delatbabel
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Joined: 7/30/2006
From: Sydney, Australia
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The problem with adding fog of war for fleets to the game, regardless of the historical accuracy, is that the game becomes very short and brutal. France loads its ports up with a fleet and a corps each. Britain doesn't know the sizes of those fleets, and so stacks essentially random ships into fleets in the blockade boxes. France tries a blockade run on each port, one or two (the one which France has actually stacked large numbers of ships into the fleets) succeeds and Britain is over-run by French troops in Jan 1805. Rinse, lather, repeat. Game over essentially as the allies on the continent can't fight on without British money. This is obviously a highly ahistorical situation -- it never happened and never really could happen, for various reasons.
Several issues need to be considered:
* The British navy had a pretty good idea of French ship dispositions in the Atlantic ports. Sail a few sloops close enough in to shore and count the masts. Out in the open waters of the mediterranean or the open seas fog of war may well apply (and in those cases the evasion rules pretty much cover it), but in terms of counting the masts in Le Havre or La Rochelle, it was simple enough.
* The game doesn't really allow fleets to "react" to blockade runs as actually happened in period. In reality, the RN didn't have a lot of ships on blockade duty. It had a number of small, fast, light, and easily manouverable frigates, sloops and cutters mostly manning the blockade, and a set of signals that allowed the bulk of the navy, stationed in the channel or at Spithead, to react quickly to any attempted blockade run. The process of a large ship leaving port is a difficult and time consuming one (from the time you start sending monkeys up the mast to cross the yards, which in itself is easily spotted from offshore), and a fleet stationed a few dozen miles away can easily be across the port leads before you actually get underway in any serious numbers.
* The process of leaving port, especially when there is a blockade to run, is actually quite difficult. It's a complex enough procedure in a modern sailing vessel which has a diesel engine down below, but trying same in a 17th / 18th C line of battle warship, with no engine and no oars, takes some serious skill. More importantly, the wind needs to be blowing exactly the right way, and except in the case of the Mediterranean and Baltic ports, tides have to be judged. So in reality a blockading fleet knows pretty much exactly when (time and date) a blockade can potentially be run at various ports, and be standing off at those times, while conserving sail and energy for the times when a blockade run isn't a possibility. In a good number of the French ports depicted on the map, notably those along the Atlantic coast south of Brest, those conditions of favourable wind and tide often didn't eventuate for months at a stretch. The British almost never blockaded La Rochelle -- the Atlantic winds and Bay of Biscay sailing conditions usually did that job for them.
* Finally, even given the right conditions of wind and tide, a fleet leaving port is seriously at a disadvantage to a blockading fleet -- more than the "auto wind gauge" allowed by EiA would suggest. In simple terms, each ship leaving port has to expose itself to a broadside, initially a bow rake and then, assuming the blockading ships have enough windage to come about, secondly up the stern, to pretty much the entire blockading fleet. If you've got even a moderate number of line of battle ships ready on the blockade, only the heaviest of your blockade running ships are going to survive that to actually make it into battle.
In reality it's pretty much impossible for a fleet to run a blockade without getting spotted and then nailed. If you have sufficient wind and weather conditions to disrupt the blockading fleet (which actually did happen quite a bit) then you also have sufficient wind and weather conditions to make leaving port impossible. If you have good wind and clear weather, then you can leave port easily enough, but every ship within any kind of range is going to see you doing so, and they'll be onto you (as we say down here) like a seagull onto a sick prawn. So naval evasion doesn't really apply to ships in or leaving port, and neither does fog of war.
Your example of Nelson's pursuit of the French is not a particularly good example, as it happened at sea not in port, and doesn't really confirm anything about sizes and locations of fleets not being known (certainly not in port). In terms of fleet strength -- both sides were pretty much exactly sure of the other side's naval strength based on counting the ships that had left port (or counting the ships that were there a week ago and subtracting the ones that were still there), and it was for that reason alone Brueys was running and Nelson was chasing.
In game turns the French got a couple of good evasion rolls in, until Aboukir Bay of course at which point they failed the evasion roll, Nelson got the wind gauge, and then the combat dice favoured the British as well.
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