Two Huge Eleuthori Navy Pops Up Out of Nowhere

[Juvenal]

That's interesting.

In my 0.80 Casse campaign I noticed that the Eleutheroi fleets seemed to come down the English Channel from the North Sea in convoys of 4 to 6 fleets. I assumed they were patrolling - but it looks like they were just heading for the Med!

I assumed the boats were being created by scripts. Every time I built a fleet (the Casse could only build ships in south-east Ireland and north-Cornwall), it would be caught crossing the Channel by 3 or 4 enemy fleets.

What would generally happen is that I would beat the first fleet with heavy losses. The second would then beat me, and my retreat would fail to take me out of range of the third fleet, which administered the coup-de-grace. The whole process felt rather like being run over by a bus.

I thought that if I kept building fleets, the Eleutheroi would eventually run out of boats. Looks like I was wrong.

I ended up conquering Gaul almost entirely with troops recruited locally - it was just too expensive to recruit a new fleet for every stack of elites I wanted to transport across the Channel.