Navy battles and ship capturing

[unmerged(88716)]

I have tried this several times.

I started as Portugal, rushed with my whole navy lead by admiral to Straits of Dover to meet the French fleet without admiral. Sometimes English navy joined. The battle always ended in a victory and capturing a lot of ships (13-16) and not a single ship was sunk.

If English (also without admiral) joined the battle they always got the captured ships, no matter that I got there first and had the admiral.

English have the stronger navy but what is the determining factor who gets to keep the captured ships?

And why are they never split up between the allied navies?

From my EU3 experience it was often the admiral in charge who got the captured ships for his country. Was that really the case and what determines it now?

 

[beckermt]

From my experience it's the larger fleet. Raw numbers or # of cannons, I don't know.

 

[BoleslavLev]

I really think the number of captured ships should be smaller. I am not saying it should be as small as in EU3, but if I have won battle of let´s say 30 vs 30 ships, I´d be satisfied even by 3 or 4 captured ones. Capturing the half of the rival fleet is ridiculous.

 

[atmafox]

I have a sneaking suspicion that as the game goes on and fire gets higher relative to morale defense/damage, fewer ships will be captured and more sunk. That said, until we see the final and have some late game naval combat we can't be certain. I think it's perhaps appropriate that early game many ships are captured (representing boarding actions and such) -- though, perhaps not nearly as many as are right now. Later game, more ships should be sunk by the higher fire damage at range.

I'm not sure when it moved from what amounts to ship-based melee with a light side helping of cannon fire to true ranged combat during the time period, but I do know it was a transition over the course of the time period (or perhaps somewhat during the later part of the CK2 time period leading into the EUIV time period.)

Thank you!
-Atma

 

[Pelican Sam]

That's a curious question. Might it have something to do with the fact that they are the war leader? Like you said the English have a larger navy than you, so maybe that combined with their status as the war leader means that they take precedence over you in capturing ships.

 

[Flayer92]

Capture actually tended to happen more often than outright sinking throughout the time period.

The Battle of Lepanto saw 137 Turkish ships captured and 50 sunk.

The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 French and Spanish ships of the line captured, only one sunk directly.

 

[Drakken]

Two words : Prize money.

Happened in the aftermath of battles, too.