Advice needed on capturing enemy warships

It seems like no matter what I do, I can't manage to capture enemy warships. If they surrender, they don't show up in the dialog under "captured" after the battle. I've tried to move in with much more powerful ships (with a least a 2-1 superiority in manpower) and capture by boarding, but while the two ships are grappled together, the enemy ship keeps firing into the hull of my ship even while they're being boarded, often times sinking it. I don't want to respond with my own cannon for fear of sinking the ship i'm trying to capture. Any advice?

You need to shoot them up a bit first so that the enemy ship only has a few guns firing and/or few crew manning them (slower reload)

Stay on them after they rout, just press them until they surrender. Hit "continue battle" if it asks you and fight on until it ends for good. All surrendered ships show up in the final battle statistics. Select what you want to keep then add them to your fleet (there's another button on that scroll). They show up in your stack. Voila!

First, try to demast them. That gives you a big advantage. Basically close in and blast away with chainshot until their sails fall off.
Once that's done, set your ship to grapeshot and tell them to board.

This is only advisable on smaller ships with fewer guns and crew than your own ship. With larger vessels, it's advisable to shoot them up a bit first, as mentioned earlier.

I'm not sure if it's still present in the new version, but in the first release the enemy could still fire their cannons while you were boarding them (not sure if it worked in reverse, since the AI never tried boarding me.) It was kind of a pain.

Make sure you're admiral is still alive and neither ship is on fire. If you board a burning ship, not only will your own possibly catch on fire, but it's likely the one you board will explode/sink eventually.

My method for taking enemy ships, which seems to work most of the time.

Step 1: Have greater firepower on your side than the enemy.

Step 2: Use nothing but chainshot, and keep firing until they have no mast whatsoever.

Step 3: Once they are demasted some may surrender, if they don't finish them off with grapeshot.

Step 4: Always continue if it gives you the option to. Don't end the battle until the game forces you to.

Using this method I have taken entire fleets of enemy ships. :2thumbsup:

getting a demast will allow you to manuever around the ship and come up from the rear where you can broadside rip them apart with grape until you are ready to board. Careful, though, grape will sink a ship too, so when battle permits I only use one ship for this job and leave the others out of firing range.

Any time i notice i have demasted a good ship i immediately move my battle from it to take it out of the fight and to keep my boys from sinking her

however, none of my demasts have been intentional and they are always done with standard balls or the fire from a nearby ship exploding. not sure if chain would increase the likelihood.