Number of available sailors to help officers going down over time.

[neon[5]]

Hey,

I play a long campain, starting in 39, I am now somewhere in summer 42 with pretty much all the upgrades for the boat researched and istalled.

I have created my custom schedule somewhere at the begining of the playthrough and it worked great and I never changed it. I also have all the 18 sailors on boat the entire time.

I noticed that the number of sailors available to help officers is going down. When I started the campain, it was usually at 6, sometimes even 7 sailors ready to be assigned to officers, this number however slowly goes down over the months.

It would start fluctuating between 6 and 5, later in the campain I would struggle to have 5 sailors on duty and these days, I ONLY HAVE 3 SAILORS AVAILABLE FOR OFFICER ASSIGNEMENT WITHOUT ME DOING ANY CHANGES TO THE SCHEADULING OR CREW MANAGEMENT !!!

What is going on??????

[Micullus]

It should be 20 on the crew list.
Check if you accidently assigned 3 people to the Nauticians.
Without alarm they only need 2.
If you have 2 Radio men they don't need assistance unless you do a sonar swipe or operate the radar detectors. Engineers commonly also need just one as support.

[neon[5]]

Not quite sure we understand each other. I have 18 sailors, 7 officers. I am not really worried about how many sailors assing to wich officers, which would be to the radio men and to the leaders to do the navigation, which I assume is the Nauticians you are talking about.

What Im saying is, I have 18 sailors, doing a regime of 6 hours on duty, 6 hours off, so each shift should have 9 sailors.

Out of the 9 sailors, I give 4 to general duties during the shift, which should leave 5 sailors to assign manualy to different officers. It really does not matter which officers I assign them to, what maters is the total number I have available to assign manualy. And that number has been slowly declining over the campain, now sitting at 3 sailors.

So I put 2 sailors to help the mechanic with the engine, 1 to help one leader with the lookout, and thats my sailors expended, because I have no more left. None to assing to my captain, or sonar man.

I also do have a snorchel, so I am at periscope depth like 90% of the time, which allows me to use my sonar all the time, and hides me from aircraft.

[Jaginun]

crew management > check grey boxes besides generic crew members, or buy more.

it's actually impressive that you made it to 41 without knowing how to assign crew

[SpaceBikerV]

Could you hover your mouse on the sailor limit icon on the bottom right corner and see the list of sailors performing the auto tasks? Could give you a hint on where these free sailors are going

[neon[5]]

Originally posted by Jaginun:

crew management > check grey boxes besides generic crew members, or buy more.

it's actually impressive that you made it to 41 without knowing how to assign crew

Can you be more specific? If by crew management you mean the crew button in the top right menu, that part has 4 more tabs and theres "gray squares" everywhere.

Originally posted by SpaceBikerV:

Could you hover your mouse on the sailor limit icon on the bottom right corner and see the list of sailors performing the auto tasks? Could give you a hint on where these free sailors are going

Ok, so that part says theres 6 out of 18 sailors on duty. Then it lists them.

1 is on helm, 2 are on depth steers, those are grayed out, I assume those 3 arent counted into the 6.

Theres 6 non-greyed out there, 4 assigned to the officers right now, leaving one on the radio and one on valves. So being at periscope depth eats 3 people.

Still, why does the number of available sailors to officers fluctuate on its own between 3 and 4.

[[XIII]Opsec]

Originally posted by neon5:

Originally posted by Jaginun:

crew management > check grey boxes besides generic crew members, or buy more.

it's actually impressive that you made it to 41 without knowing how to assign crew

Can you be more specific? If by crew management you mean the crew button in the top right menu, that part has 4 more tabs and theres "gray squares" everywhere.

Originally posted by SpaceBikerV:

Could you hover your mouse on the sailor limit icon on the bottom right corner and see the list of sailors performing the auto tasks? Could give you a hint on where these free sailors are going

Ok, so that part says theres 6 out of 18 sailors on duty. Then it lists them.

1 is on helm, 2 are on depth steers, those are grayed out, I assume those 3 arent counted into the 6.

Theres 6 non-greyed out there, 4 assigned to the officers right now, leaving one on the radio and one on valves. So being at periscope depth eats 3 people.

Still, why does the number of available sailors to officers fluctuate on its own between 3 and 4.

So out of 18 sailors, you have:
1 helmsman
2 Depthsteers
1 Radioman
1 Valves
That's 5 men

4 assigned to officers
(Guessing Engines and Watch)

That's half your boat and the full shift you've assigned to be on duty. If the other shift is scheduled as off duty it might not be allowing those crewman to work.

If any of your officers sleeping have grey boxes next to their portrait, then sailors are tied up assigned to an Officer that's sleeping.

[neon[5]]

Originally posted by XIIIOpsec:

Originally posted by neon5:

Can you be more specific? If by crew management you mean the crew button in the top right menu, that part has 4 more tabs and theres "gray squares" everywhere.




Ok, so that part says theres 6 out of 18 sailors on duty. Then it lists them.

1 is on helm, 2 are on depth steers, those are grayed out, I assume those 3 arent counted into the 6.

Theres 6 non-greyed out there, 4 assigned to the officers right now, leaving one on the radio and one on valves. So being at periscope depth eats 3 people.

Still, why does the number of available sailors to officers fluctuate on its own between 3 and 4.

So out of 18 sailors, you have:
1 helmsman
2 Depthsteers
1 Radioman
1 Valves
That's 5 men

4 assigned to officers
(Guessing Engines and Watch)

That's half your boat and the full shift you've assigned to be on duty. If the other shift is scheduled as off duty it might not be allowing those crewman to work.

If any of your officers sleeping have grey boxes next to their portrait, then sailors are tied up assigned to an Officer that's sleeping.

Pretty much. The gray squares youre talking about arent really the issue, I know how to manage them. I am bothered by the actual total number of sailors available to my officers, which is indicated by that number in the bottom right 4/4, 3/3, etc

It sorta makes sense why it would give me 4/4, since I allow 5 sailors in the squad to be there for the general usage, cleaning, cooking, operating lights, snorkel etc, while assigning squads of 2 to the engineers and squads of 1 to the sonar and lookout respectively. And they switch automatically as the shifts alternate between the officers.

It just sometimes the game decides to take one more sailor from my "ready to help officers" pool and puts them on another duty, even though I set the general use squad cap to 5.

I also dont get why I had even more sailors available in the past, without changing anything in my crew management, the number went down over time.

[SpaceBikerV]

This sounds like a stretch, but one of your sailors aren’t slacking off, are they? This is a rare event that happens even for the 2022 build

That said, this post made me recall that there were the times where my free sailors reduce from 6 to 5 without my input. I still have no idea why

[Micullus]

On a type VII you have 20 crew, on a type II you have 14 crew.
If you have just 18 crew it means you are missing 2 crew.
So get to a friendly harbour and get 2 new ones on board.
If you have no spare crew left buy them from the harbour masters.

If you stumble over a bug you can get rid of it by unassigning and reassigning them on the team rooster. If it doesn't help get to a harbour and unselect all but officers on the first page of the team tab. Shut the window, reopen it and assign all crew back.
This way you also get rid of sick crew stuck on boat.

[neon[5]]

Originally posted by Micullus:

On a type VII you have 20 crew, on a type II you have 14 crew.
If you have just 18 crew it means you are missing 2 crew.
So get to a friendly harbour and get 2 new ones on board.
If you have no spare crew left buy them from the harbour masters.

If you stumble over a bug you can get rid of it by unassigning and reassigning them on the team rooster. If it doesn't help get to a harbour and unselect all but officers on the first page of the team tab. Shut the window, reopen it and assign all crew back.
This way you also get rid of sick crew stuck on boat.

I dont play beta, im on type VII, my crew management screen says 18/18 sailors (plus officers), and does not let me add more. I also bought all the favours from the command, so that shouldnt be it either.

[Red_Seven_]

The blue box in the lower right corner of the screen shows how many sailors are currently assigned to officers and how many are generally available to get assigned to them. So if it shows 5/6 it means 5 crewmen are currently assigned while 6 are avaialable for this (including the 5 already assigned).

The question is how the game gets to those 6 available crewmen.

The answer is you take all your crewmen (18; 20 or 14 in the beta) and subtract the amount of sailors assigned to crew shifts at any given hour. This means it can vary if you have fewer sailors in different shifts. Also this considers the amount of sailors ASSIGNED to shifts and not the amount actually working on tasks of that shift. For example when you set up a crew shift with only the helmsman task but you assign 4 sailors to it, then these 4 sailors are 'gone' and it doesn't matter that only 1 can do the actual task.

So if you're running the default setup at any hour of the day there should be 8 sailors in crew shifts. Therbey you should have 18-8=10 sailors available to assign to officers, but you will have less (I'm too lazy to open the game rn to get the actual number...) maybe only 5 or 6. This is due to a 'share' you also have to subtract. The share is higher when you only have a few crew members in crew shifts and lower when you have many sailors in crew shifts.

The reason why this share exists is pretty simple. You have too many crewmen for the tasks they can do. Especially since your crewmen don't need sleep you can just overwork everyone, but you don't even need to. An actual irl crew was much bigger, but they had a proper shift system that you can't really replicate in the game.

If at any point the amount of crewmen available for officers is decreasing thsi can have multiple reasons. They might get injured or even die. You might have additional crew shifts at different hours so the amount will fluctuate. Otherwise it could simply be a bug. To tell what's going on screenshots of your sailors shifts and the squads tab would be really helpful.