I recently ran a few tests and noticed a possible reason why naval battles are sometimes so chaotic and unresponsive. It's the mechanics that allows a ship to be boarded by multiple enemies. On paper it sounds great: that's after all the way naval battles had been fought for thousands of years. But there are some issues:

There is a difference between boarding ships and those which are boarded. Melee combat will occur on ship which is boarded, while the attacker's ship is largely deserted. Now's the important point: while the process takes place, the boarding (attacking) ship could NOT be boarded by a third one. Imagine: you have two ships and AI has one. He's quicker than you so your first ship is being boarded. Naturally you would send your second ship to help by attack-clicking the enemy's ship. The command is registered and your second ship would ram itself into the side of the AI's galley. But it cannot send troop across and ends up sitting there doing nothing. You know the scenario: one of your ship stay idle during battle defying your constant order to attack a foe right in front of it.

There is also a limit on how many ships could simultaneously attack an enemy one. In Rome 2, it's 3; in Attila 4 (I still need more tests to confirm these numbers). So if you send 5 ships against one and make sure that you're the one who boards, there would still be at least one ship refuses attacking.

A third issue is that, strange as it might sound, you could not board a routing ship. You can still give order, but your ship will harmlessly bounce off the fleeing enemy like a tennis ball. The worse scenario would be: for some reason the enemy cannot flee (e.g. a big ship stands in front of it). It will stay dead in the water and so are the obedient ships that you send to pursue.

All in all, I have following suggestions:

- Drop the multiple boarding mechanics. Return to the good old S2TW's practice where boarding is an 1 vs. 1 matter.
- Somehow force ships to fight to the death. It's realistic anyway, as it is almost impossible for the defeated crew to think that their victorious foes would simply return to their ship, allowing them to run away.
- Remove the ramming ships. Seriously, they ruined R2's naval battles more than anything else.