There's no grog like a naval grog
Warships have always been the most complex war machines every made at their particular point in time. As such, they've always been incredibly expensive, so there has always been way fewer of them than any other type of military hardware. This has also always meant that admirals have been raised believing you have to very careful with your fleet (you're not going to get another one), unless you're sure you can win the war Right Now.
All this has always meant that naval battles are few compared to land or air battles. More importantly for grogdom, such battles as were fought were more likely to have been indecisive. ...
A very good point. Going back to my table top WW1 campaign, as CinC Grand Fleet, there was a problem in the game objectives. The HSF managed twice or three times to catch my pre-dreadnoughts on their own. I helped him, by using them as bait! (I think the umpire was 'nudging' encounters to stop me ending the campaign in the first 2 months of the war - not having much disincentive to be at sea en mass, the GF was always close but 'just too far away!'). Having lost about half a dozen pre-dreads, for maybe 1 of the HSF, I still felt very happy- the GF was getting stronger as ships completed, and the HSF wasn't (or at least only slowly). There were peripheral benefits such as one engagement between our BCs in early 1915, where I finally got a BC (VdT I think), but the main thing was he had 30 of the most modern DDs excorting them, but not enough CLs. This would have been a good idea, except my sub-commander (commanding the Harwich force of 8 CL, and lots of DDs) got yelled at for 'doing a Nelson' and sailing his force through my line without orders as the German DDs lined up for a smoke screen to cover the Ge withdrawl. I had to appologise for calling him an idiot! Result: my BC firing masked for 10 minutes, but a massacre of the Germans - only one German DD made it off the table (under a copy of the rules IIRC: the umpire ruled that it was the North Sea, and obviously there was a sea mist. We just muttered 'cheats'!). Anyway, to return to the point: after what was 3:1 to HSF in terms of engagements, I was still in possession of the GF, was not under any circumstances going to split it, and it was hence just a matter of time before I caught the HSF at sea, or the Ge player realised that going to sea was pointless. I did not have any real concerns for my minor ships, so long as the GF was intact, and hence the early part of the war was very much more active than RL. I was not really inhibited by anything except loss of Dreads, and mitigated that by never going to sea with less than the full fleet.
To explain my point (at last!). There is a problem with victory conditions for Jutland and North Sea WW1 games in general. There must be some sort of balance between incentive to fight (to make it a 'game'), and victory conditions that don't reward the GF just hammering in, because the inherent superiority means that any vaguely likely complete disaster is likely to be strategically useful. Even losing 1:1 in dreadnoughts is fine in a game, but I don't think the commanders of the RN would have lasted long if Jutland had been something like a 8:8 'draw'. Strategically, that is very effective however (HSF now close to 50% of it's size, GF still 66%+). Even in a single short mini campaign like Jutland, there needs to be something to counter the 'death or glory' approach in the mind of the RN commander. I am a strong believer that the RN ships must not be 'doctored' to make them less effective for game balance. You need to create the real uncertainty in Jellicoe's mind ('the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon'). Something in the victory conditions must hinder the RN - any result that swings the balence of naval power in Ge favour must be a huge German win. There must be something that discourages the RN just pressing on regardless. If you could wire up the game to give an electric shock each time a RN dreadnought gets hit, that would do it! Or more realistically, count RN losses as 10x German ones or something.
In fact the real result must be seen as no better than a draw to the RN in 'game terms', even though strategically it was a win. This was largely due to the HSF realsing how lucky they were not to get more badly beaten rather than the pure losses. In terms of relative effect on the fighting power of the real result, the RN could (and did) just shrug it off and come out stronger: it changed the design of the Hood for a start (for the better).
Sorry for the length, but ever since the table top campaign, I have puzzled over this, and have not really come up with a solution that doesn't have one or other side deciding the best way to play the game is not to turn up!
(Oh, and ironically, the campaign finished when I finally met the HSF with the GF in summer 1915. The engagement was inconclusive tactically, with many ships damaged on both sides, and at least one German, and one RN explosions. I pulled off, because we were close to the Ge minefields. I had 6 BB at sea the following week and most of my fleet in a month, and the HSF would have been in repair for 1 year plus (due to lack of dry docks, and I had inflicted 60% more damage to his fleet of fewer ships). Thus the campaign closed with a RN victory, and the HSF player would have done better by staying in the pub...