I had a friend who was having this problem as well and for a few years we played we just had to simulate the combat which kinda sucked. However we have since found a good solution and he runs a Virtual Machine on his Windows Vista system that operates with Windows XP. So whenever we want to play now we can do all the fleet battles and stuff he just turns on his virtual machine (on his Vista machine) hamachi, and we turn on skype to talk as we play. It works great! Anyway, you can get a virtual pc setup pretty easily, just need a copy of windows to install (well you have to make an image of it to use on the virtual machine to setup the easiest) and some space to set aside from the machine. Just google for microsoft's virtual pc thing.