In broad strokes, first (100+ guns) and second-rates (80-98 guns) were armed with 3 decks 2 of guns and were used almost exclusively as flagships. This endured with various tweaks for almost 200 years, until the growth of guns made it useless. In the early 17th century, this rating was based on complement, but in 1677, Samuel Pepys changed the system to be based on the number of guns. 1 The Royal Navy responded by classifying ships into six different rates, from the largest first-rates to the small sixth-rates.
The distant roots of our system go back to the days of sail, when warships broadly speaking differed in only one respect: their size, and thus the number of guns they carried. Any nice, clean scheme we come up with is likely to run into at least a few messy counterexamples, even before we get into the mess created by the fact that different nations describe their warships differently, and can't always agree on what to call them. Unfortunately, what we call warships today is the result of 150 years of evolution, with ships labeled on the basis of the nearest existing type, and old names sometimes brought back for new types. Most of us here are nerds, with the nerd's compulsion to create neat, orderly classification schemes.
The most fundamental lesson of all warship taxonomies is that they are inherently messy things.
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