Quote Originally Posted by Zerg View Post
I find the best strategy early on is to sail in a line past the 1st French fleet then stop the fleet when I'm in a position to cross the T of the 2nd fleet which allows most/all of my ships to fire into the disorganised mess of French ships. After that I then have to move the ships around 1 at a time to react to the damage they take and to where the AI sends it ships.
The mind boggles... you can just stop your ships at will, in the middle of the ocean.

That isn't a tactic, it's an exploit of a silly arcade game design. I'm still holding out a remote hope that the actual naval battles in the game will be something different from what we're seeing in the demo. If not, this game had better include an auto-calc'd sea battle that doesn't penalize the player for bypassing sea battles, in order to enjoy the rest of the game.