Noob: why ships die so quickly when exploring?

[gettingthere]

I sent out a fleet with an explorer to discover new seas and turned back before damage on any 1 ship got below 50% but none of the 25 ships I sent made it back. It seemed like an exponential decay in damage which I wasn't expecting. is this normal? Should you always turn back when you get to, say, 70% damage or 80%?

Any wisdom welcome here! :)

[Stormfox]

First of all: Exploring without one of the addons that turns it into a mission sucks. It is really micromanagement hell.

That said, never use more than exactly 3 light ships for exploring because you do not need more and they are slightly faster than the other ship types. Anything beyond that is just wasted. Giving them an amiral helps a bit because maneuver rating gives some movement speed.

As you might have noticed, ships outside supply range and on open sea spaces take quite a lot of damage. It is best to only explore 1-2 open sea spaces at a time and then return to heal up before venturing forth again. The further you get from your supply range, the more likely it is that you can only uncover about one fresh space per voyage - that probably means you should call it quits until you have a harbor (cored province of you or a subject) further down where you are exploring.

[grotaclas]

This is normal if you play without the El Dorado DLC(with the DLC, exploring ships dont get attrition, but their range is much more limited). The attrion increases by 1% for each month they are out of port. The wiki has more details, but it is a little outdated: https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Navy#Supply.2C_attrition_and_repair

To explore further, you can get fleet basing rights to repair your ships closer to what you are exploring and you can use only light ships so that they travel faster. Also try to avoid open seas which don't border any land, because they give an additional attrition tick if you enter them

[grognardgary]

Let's see we still lose ships that could haul the Santa maria in their cargo holds. So staying in sight of land is probably a good idea, Also its some what late in the age of sail before they figure out that citrus prevented scurvy. So between malnourishment and hurricanes and the like the amazing thing isn't that they lost a lot of ships at sea early in the age of exploration but that they didn't lose a lot more.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

assign a high maneuver guy as your captain and never explore with more than 1 light ship if you're playing base-game. (ED removes your ability to explore freely, and requires a minimum of 3 ships to do an exploration mission, but also doesn't require any micromanagement).

explore 1 tile at a time and go home if needed. Get fleet-basing rights from nations you discover so you can land and reset your time at sea modifiers, and just keep hopscotching along (I made it all the way to Japan with Portugol's starting explorer), though he tends to die around the Horn of Africa or India on average (or within a few days if very unlucky).

It takes a huge amount of bonus time to explore foggy regions, and additionally you take bonus attrition for non-coastal tiles, so try to stick to the coast-lines as much as possible.