I went back through forty replays from the last three weeks, all losses, and tried to find the moment the match stopped being winnable. In twenty-nine of them it was inside the first ninety seconds.
The pattern is consistent. Two or three ships commit to a flank before anyone has vision on it. That commitment is cheap to make and expensive to undo: by the time the spotting picture fills in, turning around means presenting a broadside to whatever is already shooting.
What works better, in the replays that ended well, is boring. Move toward the flank but stay outside the point where disengaging costs you. Let the first contact happen with something expendable. Then commit.
None of this is new advice. The reason it keeps needing repeating is that the wrong version feels more decisive in the moment.