A few more naval questions

1 - is the amy limit to how many men i can sqeeze onto a ship? Can a load 10000 men onto a sloop? I hasen't happned to me yet but i presume if i lose ships from a convoy I lose the men i am transporting...is it some sort of proportional loss?

2 - any way to see more detail about the damage you are doing or receiving in ship battles? Ships seem to go from hull damage to sunk rather suddenly

3 - is there any relationship between the tasks the sailors perform and the reload times - for instance if im working the sails and ive lost a lot of men does it take them longer to reload?

Thanks

i only know the first one. you mean on the campaign map? yes, you can squeeze a 20stack army onto a single sloop. If it gets attacked and it sinks, you lost all your men though. So if you are doing a trip of more than one turn, best to make it a decent fleet. or scout ahead

1. I think that the concept is that the troops are carried on troop ships and the fleet that you supply is the protection force for those troop ships. So as eXistenZ says, a single sloop can protect a full stack army at sea. AFAIK, as along as there is a single ship protecting the convoy, all of the troops are safe...I've never lost a ship as part of a troop convoy, so I can't say for sure.

2. All you can do is look at the marker above the ship and check the bars corresponding to the sides and sails. With regard to sinking, (judging from the stat tables) there appears to be a mechanism for flooding & pumping water from the ship, so once the damage exceeds a certain threshold more water comes in than can be pumped and the ship is doomed to sink. That would appear to explain why ships that had surrendered and were no longer being fired upon would still sink later in the battle.

3. The ship's crew is divided into 3 - the sailors, the gunners and the marines - typically there are two gunners per gun and then the rest of the crew is divided between sailors and marines. As the gunners are killed, the number of available guns drops. Since guns are prone to mis-fire it's difficult to judge the direct effect on reloading. In theory, if you kill all of the sailors, the ship should no longer be able to make way. However, I've never seen that happen and I have seen enemy ships maneuvering and changing sail with just a single sailor left (looking at the post battle stats in the save game).