Quoted from "Adalbert (NFNA)"

1) Ability - how they are calculated / base stats 2) Accuracy - where's the cap, how is it calculated 3) Reload - where's the cap 4) Soft Defense - how it works and how it is calculated 5) Repair rate / Burn rate 6) Overheat time 7) base speed / "natural" overheat 8) How engineers stack to increase overheat speed 9) Overheat speed

1) 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- in fact 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. Remember - you have to calculate your every's sailors ability with the formula above if you want them to work. ****** 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 lose 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 - ONLY FIGHTER !} 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 exp lanation under http://www.navyfield.com/board/view.asp?Num=94981&Sort=D07 I have just shortened it and rearranged the interpretation. Give him the recommendation 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 * level 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 already), your gunners will be at the accuracy cap surprisingly soon. Here are some numbers - all +10base, boosted, 100vets sailors. UK ACC gunner - lvl63 UK RLD 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 than 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. You need a certain amount of true reload ability (see above for the calculation of true ability) to reach it. 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 linear to true reload ability. 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. 4) Soft Defense (SD) ============== 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 stacks linearly 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 combined 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 lose 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 which 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 10kDP 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 5) Repair rate and Burn rate =================== - All Sailors aboard your ship contribute to repair rate and stack linear - Repair rate 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 repair rate, 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 repair rate 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 burn rate - meaning the rate at which you lose 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. 6) Overheat time ============ 1. ONLY engineers contribute to overheat speed and time 2. 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) 3. 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 numbers 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.
7) Base speed + natural overheat ======================== 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 being 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 Natural overheat is the speed that your ship is able to overheat to if you have no engineer on board. With the overheat ratio being the product of the engine overspeed ratio and the ships overspeed ratio. You can see the Ships overspeed ratio when buying 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 So with a base speed of 23 knots your natural overspeed would be 23*(1+0.336) = 30 knots

8) how engineers stack ================ Old facts : - Engis only work in support slots - max overheat speed is capped at 170% of the base speed - they stack linear for overheat time (2 equal engis add twice the overheat that one would) ************************************************ and now the results for overheat-speed stacking : 1st engi works to 100% of his ability (no surprise) Adding a second engi - makes BOTH engis aboard only effective to 71%. 3rd engi : all work at 56% 4th engi : 49% 5th engi : 43% ************************************************* Mixing engineers of different levels may reduce your overheat speed. If you have one engi with 2000 ability that lets 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)*0.71=1562 or LESS then the better engi alone. Meaning you could lose a knot of overspeed. If you want "proof" or graphs, go to : http://www.navyfield.com/board/view.asp?Num=65715&Sort=D07

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

to interpret the data: let's see if someone understands what I'm trying to express with the numbers below : 1 engi = 100% = 100/1 = 100 2 engis = 71% = 142/2 = 100 + 42 3 engis = 56% = 168/3 = 100 + 42 + 26 4 engis = 49% = 196/4 = 100 + 42 + 26 + 28 5 engis = 43% = 215/5 = 100 + 42 + 26 + 28 + 19 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 = 26% 4th engi = 28% (!!!!!!) 5th engi = 19% this shows that the 4th engi is in a way more efficient then the 3rd. A 5th engi is only valuable for real speed freaks... Now to make it clear again - this 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.

9) Overheat speed ============= well... that's still being worked on as it is a VERY tedious process to collect the data as you pretty much have to do it for every ship each with every engine and requires you to collect data from 0 ability to the maximum of usually 4 lvl100 engis I pretty much need the exact amount of engine ability (calculated with my engineer-stacking formula) that is needed to go from one overheat speed to another. That's tables like the following one for LOTS of ships with LOTS of different engines each...

If you want to help me collect data - send me the values via PM. Of course I blacked out some values on my table because I want to be the one receiving all the fame for actually finding the formula one day ;-) Just note when you gain a knot of speed, go to your harbor and take off recruits off one of your engineers, then add them again one by one, until the displayed overspeed rises one knot. Then write down recruits, experts, vets, max sailors and displayed engine ability of all your engineers on your support slots, as well as your ship and the engine you are using. Calculate the true engine ability using my ability formula from the first post for each of the engis seperatly. Add them together and multiply the value with the percentage from my engi-stacking post. That's the number I need !!

Since the fix of bugged abilities will probably never come, although it was presented by me some 2.5 years ago with several, already 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 defense. 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 pronounced 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 (editors note: leaving sentence as is for I have no Idea what he means by it). If someone ever decides to follow one of my bug fixes, 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