Agree with your thoughts wholeheartedly Eric!

I enjoy the historical nature of things, and battles are rarely often fought between two equal sides. In fact, reading through many of the Napoleonic sea battles - many commanders only wanted to engage when they had significant advantage, in anything but that, they'd run.

The downside in this is that a lot of the historical battles are very lopsided in terms of the engagement - I've seen lots of things where it's four English frigates versus a single French frigate and a brig. Or three or four SOLs against a couple frigates.

I think a lot of this depends on the personality of the gamer - are you trying to play a game where you both have an equal chance of destroying the opponents army (i.e. points based armies), or are you the type who wants to delve a bit more into the realism of warfare where sides are almost always not created equal. As mentioned, you can tailor the victory conditions so it's not just win by sinking all the enemy ships, but merely surviving five rounds or something else to give players a more equal shot at "winning".