Merging Fleets

Does it pay to merge your fleets after a battle? Does one boat with 60 guys fight better that two boats with 30 each? Three with 20?

Fleet fighting is one of those "grezzate". I would assume there is not difference.

It all goes for style of play. Merging is the way to go if your not going to retrain. Since I retrain I merge until the ship has too low of a number that it can no longer merge w/o being lost. If I'm far from a port I will merge ships together as there is little hope in getting them back safely.

In your example you have 3 ships with 20 men. Heres a little on naval battles, if you go up against a 1 ship with 50 men you have increases chance of losing as those 50 men can take out 1 ship at a time. but 60 against 50 would put the day in your favour. At least from my experience it seem to take unit sizes into account. That is also why biremes get torn up later in the game because they are going up against bigger ships but there exp keeps them alive.

I usually just merge to keep as many ships at full strength as possible, and send the undermanned (below half) ships back for retrain if possible. I still haven't figured out how the computer resolves naval battles. If you fight a many-to-1 battle, usually 1 or 2 of your ships lose a few men, and the other ships are at full strength. Haven't seen a pattern yet for which ships in a stack lose out, but it looks like only a couple of your ships actually fight. If there is a pattern, maybe you can arrange the stack to keep the weakened ships "in the back".
In my current campaign (Julii), the Senate wants me to blockade the Greeks, looks like you could walk across the Aegean without getting wet. Maybe I'll record the results of each naval fight to see if I can figure anything out.