You raise a good point. In fact this is why I've always maintained that Age of Sail wargames that model battle scenarios starting at or just before contact are missing or ignoring 80% of what determines victory or defeat.
IMHO, these missing factors fall into three categories:
1. Training, Experience and Morale
2. Operational Combinations
3. Maneuver to contact
The first is obvious and requires a layer, perhaps abstracted, above ships and guns and tactics and weather conditions. Some games have tried to simulate this with crew quality factors, which are typically fixed to an historical perspective. In other words, there is no opportunity for a player, over time, to recognize the deficiency and make whatever trade-offs are felt to be necessary and proper to address it.
The second, simply stated, is the ability to put the right assets in the right place at the right time... and, of course, to frustrate an opponent's attempts to do the same. Nelson's pursuit of Villeneuve, across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back, and the separate blockade of Ganteaume's fleet at Brest, as an example of the latter, is what ultimately frustrated Napoleon's plans to gain naval superiority in the channel and launch his invasion against England. On a tactical level, where most games of this genre live, it led directly to the (relatively) smaller and more manageable actions (such as Cape Finisterre) preceding and including Trafalgar, where the defeat (in detail) of the Franco-Spanish forces was a foregone conclusion.
Yes, hindsight is wonderful, but it doesn't alter the influence of contributing factors or the historical outcomes.
The third is where the fleets maneuver, sometimes for days, to gain a favorable position prior to the actual engagement. We are all familiar I'm sure with the concept of the "weather gauge", but in a squadron or fleet context, the ability to accept or decline combat (the purpose of achieving that particular tactical position) is only one of the considerations. The affects of wind and sea on the ability of a line to utilize it's full armament is another (ships holding the lee gauge in heavy weather were oft times able to use their lower deck armament while those with the weather gauge were not). And still another reason to desire the lee gauge has to do with objectives. The goal was not always destruction of the opponent's assets in the immediate vicinity.
Due to these factors I would argue, that historically, in many or most cases, fleet actions were already won and lost before the first shot was fired.
JD