Take control of a single sailing vessel or an entire fleet in this Age of Discovery era Naval Warfare simulator. The player can begin a single player campaign as either the British, French or Americans or take to the Internet in a client-to-client multiplayer. This was not a simple game, as it required able handling of the sails and knowledge of sailing in order to bring your ship up to anything resembling fighting shape. Firing could be controlled with a simple "fire all" option or one could command each cannon to fire one at a time by clicking on its icon on the ship outline. Reloading a single cannon would take around a minute, with each reloaded cannon allowing more crew to load the rest. One also had to keep his crew in fighting shape with proper leadership, as a poorly commanded Ship would be mutinied by the crew, thus losing command and the battle.
A new addition to Age of Sail 2 was the inclusion of Land objectives. Sometimes the player was tasked with bombarding a shore-based fortress or running a blockade on a port. In the opposite direction, there were some battles on the open sea involving more than 40 different ships at a time.
There was no open world with which to explore, only encounters to be selected from a list of famous battles or throughout the normal course of the campaign. The inbetween was handled with a schematic of the ship in port for repairs and a text box for mission brieifings and crew assignments. Specialists could be brought onboard to boost specific functions, as a reward for near perfection in campaign missions.
This game had a huge fan following and the majority of updates were created by the community after Akella moved on to newer titles soon after release.
In the few years following its release it saw extreme devotion to the game as mods and updates were continuously created by the community to solve stability issues and add in promised features that were never fully finished by Akella.
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