As a counterpoint and potential balancing consideration, early carriers would have severe limitation including limited number of planes, bad plane and torpedo/bomb performance (duds), and low accuracy
One of the reasons they're not planning on doing historical battles is the fact that they'd have to recreate historical ships and would prefer to avoid that so it's unlikely they'll do that for campaign.
Sometimes it seems like it's possible to out run the rotation speed of your turrets. If an enemy ship is dead in the water and you're passing it at high speeds your guns can't rotate fast enough to keep on target.
There are secondary gun positions on the Armored Cruiser IV which don't support even a single barrel 2 inch gun. It seems like the border might be too close for them to be usable.
That seems to have corrected the issue, the launcher is back to showing PLAY even after restarting. The other odd thing that happened was the launcher had forgotten my email/password even though I told it to Remember Me but that's working now as well.
After restarting my computer this morning the launcher now has INSTALL instead of PLAY as the option. I checked the game directory and it's still there but launching directly from the build.exe closes after showing the splash screen.