Each of your galleys is forty meters long and has two masts with lateen sails (with sails being taken down before battle) and a big bronze ram in front. Each ship has a complement of some 180 rowers rowers, twenty non rowing sailors, ten officers and thirty marines. Naval battles have for all of recorded history been a matter of either ramming the enemy ship, boarding enemy ships or setting them on fire. Each of the rowers and sailors has an second hand helmet and either an axe or a boarding pikes. About one in ten of them also has a basic wooden shield, one in twenty has a second hand sword and one in a hundred decided to bring along one of these newfangled handgonnes. Officers have plumed helmets with neck and cheekguards, breastplates, vambraces, greaves and arming swords. The same goes for your enemies. Marines however differ a bit. Both your marines and the enemy marines have chainmail shirts, breastplates, helmets, bucklers, shortswords and warhammers, but you have an edge. Half of your fleet's marines are armed with Yew longbows and are trained longbowmen. In contrast a third of the enemy's marines have arbalest crossbows. These guys have a lower effective range than your guys do and a much lower rate of fire. It is believed by the men that this would have provided you with a critical advantage. The fleet is divided into four flotillas which are sub-divided into five squadrons of five ships. For fleet communication there is a system in place using flags, some flags have commands and other flags are letters.
The Scoutships are also galleys but are smaller and lighter, having a single mast and a crew of forty rowers, five sailors and an officer with a spyglass. They are lightly built, have no rams and are not intended for direct battle. Their purpose is to scout out enemy formations and to act as couriers.
You believe that the enemy will be in Sharktooth Bay and so you sail south to intercept them. After ten days at sea you arrive. You find them there, but your scout ships discover that they have made an upgrade to some of their galleys. They have reported that they have built wooden battlements on the fronts of about a quarter of their galleys, in which they have put some cannons. Cannons are a fairly new idea that has only come up in the last century and have been used to defend and attack castles. The idea of using cannons on galleys had been discussed by your nation's admiralty, but was declined because of general conservatism, added costs and fears of explosions, either in the cannons themselves or in the powder magazines. Each of the cannon armed ship has one to three cannons firing two to three kilogram shot. The cannons are manned by sailors.
This is the position of your fleet and the enemy fleet. The enemy has not sallied forth from the bay as of yet. Each box has 25 ships in it. Your ships are white, their guys are red. Your command ship is in the the rear of your formation, as is the enemy's.
![Image](http://i425.photobucket.com/albums/pp338/Imperator-Zor/0e462718-3436-4121-98ef-55f916cf80a4_zps8d20jntv.jpg)
What do you do?
Zor