At the beginning, I meant: the first few turns of Uoti :D I used to do that "what if" when I was learning. Most of it i'd done in SP. If we start a vanilla campaign I won't need to do it. Or a SS one. But when I started playing here I had zero experience with Britannia or FN. I tried a lot of the stuff in SP vs the AI. I went around and started with each faction in SP to take a look at their units, terrain and settlements.

From then on I've mostly attacked when I would know beforehand that "yes, bringing such and such armies to the front will mean I win". The logistics of moving units can't be fixd via loading, sine it takes more than one turn to consolidate a stack, and positioning plays a key role.

Sometimes I've retreated out of caution, then I upload the save, and then something gnaws at me and I try to attack just in case. But that doesn't happen any more, I pretty much have all the info I need on the basic army strength in AR, of unit composition etc. And with my new job ihardly have the time to play M2TW scientist.

My overall view is that it's pretty obvious who is a good player and who has more to learn. I consider myself the latter, while some of the vets here are in the former. Who wins and who loses a hotseat may not always be because of their skill. Sometimes people just get unlucky or fall short in diplomacy. Or there's greedy neighbors who just want thieir stuff and that's that :D

Realoading naval battles - well I didn't know that. But I tend to run the hell away if i see more ships vs me, especially if i have an army on board. I do the same in SP.
BTW the stakes thing happens in SS. It happened to me as England in SP when I attacked some Irish rebels who had Yeomen arhcers. Ouch...