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.