Post by dienekes00 on Oct 22, 2013 13:12:00 GMT -8
Your crews are, without question, your second most important resource in War Thunder. The only resource more powerful are the planes, themselves. Forget equipment upgrades, or alternate ammo belts, or bomb loadouts. Those only offer minor advantages. The crews are what turn a good aircraft into a stellar aircraft and allow you, the pilot, to gain an edge over the scrubs filling the air around you.
In your hangar, you have crew slots. Each of your planes is allotted to a crew slot. Crews are not allotted to vehicles, as in World of Tanks. This allows you to swap planes in and out of the slots, at will, and train the crews on any number of aircraft, simultaneously. So, every upgrade you give to a crew applies to any plane placed in that slot. You can purchase 5 crews slots, per air force, with in-game currency. You should do this with any nation you plan on flying. As previously mentioned, planes are your biggest resource and so you should take as many with you into combat as you can manage. The sixth slot and beyond require Lions, the real-money currency. Whether you wish to invest in those is a personal choice. However, I wouldn't recommend it. It's fairly rare to run out of planes when you have five in your hangar, especially when gain some experience as a player and figure out how to not die as often.
As you gain experience, your crews gain skill points to be spent on crew skills. You access your crew skills by clicking one of those slots and selecting the View Crew menu, marked by the little pilot silhouette icon. Take a moment to skim the very important wiki page on Crew Skills and you'll see lots and lots of stats that can be fiddled with. That's a lot of data, lets see if we can unpack it, for you. There are four tabs in the menu, but we're going to ignore the Qualification tab, at first. The Pilot tab obviously deals with your pilots' capabilities and the Gunners tab to gunners. The Ground Services tab deals more with the plane than anything else. It is here, with the Ground Crew, that you will probably want to start.
The Ground Services tab houses the single most important skill for Arcade play: Reload Speed. Reload Speed affects every type of ordnance, from little 7mm bullets to giant, battleship-holing torpedoes. In arcade, having a faster reload will save you. Take a look at the reload speed chart on the wiki and you will see just how helpful it can be. If you only really plan on playing arcade, completely ignore Repair Speed and Repair Rank. They only really matter for repairing at airfields, and you only need to do that in historical battles and full-real battles. Even then, there are other things that will probably be more important. Weapon Maintenance is quite helpful, though. It greatly reduces the rate of those pesky jams and can be had pretty cheaply, as far as most skills go.
Now, let's talk about the Gunners tab. Gunners only exist on aircraft with turrets. I'm going to say this loudly and clearly:THE GUNNER SKILL WILL DO NOTHING FOR A PLANE WITH JUST A PILOT. This leads us to some meta-game concerns that should be addressed. You're going to want to decide what kind of player you want to be: a fighter-pilot or a bomber pilot. There are some other types of craft, but they can pretty generally fall into those two categories. Planes with no turrets are fighters, planes with them are at least mostly bombers. I play a mix of both, but your crews are going to need to specialize, or you are wasting your skill points and hard-earned xp on meaningless upgrades. No one wants that. The best way to maximize them is to dedicate crew slots. For example, my crew slots 4 and 5 (the two rightmost) are for bombers only. The other three are for fighters only. Think about it so that you can dedicate your slots fairly early. If you pour your first upgrades into Reloading and Maintenance, you'll have some time to try out the different styles and see what you like; then you can really specialize.
EDIT: I'll get back to this later. Need to do a couple other things.
In your hangar, you have crew slots. Each of your planes is allotted to a crew slot. Crews are not allotted to vehicles, as in World of Tanks. This allows you to swap planes in and out of the slots, at will, and train the crews on any number of aircraft, simultaneously. So, every upgrade you give to a crew applies to any plane placed in that slot. You can purchase 5 crews slots, per air force, with in-game currency. You should do this with any nation you plan on flying. As previously mentioned, planes are your biggest resource and so you should take as many with you into combat as you can manage. The sixth slot and beyond require Lions, the real-money currency. Whether you wish to invest in those is a personal choice. However, I wouldn't recommend it. It's fairly rare to run out of planes when you have five in your hangar, especially when gain some experience as a player and figure out how to not die as often.
As you gain experience, your crews gain skill points to be spent on crew skills. You access your crew skills by clicking one of those slots and selecting the View Crew menu, marked by the little pilot silhouette icon. Take a moment to skim the very important wiki page on Crew Skills and you'll see lots and lots of stats that can be fiddled with. That's a lot of data, lets see if we can unpack it, for you. There are four tabs in the menu, but we're going to ignore the Qualification tab, at first. The Pilot tab obviously deals with your pilots' capabilities and the Gunners tab to gunners. The Ground Services tab deals more with the plane than anything else. It is here, with the Ground Crew, that you will probably want to start.
The Ground Services tab houses the single most important skill for Arcade play: Reload Speed. Reload Speed affects every type of ordnance, from little 7mm bullets to giant, battleship-holing torpedoes. In arcade, having a faster reload will save you. Take a look at the reload speed chart on the wiki and you will see just how helpful it can be. If you only really plan on playing arcade, completely ignore Repair Speed and Repair Rank. They only really matter for repairing at airfields, and you only need to do that in historical battles and full-real battles. Even then, there are other things that will probably be more important. Weapon Maintenance is quite helpful, though. It greatly reduces the rate of those pesky jams and can be had pretty cheaply, as far as most skills go.
Now, let's talk about the Gunners tab. Gunners only exist on aircraft with turrets. I'm going to say this loudly and clearly:THE GUNNER SKILL WILL DO NOTHING FOR A PLANE WITH JUST A PILOT. This leads us to some meta-game concerns that should be addressed. You're going to want to decide what kind of player you want to be: a fighter-pilot or a bomber pilot. There are some other types of craft, but they can pretty generally fall into those two categories. Planes with no turrets are fighters, planes with them are at least mostly bombers. I play a mix of both, but your crews are going to need to specialize, or you are wasting your skill points and hard-earned xp on meaningless upgrades. No one wants that. The best way to maximize them is to dedicate crew slots. For example, my crew slots 4 and 5 (the two rightmost) are for bombers only. The other three are for fighters only. Think about it so that you can dedicate your slots fairly early. If you pour your first upgrades into Reloading and Maintenance, you'll have some time to try out the different styles and see what you like; then you can really specialize.
EDIT: I'll get back to this later. Need to do a couple other things.