Meneldil

How can this be in any way relevant? It's like not playing Russia in Napoleon:Total War, because Russia hardly won an actual battle at the time, or not playing German tanks in World of Tanks because the Germans lost in the end. Play as the nation you like, using the ships you like. That being said, the utter defeat of the French navy during the Napoleonic wars didn't pop out of nowhere, and wasn't caused entirely by the Revolution either. It has deeper roots, that go back to the inner workings of the French kingdom. And oddly, the French navy of the 17th and 18th century faced a fate not unsimilar to what happend to the German navy during the first part of the 20th. Like Germany, France spent millions to become a naval superpower between 1661 and 1690. And like Germany, she suffered a few defeats, which came as a complete shock. Those defeats convinced Louis XIV that he should protect his costly brand new fleet, which from now on mostly avoided open battles, and pretty much abandonned the Atlantic and the northern seas. It's noteworthy too that, like Germany too, France favored quick raids against trading vessels, though she used corsaires and not submarines. The end result was that, by 1715, despite some nice victories during the Spanish succession war, the French navy - still largely dominated by men whose main talent was their blue blood - had spent years rotting in her harbours, while the British, a mid-sized power 50 years earlier, now had experienced admirals and sailors. France could maybe have caught up, but Louis XV, lacking both foresight and willpower, didn't do anything to fix the situation. End story is: neither good admirals nor discipline disappeared with the Revolution: they hardly existed to begin with. But it's true that the Revolution was he nail on the coffin. Then, there's also the - often conveniently overlooked, albeit absolutely decisive - fact that France, being a continental country stuck between half a dozen rivals, had no choice but to field the largest land army in Europe, something the British could avoid. Given that military expenditures sometimes reached as high as 60% of the budget between 1661 and 1776, the country could hardly afford to spend as much on her navy as the UK did, especially after the first industrial revolution kicked in in the UK. Had France been an island too, I think history would have been vastly different But in the end, despite all this, France - especially when supported by Spain - was pretty much the only country that could threaten British supremacy on seas during Naval Action's timeframe. And probably the country that designed some of the finest ships of the era.