Seleukos of Olympia

What I like to do is use some destroyers or light cruisers to divert the attention of the enemy battleships. Let them try to hit my fast little escorts from a distance and maybe zigzag to avoid some long range torpedoes. If an escort gets hit, they're cheap anyway. Meanwhile, my own battleships focus their firepower on theirs, so they can cripple them before taking much damage in return. This is useful when facing more or more advanced battleships than I've got in the particular battle.

I noticed some missing flags (Croatia, Tibet, Xinjiang) but I can't recall if I had checked those countries before and if they had flags then. Tibet and Xinjiang are landlocked, so they're not important, but Croatia is my ally and it's weird seeing that blank placeholder flag everywhere.

It's also been my experience that submarines are weirdly efficient at countering enemy submarines, at least in a game I've been playing with a 1930 start. Is it realistic? No. Is it practical? Eh, I guess.

Does government type have any effect on the game, other than cosmetic?

"The only time a submarine beat the Royal Navy's destroyer screen". Ironically, the very next year a German submarine would sink the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, on its way to Malta, when it was surrounded by no less than 32 destroyers and other escorts. These things happened. They just didn't happen every month. And the submarines, in those two cases at least, were 1940 models, so much newer than the capital ships they sunk.

Yeah, battles have definitely improved.

It wasn't an issue in the last version before 1.4. I played on it extensively and the AI only ran away when it was heavily outmatched - and sometimes not even then.

I had been playing on a pre-1.4 version until now, because I had a campaign going and didn't want to lose my saves there before I could play it out as much as I wanted. I finally updated the game today and tried "Dreadnoughts vs Modern Cruisers", a naval academy mission that was fiendishly difficult in the previous version, because the AI could massively outspend and outgun the player. I hadn't managed to get anywhere near winning it before, so I thought I'd see how it is in the new version. This time, things appeared more balanced - I was able to design two battleships with advanced tech instead of one, and that give me a very significant fighting chance. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't seem inclined to oblige. It will run away outside not only my firing range but also theirs, and stay there because their ships are faster than mine. And this in a mission where it's stated that the "enemy will never retreat"! There's clearly something amiss.

I wonder if it's a camera positioning effect. The cruiser ought to be around 50% longer than the destroyer for those displacements.

I'm sure I've had over +2000%, but hadn't thought to take a screenshot. The last battle I played, I noticed I was up to 371.8% at one point.

93 hours into the game I've been enjoying my first campaign, but there's one thing in particular that's been irking me: The info panel in the world map contains two lines of completely irrelevant information for that level (since it doesn't affect my actions on the world map) but lacks something I find myself needing to check constantly: shipbuilding capacity. Whenever a ship gets damaged or I accept to build one for an ally I have to check the finances screen to make sure I'm within capacity, otherwise I have to put something on hold because going even a little over capacity can cause long delays in everything else. It would be very handy to have that information on the world map panel. That way it might even be visible whenever someone asks to commission a ship, and I usually have no idea whether it would put me over the limit. On another note - I'm not sure whether it's a UI issue but I'd rather not start another thread for it - whenever I move ships to a port, more often than not they'll end up somewhere very near that port but not in the port itself. I usually have to give them new movement orders to get them to actually move in. Each time, my cursor would be highlighting the port's info panel, which I've been taking to mean that it's selecting the port as its destination. If that's not the case, it may be an actual UI problem if it's giving the wrong impression.

I believe when you click on a tech you can't yet research it highlights the tech you need to unlock it. That's how I found out how to get French re-bored guns.

Good to hear!

After Copenhagen, I now have over 8000 prisoners, costing me over 8000 per turn. I'm already at -48k per turn and have to survive on mission rewards. If they could just vanish, that would be a good thing, financially! I'd sell some Ardent-class ships to remedy my monetary shortfall, but I have no way of knowing how many I'll need in the future.

I've played up to Camperdown so far, and in the past few battles I've faced nothing but Ardent-class third rates - often in large battles with ten or twenty of them on the opposing side. Is that intentional or a placeholder for more varied enemy fleets? Even without adding new classes like the OP suggested, couldn't there be more of the existing classes used, like the Bellona?