I think that for a game built around island hopping, with a pirateish pacific islander feal the ship to ship combat is very lacking. There are plenty of ship based games that have compabt and could have been emulated, from Sid's Pirates to Age of Sail. The fact that ship combat, while not something that should be a major component of the game, should not take up too much time but should require more than a few keyboard strokes and hoping for luck of the digital dice. Most of the time I don't even bother with the combat, I just charge and board the shop as NOTHING else I do (killing the sails to bombarding the ship with grapeshot) seems to ever actually affect boarding parties.