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Merchantman crew are too strong


acarstens

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Why are the crews of the merchant ships so strong? Such ships never had more than the necessary crew on board for sailing.
 A brig with 136 men on board is unrealistic. After all, only 20 to 30 men are required to sail. A transport frigate might have around 80 men on board, not 420.
The ships were driven from an economic point of view. Even armed merchant ships rarely had enough men on board to man the cannons (with a few exceptions such as the Indiaman ships). They had escorts to protect them.

And bombarding a ship with canister for hours is really boring.

 
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Once again, good gameplay needs to come before realism. As the brig and frigate are your early game transports, they need to be able to carry a significant amount of troops for land and amphibious battles otherwise you’ll always be outclassed. Having the large amount of sailors seems to be a balance mechanic that keeps your troop numbers down and in case you want to mount cannons. However, you can just put min crew on them and let the troops do the rest. The large amount of troops on enemy transports seems to be a balancing mechanic against the player as well to prevent us from easily capturing them with no real cost. This could perhaps be justified as representing troops being transferred from one area to another or guards for treasure or something. 

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Maybe a little off topic but I would like to know why we can't use the crew on our transports to debark to a land battle.  What I am asking is if I have a crew of 175 on a transport and two marine units of 150 each only the marine units debark into the battle but the 175 crew stays on the ship why can't I have some of them debark like I can do with the other war ships?

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7 hours ago, Rygoat said:

With ships in general, I would think that any crew past the optimum should fall under a marine detachment.  This would alleviate the bloated transport issue.

I agree to a point however I would think whatever any ship might need in order to operate whether with guns or not, anything over that should be able to deploy. Sure I could lower the crew on the transport but then again if an enemy tries to board it then I might need them but most times that is not a problem but if that did happen why is it I can only transfer the whole crew to the boarding ship so either I end up with no crew on the transport and all the rest of the crew is now on the boarding ship which makes no sense to me if it was a war ship I could deploy a small unit to that boarding ship and therefore I would still have my ship.

I don't need 175 crew to run a small transport ship so why can't I deploy some of them like I can with a war ship?  Some war ships you can deploy nearly everybody on the ship and sometimes I only have 5 or 7 on a ship in some battles and I find that's a little weird for they can still shoot the guns.

Edited by doublebuck
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