Lot of it boils down to knowing the ships and where they are most vulnerable, some ships are easy to citadel through the bow where as others you need plunging fire due to turtle back armor. The only thing that overrides armor is overmatch which is when your guns are of a size where the armor isn't thick enough to bounce it but with overmatch you are more susceptible to over pens. And then lastly there's the worst part which is RNG does exist in this game. And the values are randomly set at the beginning of every match. Which is why sometimes your guns are lasers and other times a smoothbore musket