It's a quick play set. Not realistic, but fun. Appeals to people who don't want to get into the details of how square-rigged ships moved and fought (all that stuff about whether you deploy your crew to set sails or man guns, firing on the up roll and so on).
I've used it with both 1:600 scale and the 1:2400 tumbling dice models.
Also easily convertible to a square grid.
The only house rule we used was that the result which has a ship blowing up we converted to 3 damage tokens; that stops an undamaged ship of the line being destroyed by one lucky shot.