, boosted, +10 reload base)

UK rel gunner : lvl58 / UK acc gunner : lvl113
UK AA gunner : lvl120 at +12 base with 190 vets or better...
KM gunner : lvl83 / KM AA : lvl90

4) Torpedo
==============

The reload time of Torpedos is only determined by true torpedo ability of the Torpedo man
firing the torps. It is capped at 50% of the published base reload and you reach it with
all torp-launchers of any nation at around 850k true torpedo ability - so pretty early.
A bve IJN Torper with +10 base growth reaches it at lvl51.

5) AAW
=====

A not that efficient stat right now - more on this in a 'while'