You have to admit, the water looks brilliant. Another great detail is how water splashes up at the front of a ship, and the track ship leaves behind. Even though it misses the variation found in the land battles, it’s still an eye-candy.< br>There are 3 types of ships, namely the Sloop (small), the Frigate (medium) and the Ship of the Line (large.) The larger the ship, the more devastating firepower it has, though the smaller the ship, the faster and more manoeuvrable it is. And you surely want to get away quickly when a Ship of the Line comes side by side by your Sloop. You’re lucky when you’re sailing the same direction as the wind, which will add a great boost to the speed of your ship which should constantly be taken in to account while moving your ship.
You can shoot starboard and larboard separately, and by moving a slider you can narrow the line of sight so your shots will be more precise. There are 3 types of ammo: Cannonball ammo (targets the hull), Grapeshot ammo (targets the crew) and Chain ammo (targets the sails.) Targeting the hull will make the ship to sink, targeting the crew will lengthen the reload time of the cannons and targeting the sails will make the ship immobile.
The type of ammo you use totally depends on the situation. I wouldn’t try targeting the hull of a Ship of the Line with my Sloop, instead I would target the crew so it will lose firepower, or target the sails so it would eventually come to a halt and I can have some fun time turkey shooting.
An important thing is that YOU are the one that has to follow the enemy ship and not vice versa, because otherwise your ship will surely take damage when trying to get behind it again. Being behind the enemy ship will make it much easier to get it in your line of sight, and it isn’t difficult either to stay behind it, that’s why this is so important. You might as well try boarding the enemy ship and take it over. The success of such operation totally depends on the size of the crew you are going to face.
The thing I missed in the engagements where you control a big fleet (6 is the maximum) was a Pause & Command option. Luckily I’m not really a fan of this option as it takes away the speed and excitement. However I found it pretty hard to control 3 ships at the same time.

Apart from the campaign mode you can also choose to play quick battles, historic battles and multiplayer mode. In the quick battles you can choose to play on any of the battle maps. You’ll be asked to choose an Empire for the attacking and the defending side, where you can assign troops to. Each unit costs a certain amount of money and as you expected, you have a limited budget. You can as well auto-buy units by the computer. Then you can also adjust the experience level of a certain unit and enable certain advancements which will for example enable the square formation.
This preview build contains 5 historic battles, being the battle of Waterloo, of Friedland, of Austerlitz, of Salamanca and of the Pyramids. All these battles will reflect the “as exact as the game engine allows it” layout, original settings, composition of the different armies, as they were on the battlefield. This gives a little problem though: sometimes units are scattered around on the battlefield which will make it hard for you to keep track of them. So like in the naval battles a Pause & Command option is sometimes welcome.
After all the single play you might want to prove yourself in the multiplayer mode. Connecting can be done through LAN, an IP address or GameSpy. You can play all the land battles, sea battles and historic battles from the game. The maximum amount of players is set to 4, which seems ok to me. I was going to play against my brother, but all of the sudden the coward didn’t want to anymore, so I can’t tell you much more about this mode…