I apologize if this is a silly question, but do any crew members actually benefit from the Radio Operator vitality crew skill? I can’t seem to find any tanks that have a radio operator, but there are a lot that have extra machine gunners inside such as the Sherman and T-28E. I don’t want to be investing crew XP into it if the skill doesn’t benefit anyone.
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The repair speed and reaction time are determined by the average of the skill points of all crew members, including the radio operator.
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I knew that, but I was asking specifically about vitality as I know that it affects each crew member individually. Like the drivers vitality affects the driver, the gunners vitality affects the gunner, etc.
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Radio operator is the 5th crewman is tanks that have that many I believe they are always labeled as machine gunners, I think its just a catch all for any crew that are not labeled as driver, gunner, loader or commander.
What I don’t know is when a crewman changes positions, do they keep their original HP or dose it change to the HP of that position?
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Some vehicles with a fifth crew member may require investment in the Radio Operator’s vitality. I currently main the Chinese tech tree, so my Type 99A doesn’t need a Loader’s vitality, but my M1A2T does. By extension, if certain vehicles have a fifth crew member—even if they’re designated as, say, a Gunner or something else—the corresponding stat in the crew panel should be the Radio Operator’s.
However, I don’t recommend maxing out a single crew to the highest level. Sometimes I stop around level 145 and allocate the surplus experience to my air crew instead. The future infantry mode will likely require a lot more experience.
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Ah my air crews are already maxed out and I don’t play Navel. But I haven’t invested anything at all into Radio Operator vitality so I think at least the lower levels would be worth it for me then, especially since a lot of the vehicles I like tend to have a 5th crew member like the Chi-Nu and KV-1. Thank you for the clarification!
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Prioritize: driver, gunner, loader, commander, radio operator, for health.
Driver, Gunner for repair
This isn’t good advice. Repair skill is averaged across all crew members, so only raising it on two doesn’t work.
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It’s more about the order they die in the tank, Driver and Gunner are always last to die so do them the most first when regarding repair.
Happy to be corrected if wrong, but I’m pretty sure the crew skills that are averaged don’t take into account who if any are dead at that moment. If the vehicle has 4 crew, it averages the 4x repair scores. If it has 5, it averages 5, whether none are dead or 3 are.
From the wiki:
- Field repair — Increases the basic rate at which damaged parts are repaired (by up to 50%). It most strongly affects track repair. The average level of this skill of all crew members is taken into account when calculating the total multiplier.
- Agility — Determines the speed with which a crew member can replace another fallen one. The average value of agility in the crew is what counts — spending all of the points on one disposable crew member won’t benefit the player any more than distributing the points across all of them would.
So the assumption I’ m making here is that repair and agility are handled the same, since they’re both averaged skills. And the agility wording states that spending all the points on one member won’t benefit the player, which suggests casualties aren’t factored in.
So if you had agility {0,0,0,0,5} and agility {1,1,1,1,1} that’s the same effect, it’s saying. That wouldn’t be the case if crew casualties changed the calculation (because the “disposable crew member” would turn into the driver and you’d lose those 5 points).
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Yeah it’s better to distribute points, it doesn’t matter who gets knocked out you’ll be losing the same amount of repair speed just based off the average skill across all crew members
But repair speed goes down the less crew you have as they die. I could be wrong but I just always make the last guys to die the best repairers in the case I’m right.
So radio operator and commander switch the the rolls of gunner and driver and maybe loader.
That’s another thing why does the loader reload speed slow down as long as there’s 3 men in the tank it should reload just as fast as a full crew. More bias.
So if you had agility {0,0,0,0,5} and agility {1,1,1,1,1} that’s the same effect, it’s saying. That wouldn’t be the case if crew casualties changed the calculation (because the “disposable crew member” would turn into the driver and you’d lose those 5 points).
I see it the other way around, the “disposable crew member” would have the same driver training as the driver slot.
IRL the training regime goes from junior to senior in this order: driver to loader to gunner to commander, so everyone in the tank would have that level of driver training anyway.
So 5,5,#,#,# where # equals dead crew and 5,5, equals driver, gunner it would reduce your penalties the most. Early it makes sense to gab the lower hanging fruit across the board in crew skills but as they level up or lose crew it begins to change.
Maybe it SHOULD work that way but I don’t think it does. Would be hard to test, too. And you’re paying a significant penalty if you’re wrong by spending much more for high scores on two crew instead of balancing it across them, I suspect.
There was a discussion on another topic where it was stated (a player tested it) that all crew members are counted for repair…even if they don’t exist on the current tank.
However, there was no discussion or testing of the effect of dead crew…i do “feel” repair is slower when tank has less crewmember, but i would guess this is a different modifier. You have the crew AVERAGE speed that is FIXED and does not depend on dead/absent crewmen…and then the effect of deaths on several stats. AGAIN…this last part is guessing from some experience.
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How does that work?
If anything, gunner dies first because people aim at the gunner’s seat to disable the tank from returning fire.
Loading time is NOT the average of the crew.
Would be nice if Gaijin gave details on what kind of penalty is imposed on losing the skills invested in the loader.
I suspect ALL the skill bonus is lost since someone like the radio operator would certainly not be nearly as efficient.
for a tank to operate the minimum crew is driver gunner. so they get killed and replaced, their new roll is still driver gunner.
But skills are not transferred. New “driver” can drive the tank, but not as well as original driver. There will be no skill points assigned for driving.
If it makes you feel any better I don’t think it does anything, I just do it incase it does.