How to protect your transports

[Tycondero]

1.05, playing as Austria-Hungary in the first (1890) campaign. How do you prevent the sinking of the merchant fleet? I currently just hope to keep my merchant shipping numbers up by constantly building a lot of transport capacity. Is there a better way to prevent enemies from sinking transports each month? 

I have seen that you can give task forces the protect role, but how does this work/what works best? Is it better to spread out and have multiple small task forces or one big (large radius) task force and assume it protects all shipping within the radius? 

Also, are non-task force ships (i.e. in being or sea control from your harbor) still of any use in protecting your convoys/transports?

[Norbert Sattler]

Ships in harbour still do help to protect transports, but not as well as they used to (not that they did that well in the past either).

Taskforces have the advantage that you can send them to where your transports are being sunk.

In Austria Hungary's case, in my experience the Taskforces only help if I send them far enough south to be about level with Sicily... but at the cost of the French pretty much immediately pouncing on them with rather large flotillas and the British occasionally doing the same, so make sure they are either capable of defending themselves agains that, or fast enough to escape.

Also right now it leaves you vulerable to the bug where the wrong faction gets the VP for a battle, since you'll be tangling not just with the Italians but all three Entente members, effectively tripping the chance to be hit by the bug...

[Candle_86]

So something I noticed is get Austria to send its ships to Scilily that spot between North Afirca and Scicily, it locks down the Italian and French forces from getting to the eastern med all together.