The supply lines you're probably ignoring in Iron Tide Command

Most people who bounce off Iron Tide Command do it in the same place: the second campaign, where the AI starts flanking. We did too, until we realised we'd been treating supply lines as background noise.

Your fleet's effectiveness drops sharply when its supply route is cut, and the AI knows this. It will happily ignore your strong ships to strangle your logistics. Once we started stationing a small screening force to guard those routes, our main fleet stayed at full strength and the battles turned.

The trick is accepting that you can't be strong everywhere. Pick the routes that matter, defend them properly, and give up ground elsewhere if you have to. Overextending to hold everything is exactly the mistake the AI wants you to make.

It's a slower, more deliberate way to play than the game's flashy combat suggests, but it's where the real strategy lives. Iron Tide clicked for us the moment we stopped thinking about ships and started thinking about maps.