I am not sure however that the modelisation of ship damage is so accurate : the rules trade off realism for the sake of simplicity.
Trust me Francis, I do indeed know where you are coming from.
I think there are two problems with it - criticals are too rare, and above waterline damage and fire damage both sink vessels too easily, though a burnt out vessel the sinks in command at sea may still be floating in real life - but it would be completely useless by this point.
EDIT - Let me add a third issue I have. Armor rating are not specific enough for me. They are limited pretty much to either belt (horizontal) and deck (vertical), ecen for turrets. And to get this it averages the armor from a the various locations in a weighted average. Plus armor penetration has no randomness - it either does or does not penetrate. Of course as non-penetrating hits still do 1/2 damage, when most studies have shown a penetrating hit inflicts about 3 times the damage, it compensates a bit for it's all or nothing penetration rules in this manner.
BTW - Check out Seas of War sometimes. It's a good product if you like detail, but more playable than Seekrieg. It has a few glitches as well to fix as any game does, and of course it's not packaged as well as Command at Sea, but it's free and suprisingly accurate and detailed in many ways.
So I understand the games shortcomings as a model of damage.
However, as I mentioned, their below water damage figures, most notably torpedo damage seem pretty accurate as a damage model. The only area where I see much of a shortcoming is you will not get a strike like the torpedo the Prince of Wales took. But for how many torpedoes generally can be taken before a vessel sinks it's pretty accurate.
I'm familiar with Seekrieg, more familiar with Seekrieg 4. But more detail does not always mean more accuracy. Seekrieg 4 used linear damage models tied to displacement, which are not an accurate model. I'm not sure if Seekrieg 5 follows this same linear model.
But with Command at Sea and a one Japanese Aerial torpedo, you will get some damage points and a bit of flooding that should be easy to correct, and if really unlucky another critical (maybe an 18% chance), that has about a 3% chance of jamming the rudder, a 1% chance of an engine room explosion, a 1% of one of the magazines going up, and the most common result being additional flooding or engineering damage causing a small fire and reduction of speed.
While Command at Sea lacks detail however, it's overall results from ow many torpedoes it take to sink a vessel barring something like the Prince of Wales Torpedo are pretty accurate.
Again, detail does not always mean accuracy in the big scheme of things, though it might be more "fun"
And it's pretty accurate using this to compare the damage taking capabilities from one vessel to another in the broad scheme of things.