Largest frigate/unrated battles?

[Amara]

I'm pulling together a spreadsheet to compare my ship inventory with my needs for major battles of the period: GFOJ, Cape St. Vincent, Camperdown, Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar for Napoleonic, and Ushant, St. Vincent, the Chesapeake and The Saintes for AWI. I think I have a good handle on ships of the line from the aforementioned battles (I'm making the simplifying assumption that if I can do the big battles, I can do the smaller ones), but I just want to make sure that I have enough frigates and sloops to handle interesting squadron battles of those ships.

What were the big engagements involving larger numbers of frigates and/or unrateds? I know about Lissa, and I'll be grouping together the 1812 frigate duels to make sure I have enough to fight those, but what other interesting engagements were mostly smaller ships? Mauritius? The Spanish treasure galleon? What am I missing?

For pure unrated battles, like Lake Erie, Plattsburgh, Valcour Island, and so forth, we're starting to get below what SoG can reliably simulate, but I'd still like to wind up with appropriate ships for use with a different rule set.

[Diamondback]

Susan, my advice is to go to Wikipedia's lists of naval battles and single-ship engagements--I've been nibbling away at those for years myself trying to assimilate and break down the Orders of Battle into a "planning document" to determine most-needed ships to expand the line.

It'll take a lot of fudging, but next year when the third wave comes out you might be able to do Bonhomme Richard vs Serapis (though we need a "randomly shoots alternately at both players" special rule for that psychopath Landais aboard Alliance--me, had I been Jones I woulda offered Captain Pearson a cease-fire along lines of "y'know what, that psycho nut wants to kill us both, what say we set our differences aside long enough to dispose of him"...) Also it'd be a pinch, but you might be able to fake many of the various 1812 Peacock/Wasp/Frolic engagements vs British brigs etc. using Wave 2 Swans. Most of the British frigates that came out losers against the Humphreys 44s were either engineering relatives of or very similar appearance to the Wave 2 Hebes, so that buys you some mileage once Constitution ties up for you too.

Rather noticeably less than ideal, but for showing what the game can do it might work as Quick and Dirty illustration. And actually, I think with a little tuning SGN might work OK with the smaller ships... the rub is, it'd mean creating a variant ruleset that blocks anything bigger than a 4th Rate two-decker, possibly even everything above 5th, out of play entirely.

[Amara]

I'm untroubled by that, actually. I think GMT got it right when they separated Flying Colours and Serpents of the Seas into separate games, with the latter being covered by some extra rules that "zoom in" on individual ships more, in ways that you wouldn't want to bother with when doing one of the big battles with thirty of the line on each side.

[John Paul]

Susan,

Check out:

threedecks.org

Look under the "Actions" heading at the top of the page, as it list every engagement from the 1600s on, you can click on individual actions to get a list of ships involved! It's also a great site for other info!!

[HMS Lydia]

Three decks is the best AoS online reference I have found to date. It has a rather clunky engine, but still jam packed with hard data for all rates, all major nations. Wikipedia is good source also.

[HMS Lydia]

Battle of Tamatave (May 1811) pitted three British frigates and a sloop against 3 French frigates. This is by no means a complete list, but check these out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Naval_battles_of_the_Napoleonic_Wars

[Bligh]

I asked the same question some time ago Susan, and got the reply that there was a four frigate vs four in the Indian ocean. That is the largest I have heard of.
Rob.

[John Paul]

Susan,

Three battles you may be interested in are:

Arethusa vs. Engageante April 23, 1794, Action in the English Channel

British - Arethusa (38), Concorde (36), Flora (36), & Melampus (36): French - Pomone (40), Engageante (36), R'esolve (36), Babet (20)

Indefatigable vs. Medea October 5, 1804, Action off Cape St. Vincent

British - Indefatigable (44), Lively (38), Amphion (32), Medusa (32); Spanish - Medea (40), Clara (34), Fama (34), Mercedes (34)

Action off Madagascar May 20, 1811

British - Racehorse (18), Astraea (42), Galatea (42), Phoebe (44); French - Clorinde (44), Nereide (42), Renommee (42)

[Bligh]

The one I was thinking of Susan was the Madagascar action mentioned by Paul in the last post.
Bligh.

[John Paul]

The one I was thinking of Susan was the Madagascar action mentioned by Paul in the last post.
Bligh.

Bob,

I figured it was the same battle just thought I'd throw in the ships involved as I had them on hand in a scenario I just wrote up for a future game.

[Bligh]

Thanks Paul.
It saved me having to look it out for Susan.
Bligh.