Two questions about naval combat

[malthaussen]

I have been playing the 1775 scenario as the British, and am a bit puzzled by the naval combat. First thing I noted was that warships can be added into the "static" merchant stacks, and thus in effect never need to resupply. Is this a feature, or an exploit? I had been shuffling my frigates back and forth from the patrol boxes until I tried this. Will ships assigned like this serve as escorts and engage privateers? Or do they need to be in a separate stack?

Second question concerns battle results. I have had a number of "intercepts" and "combats," in which the text tells me 0 hits were inflicted and 0 hits received. In fact, I've never had a naval combat yet where hits were recorded. But merchantment keep disappearing from my Europe box. I at first thought this might be a function of question #1, but then I realized no "hits" were being recorded even when separate stacks engaged.

And come to think of it, a third question arises, although not about naval combat. I keep getting these popups telling me that I can import more Engagement Points if certain ports are in my possession. But even when I hold those ports, I never see more than 2 EPs from a given box. Leading me to ask the question, why do I keep seeing this popup?

-- Mal

[lodilefty]

Ships will fight when with merchants.
I never tried stacking them together! Neat idea. Sort of an exploit, but not sure what we can do to prevent it....

Hits can be "fractions", less than 0.5 gets reported as 0.
Cohesion hits don't get reported at all, but eventually cause losses.

"Holding ports" EP bonuses are relatively small. May not be showing up with the low EP production. Fractions again...

[jjjanos]

Ships will fight when with merchants.
I never tried stacking them together! Neat idea. Sort of an exploit, but not sure what we can do to prevent it....

Cohesion still suffers when you do this.

I also wouldn't call it an exploit. In the real world, the Brits wouldn't have been protecting the European Shipping lanes with ships based in the New World. In the game, the European zones are terra prohibita.