Quote Originally Posted by SirGrotius
I would like naval battles if you could actually control armies on ships and have boarding actions and the like.

Just kidding!

Naval battles should be abstracted unless we want a lot of silliness.
Don't laugh, I would want exactly that. Ramming, boarding actions, wind effects, fires, etc. But I also know that it would be extremely difficult to code properly, the onship path-finding would be atrocious, bugs galore, and in the end the advantage would go to the human player and the enemy fleets would be swept from the seas by smaller, more economical, human fleets using better tactics (i.e. exploiting bugs and a poor AI).

If they could make (or better yet, co-opt an existing one) a proper engine for naval battles, I would love it. The auto-calc ship battles of MTW and RTW always wound me up, since I could never figure out what was really going on, and always "knew" that I could do better. But I also understand the reality of the situation. Spend the time and money making the rest of the game great.