Self-imposed rules to prep for naval invasions

[Servius]

CA knows that naval invasions don't work and have included a fix to the bug that makes them impossible in the current game. Revoming this bug won't necessarily mean a huge increase in naval invasions, since a naval invasion is still just one option for the AI, and it has to determine if that's the most effective/efficient use of their land and sea forces.

Without knowing how frequent naval invasions will be, it appears the risk will exist after the upcoming patch. I don't want to start playing after the patch and have no idea how many 'homeland security' forces I should leave in Great Britain or the Carribean isles. So, how should our play styles change to address that?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Somewhat in the same vein, what was the troop-carrying capacity of the ships you can build in ETW? I feel kinda dirty every time I load a full stack of land forces onto a sloop. I'm pretty sure you could not fit 2,400 line infantry on a single sloop, right? So, how many troops, that are not part of the crew, could the following ships really carry?

Sloop
Brig
Indianman (British merchant ship)
Spanish Merchantman
6th Rate
5th Rate
4th Rate
3rd Rate
2nd Rate
1st Rate

I'll update the OP as you all respond with numbers.

[TinCow]

I'm pretty sure that most warships from that timeperiod were not used to transport troops at all. From what I've read, troop transport was done with separate cargo ships and these would in turn simply be escortd by the warships. Based on that, if you want to impose some kind of realism on your play style, I would say that you could only use 'trade' vessels to transport units. For a long time now the large PBM games in the Throne Room have imposed a custom limit on unit transport per vessels. We've been using 2 units per ship, and it's worked pretty well. So, combine that with the trade vessel transport rule, and you'd need 10 trade vessels to transport a full stack of units, which leaves another 10 slots open for warship escorts for the 'convoy' fleet. That seems like a nice balance to me.

[edit]A quick google search confirms my recollections. Troop transport was done with cargo ships or warships, but the warships were usually old and had almost all armaments removed to provide more space for troops and cargo. Thus, any warships transporting men would not really be able to fight anyway.

[AussieGiant]

If anyone has been on an actual replica 'ship of the line' or a real one (restored mind you), then you know there is absolutely no possible way a war ship of the time can house anymore people than the fighting crew.

TC's right on the money.

[Marquis of Roland]

I don't know if this makes it too complicated but the farther you transport troops, the less troops you can transport. I think even a frigate can carry around 800 infantry or so "en flute" (meaning some or all armament removed to make more space for transport), if it was a few days sail, say, from France to Ireland. If you're taking troops from Europe to America, obviously you can't keep conditions aboard ship as crammed and you also need to take on more stores.

Ironic gamewise - en flute means "as a fluyt", yet in-game fluyts are considered early game floating fortresses

[Dayve]

Floating fortresses? They're nothing less than modern day American aircraft carriers, fully loaded with fighter jets and anti-missile capabilities and other shinies.

If that's what Spanish trade ships were like back in the day, i'd hate to fight an actual Spanish ship of the line, designed for the sole purpose of battle!

[Servius]

The Fluyts were Dutch ships I think. The Indiamen are British and the Merchentman are Spanish.

Anyway, I guess the troop transport question has been solved. If I want to play fluffy, 1 merchant ship per every 2 land units.

So, what about homeland forces? How larger were the garisons on Carribean islands? Could any of the grey-bar 'Flintlock Militia' forces be counted as a home guard?

I want to try to start getting used to the impact additional trade ships and home guard forces will have on my economy.

In the end, this may just necessitate a stronger and larger navy that blockades enemy ports. If your foes are bottled up in their home port, you don't need to spend any $$$ on land-based defense forces for your island territories.

I wish there was a way for navies to destroy docked enemy ships. Right now, at least to my knowlege, the only way to force docked ships to fight is to land forces nearby, have them take the port, which forces the enemy ships out to sea, where your navy can engage them.

[Marquis of Roland]

If that's what Spanish trade ships were like back in the day, i'd hate to fight an actual Spanish ship of the line, designed for the sole purpose of battle!

Actually, back then (or maybe back a little further lol) the Spanish galleons WERE their ships of the line. I remember on a earlier post on naval tactics, I mentioned that people were losing to fluyts and galleons because they didn't treat it as a ship of the line.

As far as warships go back then, everyone pretty much used the same, or similarly designed ships. Better designs were copied right away; for example, the French built better ships in general than the British, and as soon as the British would capture a new design they'd copy it or implement changes in their own design right away. What made the Royal Navy superior was their level of training and drill, both in gunnery and seamanship. The French couldn't practice as much since they were blockaded in port.

Anyway, back to troop transport. First off, what is 1 "unit"? I like to define mine as:
1 infantry unit - 1 battalion (grenadier and light infantry come in "half-battalions")
1 cavalry unit - 1 squadron
1 artillery unit - 1 battery

Going on this, 1 frigate can carry 1 unit of cavalry or infantry. 1 ship of the line-class hull (including indiamen, galleons, and fluyts) can carry 2 units of cavalry or infantry. Artillery batteries are obviously less in manpower and provisions needed for the voyage, so multiple artillery batteries can be carried in 1 ship(?)

@Tincow:
Will you count colonial line infantry as recruitable overseas? Because lets say I want to be REALLY realistic but the AI natives don't.....

[Kasagi Yabu]

Floating fortresses? They're nothing less than modern day American aircraft carriers, fully loaded with fighter jets and anti-missile capabilities and other shinies.

If that's what Spanish trade ships were like back in the day, i'd hate to fight an actual Spanish ship of the line, designed for the sole purpose of battle!

[Didz]

So, how many troops, that are not part of the crew, could the following ships really carry?

The simple answer from a practical viewpoint is none.

As has already been stated warships of this period were built to accomodate the number of guns they had, not the number of crew required to sail them and mann those guns. Therefore, the crew had to be squuezed into whatever space was left after the guns were in place. This actually meant that there was normally not enough room on a warship to accommodate the crew, and it was normal practice for men to share hammock space e.g. as one man got out of a hammock to start his watch, then his mate would climb into the still warm hamock to sleep.

The only way room could be made available for troops was to remove all the guns (and the men needed to man them) This practice was often used to convert a frigate into a fast troop transport by the French but even rigged 'en flute' a frigate would barely be able to transport more men than its original crew compliment possible 400 - 600 men depending on its size. Liners were not used for this purpose as without their guns they had too much top hamper and became unsailable.

As for more organised invasion fleets I've done a bit of research on Quebec which was one of the most notable amphibious operations of the period and come up with the following information so far.

Quebec 1759 - either -
British naval landing 9,000 troops transported in 141 vessels (63 men per ship)
British naval landing 8,500 troops transported in 250 vessels (34 men per ship)
http://www.answers.com/topic/quebec-battle-of

What we don't know is how many of the vessels were warships and how many transports. The battle map cleary shows a division of Frigates, Saunderson's main fleet and a fleet of transports. So, not all the ships were used to transport troops.

A Serjeant-Major of Gen. Hopson’s Grenadiers confirms that dedicated transports were used on this occasison e.g. Louisbourg, June 1st, 1759 We embark’d on board the Transport Harwood, bound on the Expedition to Canada ... However, he doesn't say how many of his regiment were embarked on that transport, or how many transports were in the fleet, and as usual our trusty historian's have contrived to ignore the very factual information that ought to justify their existence. No doubts its there somewhere buried in the archives but instead of publishing it we get plagerised drivel, and as you can see they can't even agree on that.

P.S. I may have had a bit of a breakthrough as I have managed to fine an online copy of 'The Life of Captain James Cook' who apparently was part of Saunderson's Fleet at Quebec, and he does mention some facts. As follows:

He was involved in advising on the fitting of 'The Three Brothers' a quite large ship of 600 tons formerly used in the coal trade and now fitted out with stalls for 40 horses.

Saunders Fleets consisted of 9 x Ships of the Line, 13 x Frigates, 119 x transports (so an average 75 men per transport? - however, that is ignoring horse, cannon, amunition, stores, food and baggage.)

This a link to the book if anyone is interested.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=m...snum=3#PPT1,M1

Annoyingly, there are lots of details of naval operations and numbers of ships involved, but this time the writer merely dismissed the military aspects of the campaign, referring to the embarkation and disembarkation of 'troops' without mentioning numbers, type or regiment. So, to get the facts one would need to find an equally detailed account by someone writing the life story of Wolfe and cross-reference the naval operation with the military operations to establish which troops were in involved in which operation with which ships. Annoying given that the author must have had the historical records showing which troops emobark on which ships and where they went.

More to the point somewhere there will be a complete list of the transports available during the campaign and what their carrying capacity was, as without such a document the logistic's and quartermaster staff could not possibly have determined which ships were needed for each operation and which units to allocate to each.

[Ordani]

There is no real way to model naval transport in ETW, I generally sent a full fleet just as not to lose the army. In actual practice you had dedicated transport ships which might carry 50-200 people over any meaningful distance; a good point of reference would be Dutch actions against England during the "revolution" prior to William of Orange and Mary QOS deposing James-whatever in 1688, in which an army around 15000 strong was moved that short sea voyage by around 180 ships of note and probably a good number more of smaller ones.

[Maleficus]

a good point of reference would be Dutch actions against England during the "revolution" prior to William of Orange and Mary QOS deposing James-whatever in 1688.

Am I misreading something here, or did you really just refer to Mary II of England as Mary, Queen of Scots?

[Ordani]

I just got off work, who knows where my head is :>

[TinCow]

Annoyingly, there are lots of details of naval operations and numbers of ships involved, but this time the writer merely dismissed the military aspects of the campaign, referring to the embarkation and disembarkation of 'troops' without mentioning numbers, type or regiment. So, to get the facts one would need to find an equally detailed account by someone writing the life story of Wolfe and cross-reference the naval operation with the military operations to establish which troops were in involved in which operation with which ships. Annoying given that the author must have had the historical records showing which troops emobark on which ships and where they went.

While doing some google-fu, I ran across this article on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneas_(troopship)

It talks about two ships that wrecked in 1805 off the coast of Canada. The ships were in a single convoy which was carrying the 100th Regiment of Foot, and that appears to be the only unit that was being transported. Of the two ships that wrecked, one carried "80 passengers, 40 soldiers, 30 crew and all the baggage and heavy equipment of the 100th Regiment" and the other carried "347 people consisting of soldiers of the 100th, many women and children from their families and the ship's crew." An article on the regiment itself states that a total of 271 soldiers perished on the Aeneas, indicating that most of the passengers were soldiers.

So, based on that, it appears that the two ships transported together about 300 soldiers and all of the equipment required for the regiment. If someone can provide some numbers on the standard size of an infantry regiment around that time, we should be able to estimate how many other ships were required to transport the rest of the unit.

[Didz]

So, based on that, it appears that the two ships transported together about 300 soldiers and all of the equipment required for the regiment. If someone can provide some numbers on the standard size of an infantry regiment around that time, we should be able to estimate how many other ships were required to transport the rest of the unit.

I can help you with that.

There have actually been several regiments in the British Army with the number 100, but the one in question was the third to carry that number and raised in 1804 and consisted of entirely Irish personnel.

When accepted into the British Army in 1805, it was known as The 100th County of Dublin Regiment.

The Regiment was ordered to serve in Canada in 1805. Half the regiment was drowned in a shipwreck off Newfoundland. The remainder served out the war in Canada, fighting the Americans in the northern campaign of the War of 1812. The regiment was renumbered as the 99th in 1816 and disbanded in 1818.

The important point is that the 100th County of Dublin Regiment was raised and trained as a Light Infantry Regiment, and was therefore likely to have been popular and probably found recruiting easier than a line regiment. So, assuming it was therefore close to full strength it would have consisted of 10 companies of 100 men (1,000 men) in total.

That more or less tallies with your figure of 467 solidiers involved in the incident on the two wrecked ships. Assuming division of the regiment was more or less equal then the other half of the regiment would have also been on two ships, suggesting that 4 were needed to transport one full strength battalion. In this case I'm assuming that the 100th in 1805 was a Regiment of one battalion. Which again ties in with your figures.

Afterthought:

Actually thinking about this. If we read the statement literally e.g. 'Half the regiment were drowned' then only 271 men drowned so that would make the regiment about 540 strong and severely under strength. But either way about 2-4 transports per unit seems about right in terms of naval transport.

[Mr Frost]

I can help you with that.

There have actually been several regiments in the British Army with the number 100, but the one in question was the third to carry that number and raised in 1804 and consisted of entirely Irish personnel.

When accepted into the British Army in 1805, it was known as The 100th County of Dublin Regiment.

The Regiment was ordered to serve in Canada in 1805. Half the regiment was drowned in a shipwreck off Newfoundland. The remainder served out the war in Canada, fighting the Americans in the northern campaign of the War of 1812. The regiment was renumbered as the 99th in 1816 and disbanded in 1818.

The important point is that the 100th County of Dublin Regiment was raised and trained as a Light Infantry Regiment, and was therefore likely to have been popular and probably found recruiting easier than a line regiment. So, assuming it was therefore close to full strength it would have consisted of 10 companies of 100 men (1,000 men) in total.

That more or less tallies with your figure of 467 solidiers involved in the incident on the two wrecked ships. Assuming division of the regiment was more or less equal then the other half of the regiment would have also been on two ships, suggesting that 4 were needed to transport one full strength battalion. In this case I'm assuming that the 100th in 1805 was a Regiment of one battalion. Which again ties in with your figures.

You forget the other 6 ships to carry their booze .

[Didz]

You forget the other 6 ships to carry their booze .

British ships were always built with adequate storage for alcohol, they would merely need to substitute some of the rum for gin. In fact they had enough spare to pickle Nelson's body in a spare barrel of the stuff after Trafalgar.