Ok sell points of GOF, well i will warn you now, GOF 1.2 is known for crashing when you start to see class 3 and above ships. So be ready for that, GOF 2.0 is still in beta testing but has proven so far to be more stable without any crashes durring naval battles, but its early day's and none of us have reached the rank where class q1, 2 and 3 ships will show up.
Sell points.
1. Many new characters to choose from when starting.
2. Can choose to start as pirates or the original nations (England, France, Spain and Holland).
3. Switches that you can change in the options screen on a new tab called mods, these switches are for more realistic or default settings like realistic costs, which changes the costs of goods by lowering them a little, realistic weights which increases the weights of goods making it so you can't load your ship up with a load of goods for more realism, RTBL which changes the damage you can deliver to enemy ships and the same for the enemy ship to you and your crew and sails. Many other features you can switch on or off, take a look at them.
4. Different sea, the hights are not as drastic although many say its to calm. In GOF 2,0 this has been fixed though.
5. Skill books replace the trinkets for added realism, no more rings giving you a boost to your luck skill, in stead you will get books that will do this for you.
6. In GOF 1.2 there is over 150 ships with new textures and are sorted out into there respective class by the amountof guns they have mounted.
7. The Black Pearl, Interceptor, Victory, Constitution, San Felipe, Queen Anne's Revenge and many many more ships.
8. Realistic ship purchase, this has been put seperate to those i already listed for a good reason, it reduces the likelyhood of seeing ships that are to high a rank for you at sea and also makes it so you will never be able topurchase Frigets, Corvette's, Fluet's etc from the shipyard as they would have been specially made for the nation and not your average privateer.
9. New calibures of cannon/culverines, default is 12, 16, 24 and 32 for cul;verine with cannon having 42 and 48ibs available to them. Now you will have 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 and 32Ibs for culverine with cannon having the following ontop of these calibures. 36, 42, 48 and for forts 92Ibs.
10. Range that the shots can be fired has been lowered to bring shup battles closer together as it should be rather than blasting each other from afr distance.
11. Many bug fixes that made the vanilla version unstable.
12. Can loot the dead bodies for iteams to sell or use.
13. ship cargoholds reduced to make way for better and more realistic trading.
14. New music, sounds etc, so while onboard your ship you will hear the ship creeking but also tapping as if the carpenter is busy working on something etc.
There is so much to list, my suggestion would be to take a look at the GOF 1.2 thread on the first page. For GOF 2.0, ships are less than GOF 1.2, almost half has been removed but much has been done to change the way they come across, like ship speeds reduced to more realistic speeds, turn ability reduced to reduce the ships spinning on the spot (doesn't fix it but has stopped it from happening all the time). new RTBL value's that increases the balance for and difficulty, new improves sea so its not as calm. Almost all the features in GOF 1.2 are in GOF 2.0.
I really have not noticed anything different about how Red Legs fights in melee Combat but of course its from my experience in v1.2 Gof I dont know if you guys changed the fighting in v1.2 and I did not notice or its just in the newest GOF.