Some thoughts and insights from my notes that I somehow forgot to write up the first time:
Galleons, Barquentines and Carracks have eerily similar average planned route lengths, suggesting the Admiralty treat these three ship types as interchangeable in their planning.
This is important because it means that [number of sinkings]/[number of trips taken] is an unusually selection-bias-proof estimator of sinkability for everything but Dhow.
This estimator says pretty clearly that Galleons>Barquentines>Carracks.
However
The Admiralty keeps recklessly sending ships into hexes at risk of reefs, kraken, icebergs and WMF. Since my chosen routes dodge all of these (though I didn’t notice I was icebergproof until other commenters pointed out the seasonality effect), the main questions become how Galleons handle the remaining threats (pretty well), and how frequently they encounter them (. . . whoops!).
And also
I have to plot routes which are unusually long: if Galleons handle marathons worse than sprints, that’s a problem.
Unrelatedly:
Dhows appear to handle a lot of long-tailed encounters (especially WMF) better than Carracks, but I think it’s a statistical trick of the light. When faced with an extreme situation, they die and can’t report how much damage they took; this skews damage/encounter ratings in their favor.
The one place where they genuinely do appear to handle a threat significantly better than Carracks on a by-hitpoint basis is with Merfolk.
The ratios of average recorded damage for Merfolk encounters lead me to believe that Merfolk damage is calculated as a percentage of total hull integrity, and not in terms of hitpoints like (all?) other encounters.
Some thoughts and insights from my notes that I somehow forgot to write up the first time:
Galleons, Barquentines and Carracks have eerily similar average planned route lengths, suggesting the Admiralty treat these three ship types as interchangeable in their planning.
This is important because it means that [number of sinkings]/[number of trips taken] is an unusually selection-bias-proof estimator of sinkability for everything but Dhow.
This estimator says pretty clearly that Galleons>Barquentines>Carracks.
However
The Admiralty keeps recklessly sending ships into hexes at risk of reefs, kraken, icebergs and WMF. Since my chosen routes dodge all of these (though I didn’t notice I was icebergproof until other commenters pointed out the seasonality effect), the main questions become how Galleons handle the remaining threats (pretty well), and how frequently they encounter them (. . . whoops!).
And also
I have to plot routes which are unusually long: if Galleons handle marathons worse than sprints, that’s a problem.
Unrelatedly:
Dhows appear to handle a lot of long-tailed encounters (especially WMF) better than Carracks, but I think it’s a statistical trick of the light. When faced with an extreme situation, they die and can’t report how much damage they took; this skews damage/encounter ratings in their favor.
The one place where they genuinely do appear to handle a threat significantly better than Carracks on a by-hitpoint basis is with Merfolk.
The ratios of average recorded damage for Merfolk encounters lead me to believe that Merfolk damage is calculated as a percentage of total hull integrity, and not in terms of hitpoints like (all?) other encounters.