IME just buying a plane is not enough. You want to expert the crew if you plan to use it.
It makes a massive difference in a one-on-one fight even at props if you’re flying a plane that excels at high-energy dogfights (most american planes. Flying a mustang or corsair with/without is night and day). At jets, it’s basically a requirement otherwise you pass out doing a simple split S or a low yo-yo. Maxed crew can help offset the need for expert, but every little bit of additional G tolerance and Stamina makes a difference.
A 5/5 expert crew can and will sit on ~6.0Gs without a G-suit forever without blacking out. A 2/2 crew with no expert passes out from 20 seconds at 5.5Gs.
On flipside, crewing+experting is super expensive so ONLY crew planes you actually care about flying. Buy whatever you need to unlock trees and tiers but don’t crew them. As such, i disagree with Piano’s advice to just “move stuff to other crew slots for autorepair.” For autorepair to pay back all the SL you wasted crewing that plane, you’d need to wait for some enormous amount of time above Rank 3.
Exactly. I have an ace lvl75 crew for my mirage IIIC and since I bought new slots I needed to train the crews and the mirage seemed the best way to do it.
The difference between 0lvl and aced is enormous. 0lvl can barely pull any maneouvers while the aced can run circles around other planes before blacking out
So for planes just use one slot that you put all your new vehicles into
I don’t know very well how crew experience works, I never did more than apply the points to my crews… when you talk about experting a crew, do you mean there are tiers to this? Because my best crew is like level 28 and has some stats almost maxed out
Or is it just the inflation and the little I have left to max it out is what will bring it to level 75?
You earn Research Points in battle. Apply all relevant modifiers EXCEPT for research penalty/connection bonus (so modifications research is more or less the accurate value to look at)
If you are playing Arcade, multiply this number by 0.03
If you are playing realistic or simulator, multiply this value by 0.01
The result is your crew XP gained
You can allocate crew XP as required, with increasing XP costs for each new level.
There is also a “total level” which adds up all individual sources of crew XP you have. This is used as a requirement for acing your aircraft.
Here is a plane I haven’t got around to experting yet. I click the “Upgrade expert” button and this happens:
To upgrade to Ace, you need significantly higher crew levels than expert and it’s a very, very slow grind.
For my premium Rank 3 plane, I need to fly it and earn the following:
This window is found under “Qualification” where it also shows you the crew level needed (in this case: 35). To get this tooltip, hover over where it says basic/expert.
Now, there’s a trick to achieve the 10 crew level needed for a rank 3 expert faster than naturally possible.
Getting 5/5 G/Stamina takes an insane amount of RP:
That’s 514 000 RP to get one plane to 5 G-tolerance and 5 Stamina (Crew level 10).
Alternatively, you can approach it by going 2/2 G/stamina (22+64+110+160)*2 + 2/2 keen/aware (15+50+90+145)*2 and then
Then repair speed 1, Gunner G tolerance 1/1/1 (4+4 so far), and fire prec/fire acc 1/1 for another +2 for a total of +10
In terms of RP needed we’re instead looking at:
((22+64+110+160) * 2 + (15+50+90+145) * 2 + (12+35) + 3 * (17+40) + 2 * (12+29) ) / 0.01 = 161200 RP! That’s easily about a third of the effort originally needed.
Thank you, I understand better now. So it’s a good idea to buy the expert thingy for my main crew? Costs 270k so I wasn’t sure if it was necessary or just to make things faster
I don’t get it, does that thingy put my crew to a superior level that I wouldn’t reach otherwise or does it just speed up the process I’ve already been through?
The main stats all help quite a lot but I usually do vitality last. Keen vision and awareness helps you identify enemies from further away to have them marked. G-tolerance and stamina are self explanatory.
Repair speed and rearm speed also help after you have the main stats to at least like 4. Since they cut down the repair and rearm time on the airfield by a lot.
You can’t get expert without buying. It always costs SL.
You may be conflating buying CREW levels with buying expert.
IF AND ONLY IF you intend to use the plane for a long-time, yes - get expert.
If you plan to skip it ASAP, you can avoid it but its absence is going to hurt you when flying defensively or in high energy dogfights. It’s very expensive, which is why we are OK with skipping it and eating a bit of suffering.
Only relevant for getting cheap crew levels to qualify for expert (see table of costs above), otherwise G/Stam, then keen/aware.
Did you take a shower afterwards? Every time I play the B7A2 I feel absolutely disgusting… it just so badly out classes so many other aircraft.
It’s one of those planes I hate seeing, no matter what I’m flying… because I know it will be above me, and it will out turn me. It also has the benefit of being teamed with aircraft that will devour anything that dives to avoid it, and typically flown with more skill than the US/USSR/LW aircraft.
