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I see that Brigs and sloops have a fairly big chance of being captured with a 15% capture ratio in the unit panel, but capture of ships of the line or frigates seems impossible, whereas it did happen quite a lot. The fact was that the captured ships tended to be very damaged and take a very long time to rebuild, AND when the capture took place far out at see, escorting them back to port could be too dangerous and time consuming. But nevertheless it should be more possible for the victor of a navy battle to capture a ship of the line once in a while, particularly if it isn't a marginal victory but a trouncing.

I suppose it's moddable, i'll have to look at naval units set up.

veji1 wrote:I see that Brigs and sloops have a fairly big chance of being captured with a 15% capture ratio in the unit panel, but capture of ships of the line or frigates seems impossible, whereas it did happen quite a lot. The fact was that the captured ships tended to be very damaged and take a very long time to rebuild, AND when the capture took place far out at see, escorting them back to port could be too dangerous and time consuming. But nevertheless it should be more possible for the victor of a navy battle to capture a ship of the line once in a while, particularly if it isn't a marginal victory but a trouncing.

I suppose it's moddable, i'll have to look at naval units set up.

Definitely needs to be added as was a big feature of the Naval battles of the era (the RN loved those French 74s).

TC271 wrote:Definitely needs to be added as was a big feature of the Naval battles of the era (the RN loved those French 74s).

indeed ! I see that the Brigs and Sloops have this potential for capture, we would have to test how to integrate that for the bigger boats, but it would seem logical to me.

Can be done...what would be the ideal capture percentage (to represent in particular the fact that few SOL ships captured made it to full operational status under new owner, may be half a dozen for GB) ? 10%?

PhilThib wrote:Can be done...what would be the ideal capture percentage (to represent in particular the fact that few SOL ships captured made it to full operational status under new owner, may be half a dozen for GB) ? 10%?

There are 2 issues, here, and I don't know if they are doable : capture should be an element of "pursuit", ie you don't trade captured ships in a naval battle, but it would make sense that the victor captures a few left behind demasted and dead in the water ships of the line. say 10% maybe, but we would have to check what is that 10% of.

The second issue is that quite a few of those ships could never be fully repaired and used. I don't know how the game could model that : Could there be a way to make repair of capture ships a lot slower than of owned ships ? not make it impossible but say going 25% the speed. I find that repairs are a bit too easy at this stage anyway, you can have a 118 guns ship of the line reduced to 12 functioning cannons, and it will repair in 4 turns in port ! I would make ship repair 2 times slower for everybody and maybe something like 6 times slower for capture ships : repairing a very damaged ship of the line should take a couple of months and a captured one say 6 months which would somewhate emulate having to raise a new crew, changing and adapting some elements, etc.

In an abstracted way it would work better.

BTW Phil, did you see my post (title was about chrome) about ship names ? I find it not very immersing that when a ship squadron gets a new ship it's just "74 guns ship of the line" and not a ship name, same for a whole new squadron (it's called xth division de course with just gun numbers). I pointed a link to a site for the french for example from which we could pump name which would give some more immersion to the whole.

And lastly, Vicberg's comments on naval battles are spot on : the naval aspect of the game has much potential and could be really working great with just a bit of adjustment.

Lastly, I would like to ensure that the game emulates the ability of smaller fleet and ships to evade big fleet, so that we can avoid a "bigger stack trumps all" effect : Historically a frigate heavy small fleet (even with ships of the line) had a strong chance of evading a big fleet because the biggest ship of the line were slower than the 74 guns one and of course than the frigates.

My point is that a strategy of having a smallish fleet with say 1 or 2 squadrons of ship of the line and 2 or 3 of frigates avoiding big fleets to manage and go wreak havoc in the indies or whatever, after all it happened a few times, they got caught eventually (cf the 1806 atlantic campaign) but right now it's close to impossible to pull off.

You have to realize that the naval combat IS the land combat mechanics. They are the same. The only thing unique to naval combat is the 'wind gauge' and if someone has it for the combat.

CBT Signature determine who is most likely to be targeted. Then range determines who shoots. Then range is reduced and more units can fire until you get to range 0. The battle display shows boarding at range 0, which is different than the "assault" shown during land combat.

You can't buy replacements for captured ships. So I don't think they will repair at all, which overall could work.

Naval combat uses the same hide/evade/detect process that land does. So small fleets/ships, should be able to evade, providing it's all setup correctly in the game files.

Edit: alt+click on a tab to rename the fleet. The engine doesn't magically come up with names. They are embedded in the model file.

vicberg wrote:You have to realize that the naval combat IS the land combat mechanics. They are the same. The only thing unique to naval combat is the 'wind gauge' and if someone has it for the combat.

CBT Signature determine who is most likely to be targeted. Then range determines who shoots. Then range is reduced and more units can fire until you get to range 0. The battle display shows boarding at range 0, which is different than the "assault" shown during land combat.

You can't buy replacements for captured ships. So I don't think they will repair at all, which overall could work.

Naval combat uses the same hide/evade/detect process that land does. So small fleets/ships, should be able to evade, providing it's all setup correctly in the game files.

Edit: alt+click on a tab to rename the fleet. The engine doesn't magically come up with names. They are embedded in the model file.

I wasn't talking about renaming fleets, rather individual ship (and therefore squadron) names.

Regarding the repair of captured ships, I might be wrong but I had the impression that you couldn't get new elements (new sloops or brigs or transports) for a captured fleet, but it looked like the actual individual ships did repair. Might be wrong though.

Maybe too complicated, but create "captured" ship tokens from won battle - slow and not really able to fight, and if they are brought to a few large ports + RGB they have 30% chance of being converted into a worthwhile ship, 50% chance of being lost with maybe a minor win in ressource and 20% chance of no-effect ?

Narwhal wrote:Maybe too complicated, but create "captured" ship tokens from won battle - slow and not really able to fight, and if they are brought to a few large ports + RGB they have 30% chance of being converted into a worthwhile ship, 50% chance of being lost with maybe a minor win in ressource and 20% chance of no-effect ?

Something like this would be pretty cool, it would help make the naval game that much more immersive.