Tracking Your Crew and Tours

[groomsie]

I'm new to Subsim as well as to SH4, but really enjoying it so far. I've been intrigued by the idea of better crew management, as far as rotation of crew and such. Was hoping someone had a better way to do this, as far as tracking the crew and their number of patrols with you as well as their experience / ratings. I'm thinking maybe a spreadsheet, if there is a way to pull your crew off the save game files, dump it to a spreadsheet, slice-n-dice it, then use that to track things like their areas of expertise, number of patrols, station assigned, and maybe comments (ie: wounded, key to leading engine room crew, etc).

Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this or anything similar to it? I've seen the method of simply randomly removing crew, etc., but I guess I'd prefer to be a bit more systematic.

Any thoughts or help by more experienced players would be greatly appreciated.

[-Pv-]

I've heard talk of a crew database before, but my thought is getting down to that level (other than a fanatical interest) doesn't benefit the game that much.
The game chooses which crew are elegible for advancement and medals and other than that, there appears no clear benefit to choosing one elegible crew over another except you don't want to reward a crew you intend to dump.

Since it's clear from the management tool the game displays which crew is more capable, it's a duplication of effort there. As far as knowing which you've kept the longest, again, nice hoby but you can purchase high value crew green from the base who will out-perform your longest serving pawn.

The key to quality management is to leverage your renoun to purchase equipment and the best replacements. Since you cannot afford to replace everyone and also buy junk, the game also benefits from upgrading crew on patrol, but since this happens automagically, again, I see no benefit to spending a lot of time picking at fine points.

Sink massive tonnage to earn renoun, fulfill lots of missions, return to base and upgrade crew and equipment. Keep best crew in Damage Control and compartment leadership. Use DC and Battle stations at critical times properly. Keep the boat safe while taking managable risks. Risk management is knowing your enemy. Do these and you'll get the job done and see the end of the war through your career.

Other than to give yourself a new hoby, I don't think you sink more ships or tonnage by managing at that level.

-Pv-

[groomsie]

I guess I was thinking more from the standpoint of trying to emulate actual crew rotation (ie: 20% to 33% depart at end of patrol) patterns. Several methods have been discussed, all I've read involve either (a) random methods or (b) manually removing crew with goal to not have them do more than 3-5 patrols with you.

If using such a manual method, how do you track how many patrols a guy has been with you?

Maybe there are actually very few skippers out there doing this, in which case maybe I'm trying to bury myself in detail when I should be out sinking tonnage...I'm sure there are opinions both ways on that

[tomoose]

SH3 Commander fulfills some of the requirements your interested in and was a welcome addition to SH3 and gave more control over crew management and other tweakable aspects of the game (i.e. designating your own U boat number).

All that to say that there are a couple of modders who expressed interest in doing the same for SH4 (I can't find the link to that thread, sorry) and I believe that's still in the works but I haven't seen anything for a few months now.
Contrary to Pv's comments, SH3 Commander (and hopefully an SH4 version) really enhanced the crew management aspect and added much to the immersion factor for the campaign game. I particularly found it useful for printing out consolidated Captain's logs (it even added a blurb on what happened to your Captain at the end of his career which was a novel twist).

I'm still holding out hope that someone is working on this. I'd give it a go myself if I knew where to start.

[tomoose]

Here we go, is this what you have in mind;?
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=130758&highlight=donner

[groomsie]

Sounds like same thing (if not, very similar).

For now, I think to keep it simple (and less like real work) I'll try some kind of random rotation and just go from there.

[-Pv-]

I never made any comment about S3 Commander. My comments were a generalization that I find the current stock crew management satisfactory for the purpose of getting the best performance out of the crew and best score from the game. Anything else you do with the crew that the in-game tool doesn't already provide is more in the realm of a personal satisfaction, special interest. If you rotate 1/3 of the crew every patrol, you'll not sink more tonnage or earn a better boat than if you don't. Sometimes a crew member you got cheap who has accumulated a lot of experience and stamina is the guy that shoots down the Betty attacking you while trying to submerge. I DO retate my crew, but it's because after buying equipement I have dough left over to get a high rated torpedo man that became available at a good price.
-Pv-

[tomoose]

PV; I didn't mean to imply you were slamming SH3 Commander.
I just think that the SH3 Commander gave you more flexibility, particularly with the crew (including qualifications and awards) and essentially took the reknown aspect completely out of the picture. I have never liked the reknown/points system and consider it a negative aspect of the game. One shouldn't have to "buy" torpedoes, for example, it just doesn't make sense and irritates the hell outta me!!!;)