Dale/Snoopy
Have you given any thought into modifying to how the Ref Navy is calculated? Once the kings ground forces get large enough, additional boats are needed to get them to shore in a timely fashion, however it does not appear that the king builds much for ships unless you build a navy of your own. A small royal navy prevents the player from being inundated with units, but In two seperate games, I have been so concerned with the king not being able to move his large army in time that I built a small navy just to escalate the kings and ensure all units make it to the new world in time to kill them. The forum also has several instances of the royal ships getting stuck, or not delivering the final units. Fixing the AI is a much taller order, but ensuring the king has enough ships to transfer all units in the time remaining while still allowing for bombardment of settlements may help to reduce the problem.
Admittedly, I have not played thru that many games and do not pretend to fully understand the kings REF. Below are just a few thing that pop to mind.
1. Make sure the kings MOW can sail back and forth in one turn. This could be an acquired skill that kicks in with a certain amount of turns left. If a colony can do this early on with a FF, why can't a european super power do it 2/3rds of the way thru? (This may be a moot point if the king can already do this)
2. Use a formula to determine min number of ships. The formula should involve total ground units, total number of ships, ship cargo capacity, ocean travel time, average travel time to the coast and some sort of "efficiency" variable to account for time spent bombarding settlements. The formula should be evaluated to ensure there are enough ships to get all troops to the new world with an arbitrary amount of turns remaining in which to do battle. A possible extension of this would be to ensure there are enough ships to get all units to the new world within a pre-defined time period in stead of just by the end of the game. This would allow starting the WoI early without having to play out all remaining turns just to slowly kill ground units in small waves. To prevent swamping the player in case of a large navy, it may be a little more realistic to stagger the release of a certain percentage of ships over a turn or two. After all, no country can mobilize their entire army instantly.
3. Look at increasing the movement range of a MOW after a certain year for the same reasons listed above.
4. Give the king large faster troop transport ships in addition to MOW. This is a big change, but would be much more period accurate. If this was done, the cargo holds of a MOW could probably be reduced to 2 or 3. This would add another dimension to naval victory by trying to attack the soft merchant vessels while avoiding the heavily armed warships. It would allow a small colonial navy to influence the war in stead of being wiped out while only killing an insignificant number of MOW.
Again, thanks for all you have done for the community.