Capture the zone at sea
The naval round was a pure fleet action: score by sinking enemy hulls, first to the target wins. That's a brawl, not a battle. So here's an objective to fight over — a capture zone at the map's centre that scores for whoever holds it, so map control wins games too.
Hold the ring
A gold ring of light lies on the sea at the centre of the map. Put a warship inside it with no enemy contesting and the points tick your way; the ring glows your colour when you hold it and the enemy's when they do. The moment a hull from the other side noses into the circle it turns contested — purple, no points for anyone — until somebody wins the fight and clears it. Points from the cap stack with points from sinking, so the win condition is now “sink and hold,” and a team that's behind on kills can still take it by owning the middle.
It changes how the two fleets meet. Before, you could kite at max range and trade; now there's a place you have to be, which drags the battle into the centre — and the centre, as it happens, has an island sitting in it, so the cap comes with its own cover to peek and hide around. Concealment, island line-of-sight, and the objective all pull on each other.
How it sits in the engine
It's a small loop in the naval tick: each frame it counts the warships of each side inside the zone radius, sets the holder (yours / theirs / contested / neutral), and — if one side holds it alone — adds points to that team's score, the same score the sink kills feed and the win check reads. Both AI and player hulls count, so the cap is always live. The holder rides the score block already in every snapshot, so there's no new wire; the client just draws the ring flat on the water and tints it by who's holding. And it's all behind the naval seam — the air game's Sky Ring objective is a separate path and never sees it.