Self-imposed rules to prep for naval invasions

[Servius]

So...

2 120-man units / trade ship

OR

2 trade ships / 120-man unit

[Didz]

So...

2 120-man units / trade ship

OR

2 trade ships / 120-man unit

That depends what you decide on unit scaling.

Personally, I am going with 1 man = 5 men and 1 ship = 1 ship.

So, for me it works out at 1x Land Unit / 2 Trade Ships

[Kraxis]

Just note that Indiamen and their likes (not the eastern ones though) were extraordinarily large merchantmen. Many were no bigger than Sloops and Brigs, and Frigate-size would generally be a pretty decently sized ship.

How can I know? Well, the number of ships involved. Ships the size of Indiamen were investments on the scale of early 20th century atlantic liners. They were not common due to costs for the 'common' company. The Indian Companies obviously had the currency to get them made.

As a little pointer in the Gunboat War Denmark persecuted against the UK in the Napoleonic Wars she relied very heavily on gunboats (duh) and privateers. The greatest success came when an entire convoy of more than 100 ships were captured, by tiny little privateering ships with a handful of guns (and mind you not even military personel so pretty crappy in a fight). If even just 5-6 ships had been Indiamen or that size there wouldn't have been an incident at all... The convoy would have passed through safely, perhaps the odd ship captured.

Indiamen should easily carry 2 units.

[Servius]

I'm going with Kraxis then.

Were it 2 ships / unit, a full stack would require 40 ships, and since you can only have 14 ships per fleet stack, that would require 3 fleets

[Didz]

Indiamen should easily carry 2 units.

I disagree.

The Arniston was an East Indiaman, it was was requisitioned by the Royal Navy in 1814 as a troop transport to bring wounded soldiers of the 73rd Regiment back to England from Ceylon.

It was wrecked and only 6 men of the 378 aboard survived and that included the crew.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arniston_(ship)

Assuming that a Battalion numbers around 600 men that still equates to 2 ships per battalion.

Incidently, the Arniston was 176' from stem to stern and 45' across the beam.

A further wreck of HM Troopship Birkenhead in 1845 reveals that this ship which was 210' in length and 37' across the beam was only carrying 643 people fully laden, no where near the 1,200 you would suggest.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Birkenhead_(1845)

[Kraxis]

The Arniston was carrying wounded and civilians... Obviously not the most 'compressable' passengers. Further it appears that the entire trek from Ceylon to the wrck was done with no ports of call, leading to less room for people and more required for stores.

In any case, the Birkenhead was a Frigate and was larger than the Arniston apparently. So the Arniston is not a comparable ship to the ingame Indiamen. You can argue that the Indiamen were of that size, however then you ignore the ingame possibilities, given that the Indiamen there are very clearly of ship-of-the-line size. Wrong or not, that is what we have to work with. And at the very least they are still very easily capable of carrying more than 1 unit per 2 Indiamen.

[Didz]

Well we will have to agree to differ. I've given you two perfectly vaild examples of 'actual' carrying capacity, if you still wish to go with the 1,200 men jammed on a deck idea then clearly I'm not going to persuade you otherwise, and at the end of the day its your game, so play it how you wish.

I'm going with the two trade ships per unit approach, with the possibility of an 'enflute' frigate carrying a single infantry unit for journeys of one turn duration. I will just need to be disciplined enough to switch 'fire at will' off and keep it off for that ship if its attacked.

[TinCow]

That depends what you decide on unit scaling.

Personally, I am going with 1 man = 5 men and 1 ship = 1 ship.

So, for me it works out at 1x Land Unit / 2 Trade Ships

I think this is the issue right here. We seem to have gotten decent numbers on the size and carrying capacity of historical ships, but we're in disagreement about what the proper unit scaling is. I don't see any reason we can't continue with our historical analysis to figure this out.

For gameplay purposes in the TW series, a full stack has become synonymous with a standard large army size. Anything under a full stack is generally considered a 'partial' army, and anything over a full stack is either overkill or used for attacking in multiple directions in a particular theater. Figuring out the scaling of individual units is a good experiment, but that system is not really that accurate because even when scaled up, 20 regiments isn't even close to the right size for a 'large' army of the 18th century. This means a proper approximation should be done on the basis of an entire stack, not just an individual unit. Thus, we should try and determine the average size of a typical pre-Napoleonic army, as that will allow us to determine a better scale for each unit.

We then use the same system on naval fleets, determining the average size of a fleet by expanding an in-game stack to match the size of a typical historical fleet. Once this is complete, we will have a universal scale that will allow a proper determination of how many in-game land units should fit on each trade ship.

[Didz]

For gameplay purposes in the TW series, a full stack has become synonymous with a standard large army size. Anything under a full stack is generally considered a 'partial' army, and anything over a full stack is either overkill or used for attacking in multiple directions in a particular theater. Figuring out the scaling of individual units is a good experiment, but that system is not really that accurate because even when scaled up, 20 regiments isn't even close to the right size for a 'large' army of the 18th century. This means a proper approximation should be done on the basis of an entire stack, not just an individual unit. Thus, we should try and determine the average size of a typical pre-Napoleonic army, as that will allow us to determine a better scale for each unit.

Very true, but from a game enjoyment an immersive aspect I like to assume that one unit is one battlation/regment/battery/ship. If nothing else it means I can name my units/ships and not have to keep reminding myself that they are just an abstract playing piece.

On that basis 1 man= 5 men, 1 gun = 2 guns, 1 ship = 1 ships works pretty well. A battalion in this period was about 1,000 men on paper, but rarely exceeded half that number in practice so 120 men = 600 men is about right. There is obviously no way this produces a viable approximation of an army except perhaps for some of the AWI battles like Yorktown (9,000 American's) (7,800 French)(7,073 British and Tories) which could be just about acheived with three unit stacks.

If CA ever produce a Napoleon Totalwar they will need to do a major rethink of the whole Order of Battle mechanism.

We then use the same system on naval fleets, determining the average size of a fleet by expanding an in-game stack to match the size of a typical historical fleet. Once this is complete, we will have a universal scale that will allow a proper determination of how many in-game land units should fit on each trade ship.

Well I've already done that to my satisfaction, but feel free to come up with some alterntive idea's. the problem I percieve is simply that game wise one ship is intended to be one ship, it even has a name. So, one could change that to something like 'Hornblowers Squadron' and assume that each ship represents say 5 ships, but then you run into problems of ground scale and range when you get into battle. Not to mention that the entire squadron will literally sink or swim as one entity.

I just think its best to keep things simple and live with the inaccuracy of the army and fleet sizes.

[TinCow]

While we're at it, it might be fun to explore proper historical army and navy composition as well. Assuming a full stack is a 'standard' size for an army, how many units should be line infantry, how many artillery, how many cavalry, etc.? For a full naval stack (assuming ability to build all types of ships), how many should be of each rate?

[Servius]

Right. The unit scale varies. If we arbitrarily start saying that 1 TW man = x historical men, then we have to allow what an earlier poster said: that 1 TW ship = x historical ships.

Since that just makes anything impossible to nail down, I too prefer to use 1 TW man = 1 historical man. In that sense, on (I think) normal unit size, 1 Line Infantry unit = 120 men (with Austria being an exception I think). I'm listening to NPR right now. They're talking about the Sultana, a US Civil War era Mississippi River steamboat that mostly carried cargo but also carried passengers. The ship was designed to carry ~350 passengers, plus a greater capacity of cargo. When it sunk, it was carrying ~2,500 Union POWs in addition to it's regular passenger compliment. Wiki says it was carrying 2,400 passengers.

If a 1,719 ton steam boat meant for river travel could carry 2,400 people, I'm pretty sure an Indianman (1,100-1,400 ton) of ~70% the size could have carried 10% of the human cargo. Keep in mind that the Sultana was also transporting soldiers, normal passengers, and cargo.

[Khorak]

If a 1,719 ton steam boat meant for river travel could carry 2,400 people, I'm pretty sure an Indianman (1,100-1,400 ton) of ~70% the size could have carried 10% of the human cargo. Keep in mind that the Sultana was also transporting soldiers, normal passengers, and cargo.

Armies have a vast supply train and huge numbers of non-combat personnel. A river steamboat also doesn't have a large compliment of sailors to keep it going and the entire upper deck taken up by those labour intensive sails, and a riverbourne passenger vessel wastes not a single square centimeter on defensive armament. The oceangoing troop carrier is also pretty much its own world in the sense that it isn't at all times within friendly territory for resupply like a riverboat will be, it has to be much more liberal in its provisioning. Finally, the Sultana, with but the most cursory research, was so vastly overcrowded even the decks were completely stuffed. It was a floating sardine can.

Carrying a ready to fight army in open seas is simply in no way comparible to just stuffing as many people as possible in a steam riverboat.....especially considering that the official explanation for the Sultana disaster was because it had been so heavily overcrowded.

[Didz]

While we're at it, it might be fun to explore proper historical army and navy composition as well.

That would be quite hard to do given the period covered by the game and the differences in culture and doctrine. The other big problem when looking at army and fleet composition is that most OOB's (Order of Battle) relate to a specific battle or event rather than routine activity. So, for example, artillery and riflemen might be attached when normally they wouldn't have been.

One nonesense I have noticed is the strange mix of ships used by the AI (e.g. 1x3rd Rate, 1x6th Rate and 1 x Rocket ship). Quite a weird mix and not one that an Admiral would put together.