The nasty thing may be that it is not possible, with state of the art technology, to do 17th Century battles with a game

The owner of a small game company that does a good bit of business in the more modern naval wargaming arena wrote about the issues involved with larger numbers of ships, even on his 3GHz+ machine with 2GB of RAM. The problem is that a game can't keep up with the necessary "frame rate" with more than something like 50 ships. I guess that Privateers Bounty being able to handle something like 82 ships is doing better than you might expect. There are several battles (the Battle of the Gabbard and the Battle of Scheveningen, as well as the Battle of Lowestoft) where there were more than 200 ships present. That is clearly beyond the realm of possibility, given where we currently are, with technology. To do even what Privateers Bounty does, it is necessary to use low-vertex count models that rely upon their skins more than on the detail in the model. I suspect that the situation will get better, but we are a ways off from being able to do the large battles. I have wondered if the reduced speed in age of sail combat might help the size issue, but I am not sure that it is true. The raw numbers seem to be an issue, and the amount of calculations involved, regardless of the movement.