While automatic firing and circling options allow you simply to set a target and step back as your ships engage, you can choose to get more hands-on, such as turning off autofire to unleash a storm of cannonballs at the perfect moment. It brings to mind Sid Meier’s Pirates! as a strategy game, but with much more realism: the primary goal is to line up as many of your cannons as possible to fire at the right moment. I watch as my British fleets manage to trap the Americans between them, shredding sails and bringing down masts with chain-shot, thinning out the crew with grapeshot, and punching great dirty holes through timbers with dependable solid shot. In an improvement to the grouping systems of previous games, ships can be set not only to group, but to maintain a formation in group. Ships’ destinations are charted with a mouse click, with the goal of manipulating fields-of-fire to line up much-desired broadsides (directing the cannon-laden flanks of your ship toward the enemy). Naval combat works and feels absolutely like a logical extension of Total War’s maximalist mandate.
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