2 is the best balance between viability and content. Cold Waters is fundamentally designed for submarines.
It has taken a lot of iterations to implement many aspects of surface ships in the game properly. Before Epic Mod changed the game's code, the game literally thought these were submarines. Now Epic Mod has resolved many of the early problems with implementing surface ships, but it's still far from flawless. Killerfish Games didn't expect the modders to go this far.
The most major issue with making each surface ship viable is that the campaign doesn't assign ships missions according to their capabilities. Anti-submarine ships have an equal chance of getting thrown into merchant ship missions as anti-ship ships. The Kirov is simply far better than all of the other options because it can do everything. Meanwhile, the vanilla game knows whether land strike missions should be assigned based on the sub's ability to carry land attack missiles. There's nothing like this to balance ships.
Right now, surface ship engagements against other surface ships are a furious point-and-click adventure at flank speed while trying to destroy all the other ships and survive. This is where subs thrive because much more realistic tactics can be used. And again, that's what the game is fundamentally designed for.
Manually firing and aiming guns hasn't been figured out. I hope an implementation to manually aim guns similar to War on the Sea is added. We are better off waiting for Sea Power to release if we want to manually use all the surface ships' weapons.
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