I've just played all of the battles, there are 2 tutorials and 2 real battles. Two of them are land, and two of them are sea. The land battles are more realistic then in the previous games, now covering behind buildings and wood really means something. And the amount of strategy that can be made in the sea is simply overwhelming. To me, it looks almost identical to Sid Meier's Pirates, except it's with large scale battles. Everything is there, from adjusting sails, types cannon balls, and steering the ships. It's a bit difficult to do it with many ships at first, but after playing it for the second time, you already get used to it. As for the land battle, I'm quite satisfied with the strategy, and graphics. On my 2.8 dual core, 9600 GT, 2 gig RAM machine I didn't experience any lag even when all the cannons fired at the same time, so if framerate stays like this, I'll have no objections to the real time battles. Now I just need to see the changes made to the campaign.