During medieval navy wars, there was a lot of smoke and noise from cannon fire. The weather was sometimes stormy. The visibility and sound wouldn’t have been that good. How were they able to command ships during such conditions and keep updated with rapidly changing events during battle?
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The main ship of the fleet where the person in charge of the fleet resides (today an admiral) is called the “Flagship” because ships communicated with literal flags.
There would be a codebook with quick messages and an agreed set of quick signals to tell the fleet things like “withdraw”. The Flagship needs a generalized plan, but for the most part ships are too slow to respond quickly especially when the brawls start happening so once the battle is going its a series of much smaller 1v1 and 1v2 engagements that go until they’re done or the Flagship requests a withdrawal.
Fleet battles were also relatively small, Trafalgar in 1805 was 73 ships in total. Every ship picked a target and pretty much just dueled that one. The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 is probably the fight with the most mid/large ships with about 400 galleys total but galleys are pretty small and only have like 2-8 cannons so there isn’t much smoke and each ship has relatively limited combat capabilities so nothing changes abruptly
Captains of ships end up with a lot of liberties in the actual tactical decisions because they are so isolated and so restricted in movement that its impractical to try to micromanage the battle, the ships can’t effectively respond to commands in less than a few minutes.
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