Crews & Academies

[Rich.h (OP)]

The wiki states that a military academy generates 5 leaders and 1000 crew per year, But I cannot seem to find out anywhere how many crew I currently have available for service. I am wanting to go on a ship building expansion but not sure how things get handled. If I do not have enough spare crew will my ships simply take longer to build (due to waiting for new crew) or will I get a message to tell me I am short? Is there anywhere I can clearly see how many crew I have in service and awaiting assignments?

[Ostia]

The total amount of available crewmen can be found under Economics > Teams/Academy > Empire-wide crewman availability.

As I was never in  situation where I lacked crewmen I can't answer that question.

If you are worried about that, you can ease the load on your crewmen by flagging commercial ships (read: non-combat/non-survey)as conscript crew. That prevents them from drawing from your crewmen pool, but means crappy grade bonus for the ships, which affects combat ability. This is available under Class Design, top right corner.

[Rich.h (OP)]

Ah thanks for the tip that should fix things nicely.

[JacenHan]

If you run out of trained crewmen, your ships will come out of the shipyards as normal, but with lower grade points. The exact amount of grade points depends on how many crewmen were unavailable.

[linkxsc]

Stupid side question that has a bit to do with this question. In the race screen you can set it so that you have a higher level of "crewman training" and end up with fewer crewmen per year

Does changing this to say 5 make it so that ships will start off with a higher crew grade bonus?

Also on the tidbit of crew grade bonus, would refitting ships into newer 1s keep an already trained crew's higher grade bonus, or would it reset to 0%?

[Vandermeer]

I've played with the training grade in the past, but cannot confirm nor deny the impact it has in reality. I can however affirm that the crew grade stays after refitting, but may drop a slight bit if the refit caused it so new crew members have been added, which are greenhorns at first of course.

[83athom]

Stupid side question that has a bit to do with this question. In the race screen you can set it so that you have a higher level of "crewman training" and end up with fewer crewmen per year

Does changing this to say 5 make it so that ships will start off with a higher crew grade bonus?

Imagine this, would you rather have your crew only have the most basic of training (ie only told how to use the systems and some "training") or  would you want to have each and every crew member to have in-depth advanced training in a lot of simulators on their role. I believe, in game, it only adds experience (grade points) for the crew but don't quote me on that.

[linkxsc]

Well see it confuses me. If I'm in the middle of a game and I go and switch it from 1 to 5, I don't seem to get any change on new ships built. (Perhaps because those new higher trained crew get intermixed with the thousands of crew I already had trained)
So I started a brand new game and set it to 5 immediately on starting. Certainly noticeable that there are fewer total crew members, however the ships still come out with a 0 crew grade bonus. (Haven't built a little combat fleet yet and told them to train though, perhaps they'll accrue training faster than level 1 crewmen)

[Rich.h (OP)]

I cannot comment on how long a fleet with level 1 crew takes to complete training, however I always go for level 5 at the game start. I tend to find my fleets reach 100% within 2-3 months of task force training.

[Vandermeer]

I cannot comment on how long a fleet with level 1 crew takes to complete training, however I always go for level 5 at the game start. I tend to find my fleets reach 100% within 2-3 months of task force training.

Waitwaitwait. You mean "100% of the possible training grade completed", "100% grade bonus", or just "100% TF training"? TF training is different from crew grade.

linkxsc observed there is no difference in the grade of fresh ships, so if the thing is still functional in some way, it would be reasonable to assume you get other benefits. I assume that it is either a higher maximum grade for ships (would be awesome, but I doubt it - Rich.h, do your ships cap out at 34% too?), ...well, or the TF training gets completed faster. 2-3 months seems good. I can't be sure right now, but to me it always seems more close to a year or 9 months with my training rate set to 1.


..Does anyone even know what happens if you run out of available crew? I was only once close to getting that when building a gigantic ship fleet (on training rate 1 still), but it was avoided, so I never saw it happening.

[Rich.h (OP)]

Sorry I meant that the TF training reaches 100% in around 2-3 months. I haven't ever kept watch on ships to see the other training aspects though.

[GreatTuna]

Maximum grade points achievable by training - 2000.0, or 34%. It is possible to get more grade points by taking damage to armour\modules.
The bonus is applied to to-hit chance only IIRC.

Crew training affects starting grade points, not maximal - 100.0 per level. Lvl1 crew gets 0% bonus (100 pts), lvl5 crew gets 12% bonus (500 pts). After that grade points can be increased by training by officer or taking damage.

If one runs out of trained crewmen, the crew will be filled with conscripts with no training whatsoever, and will get less points depending on amount of conscripts in the crew. If there are no crewmen in pool, the ship will get 0.0 point crew, or -10% grade bonus.

[CharonJr]

Those training times seem very short. My crews have been training for 3 years now and only reached 50% TF yet. And I am using 100%+ training officers here. They are still in the home system and thus supervised by the HQ as well which should provide an additional bonus. Anything I might be missing?

Edit: Found the problem, I never reassigned my crappy task force commander when better officers got high enough in rank to replace him. With 375 training from the HQ it is much faster now.

[Vandermeer]

Thanks, Tuna, for the complete explanation.

[Rich.h (OP)]

Slightly related but the wiki states that when using the realistic promotions setting the following applies. For a promotion to take place there must be less than 1/3 of the next rank of available officers for any of the current rank to be eligible for promotion, from rank 5 onwards this changes to 1/2 the number. Is this accurate? I seem to be finding the 1/3 rule applies to all ranks. I am trying to get myself a rank 8 officer, and my lower ranks are as follows.

R8 = 0
R7 = 1
R6 = 4
R5 = 13

Should some of the R5 officers not be promoted upwards and so on with the higher ranks or does the 1/2 only apply above R5 not from R5?