Anyway, ordered a copy of Captaincy from wargamevault and though I'm guessing it may have a steep learning curve I'm really looking forward to giving it a try soon.
They do so fairly simply and abstractly by allowing a ship to roll a handful of dice each turn to represent the features of the wind. There may be a general prevailing wind but each ship is in effect its own microclimate, as Carnahan described it.
They also treat the sea and wind as real forces in their own right - a more complex "terrain" than the land, for military purposes, rather than a big blue featureless plain.
These rules can model some of those tense chases from the Aubrey-Maturin series, where you want to pile on sail to gain speed but risk having a spar blown away.
So many actual naval actions and so many of O'Brian's most memorable passages focus on very asymmetrical match-ups, one ship trying to escape another, yet games tend to focus on very symmetrical battles between ships of the line and/or dueling frigates.
And this is something I've never found before in a game. Obviously plenty measure wind direction and ship characteristics but in this one you really have to think to be able to aim your guns and avoid hazards.
I know very little about sailing, as one can probably tell by the misuse of nautical terms above, but it felt like a passage from a Patrick O'Brien book (say, Desolation Island) or when he's trying to run a gauntlet into a harbor.
I needed speed to turn into the wind, but if I moved fast I would smash into the rock ahead of me. Finally I picked up a gust and briefly lost full control of my ship, but in doing so I slipped leeward away from the rock on my left and was able to cruise past it.
It was hairy. I turned into the wind to get some distance between my hull and those jagged rocks to leeward, but by doing so I turned into the wind, lost speed and handling, and started to slip to my right and get blown towards the very peril I was trying to avoid.
I didn't have an opponent, so my task was to sail a frigate between two rocks with the wind coming at me from 90 degrees, aka on my beam. In the photo, the ship started several inches to the left of its present position, facing to the right of the screen.