Ed, you are correct in theory and according to the rulebook, as far as it
goes, but incorrect in actuality.
First, in any encounter or battle, if you have a navy which takes losses --
sea serpents, pirates, or battle with another navy -- warships are lost
first. That is their job, to protect transports and fight dangers. Only when all
warships have been lost, will transports start taking losses. So any navy
planning on travelling the Open Seas would be well advised to have some
warships along, just to make sure. You don't have to worry about losing any
transports until all the warships are gone -- so that navy won't lose a transport
unless all 10 warships get sunk in the encounter first.
However, although troops are allegedly evenly distributed among the
transports, that is more a case of "how do we divide up different types of troops
among the transports needed to carry those troops", than it is a matter of
spreading the troops out all over the navy so that every transport has troops.
It works like this. The troops will be on the minimum number of transports
needed to carry them -- they will fill up one transport after another, and
when all the troops are on board the minimum number of transports, any
additional transports sail empty -- AND the empty transports are lost first, then a
partially filled transport if there is one, and then, and ONLY then, full
transports start sinking.
Lets say you have 800 infantry, consisting of 400 HI and 400 AR, in a navy
of 5 transports. The first three transports will take 250 infantry each, the
fourth will take 50 troops, the fifth will be empty. If you lose one ship,
it will be the empty transport, if you lose a second ship it will be the one
with 50 troops, if you lose more then you start losing ships with 250 troops
on them.
The "evenly distributed" part applies when it comes to figuring out what
troops will be lost. I picked 400 and 400 to show this. The HI and AR will be
evenly distributed across the ships needed -- hence the 'full' transports
will each carry 125 HI and 125 AR, and the one with 50 troops will have 25 HI
and 25 AR.
What this really reflects is the way the program does losses -- i.e. when
you lose troops, regardless of their CON, they are lost proportionally across
the army or navy. In a land battle, for example, say those 400 HI all had
steel armor and thus CON of 10 x 1.6 = 16 while the AR have no armor, CON = 2,
that doesn't matter in terms of dividing up losses -- if the army loses 25% of
its troops, it will lose 25% of each type, so that army would drop to 300 HI
and 300 AR. The program doesn't really know or care what troops are on what
ships -- what it does is say, for example, the navy is down to 2 transports,
so it can now only carry 500 infantry troops, 5/8 of the original troops --
so I assign losses of 3/8 to each type of troop and see what I have left.
Okay, on my 2 remaining transports I now have a total of 250 HI and 250 AR, 500
infantry, check.
Also note that all characters in the navy are effectively travelling on the
very last transport to get sunk. So if that transport survived, no matter
how many other ships were lost, all characters will survive and the transport
will have all the troops it started with.
In the case of a navy with 100 troops, you could have 100 transports and
lose 99 of them, and the 100 troops would miraculously be on the one remaining
transport. Look at it this way -- that is the fleet flagship, and all other
ships in the navy know that they must protect that ship at all costs, even if
it means getting sunk themselves.
NOTE by the way that if you have two navies sailing together, even if they
follow the exact same path, they count as separate navies for encounter
purposes. I once had that situation exactly, where one navy had lots of warships
and a single transport, and another navy was all transports. They were
travelling 'together', mostly for protection against other player-nation navies,
but they cut across a short distance of open seas, and I was unlucky, my
no-warships navy had an encounter with pirates and lost three transports.
Fortunately one of the transports was empty but the second was partially full and the
third was full -- so I did lose some troops, ended up with 3 fewer
transports but all the remaining transports were full of troops still. If I had been
sailing all as one navy, then I would have instead lost 3 warships --
assuming that one navy got the encounter. (With two navies passing through open
seas, two separate chances for encounters -- I just got unlucky and had it with
the navy without warships.)
Hey Sverre, this wouldn't be an Outsiders navy in game 42 we're asking about
here, would it? 
Nice job saving the Runhirim from a whole pile of Rab
H troops! (But fighting a navy of all transports probably wasn't as much fun
as smashing some warships too, I bet...)
With respect to carrying capacity, cavalry and infantry can mix just fine,
and in fact they do. What you do is as another reply implied. Divide you
cavalry by 150, your infantry by 250, keeping all fractions, and add the two
numbers together, that is how many transports you will fill. Say you have 500
HC, 200 LC, 1100 HI, 100 LI, 100 AR, 100 MA. You don't need to figure out who
is on which ships. You have 700 cavalry and 1400 infantry. 700/150 =
~4.67. 1400/250 = 5.6. Total transports needed = ~4.67 + 5.6 = ~10.27. So that
force would totally fill 10 transports, an 11th transport would be ~27% full,
and any additional transports would be empty. Of the 11 transports that had
troops in them, the troops would be divided proportionately among the
various types of troops. The math might be too complicated to worry about in this
example --but it doesn't matter. All you need to know is you need at least
11 transports to carry them. In this particular example, you would need 11
even if the troop types didn't mix -- but they do, and you don't need to worry
about a transport full of HC being sunk while a a transport of all light
troops remains afloat, because 'all the troops are divided equally', sort of.
All the program will do if you lose ships is figure out how many ships you have
left, what is their total carrying capacity, and subtract the lost carrying
capacity proportionately from all troop types.
Hope that clarifies matters for you and any other budding Nelsons out
there... -- Ernie III
In a message dated 11/10/2007 9:42:07 AM Eastern Standard Time,
ovatha88@hotmail.com writes:
Sverre:
Losses are distributed amongst the transports equally. So the fleet would
disband.
Ed
_sverreme@yahoo.sverre_ (mailto:sverreme@yahoo.noDate) : Sat, 10 Nov 2007
14:49:16 +0100Subject: Vedr. [mepbmlist] ME Naval question
One more naval question. If a navy in open sea haslets say 101 troops,10W
10T, and loose a transport toa seasearpent or pirates. Then the troops should
bereduced to 91. Will this happend or will the number oftroops remain 100 as
long as there is one transportleft? If the navy is disbanded what will happend
withthe characters with the navy in the open sea?Sverre--On_RFmehl@aol.com_
(mailto:RFmehl@aol.com) skrev:> Can naval transports carry both infantry and
at the same time?> > ie, if I have an "odd" number of HI/HC so that
need one of my transports to > carry a mix of inf/cav, will the program
allow this?> > or does each transport have to be exclusively inf or> cav?> >
> > ************ **** **** ***> See what's new at >
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