Domination: three zones that split the fleet
One capture zone at the map's centre gave the naval round a place to fight over. But one zone is one fight: both fleets pile into the middle and it's a brawl with a ring around it. So the cap becomes three — a domination objective you can't hold with one massed line, and that's the whole point.
Split or lose the map
A contested zone sits at the centre, with a flank zone north and south of it. Each zone scores for whoever holds it alone, and holding more of them ticks the score faster — so you can win on map control as well as kills. The catch is that no single formation covers all three. A fleet that steams into the middle as one fist holds the centre and concedes both flanks; a fleet that scatters holds nothing for long. You have to split: send the fast hulls wide to grab and garrison the flank caps, and keep the heavies massed for the fight in the middle.
That's exactly what the AI does now. When a division forms up, the heavy line — cruisers and the battleship flagship — is assigned the contested centre, and the destroyers peel off the screen and run for the flanks, one to each, to take the cap and sit on it. It reads like real cap play: a battleship slugging it out in the middle while a destroyer races for an undefended ring on the wing, and the round can swing on whether anyone notices in time.
Why north and south
The flank zones sit perpendicular to how the fleets deploy. Crimson forms up to the west, Cobalt to the east, so spreading the caps north–south puts them equidistant from both sides — neither team has a nearer cap, and the seed's east–west island asymmetry can't quietly hand one side the map. The early builds spread them east–west instead, and the headless balance probe caught it at once: a steady five-to-eleven lean to whichever side had the cleaner run to its home cap. Rotating the spread by ninety degrees flattened it back to a coin-flip.
Tuning the radius mattered just as much. Caps that were too small and too far apart never got contested — the fleets clashed in the middle and nobody detoured to a lonely ring on the edge, so the objective went dead and the round was a brawl again. Caps sized to overlap the central battle keep both fleets inside them, trading the hold back and forth: the probe now logs a couple of hundred lead changes a match, and the win rate across a hundred and twenty-eight bot matches is even.
Reading three at once
With three caps the HUD can't just say who holds “the” ring. The old ZONE: CRIMSON chip becomes a ZONES count — how many each side holds right now — and the minimap, which used to draw a single ring at the centre, now draws one ring per zone, each tinted by its holder so the whole map state reads at a glance. A callout still fires the instant any zone changes hands, so you hear a flank slipping even when your eyes are on the centre.
How it sits in the engine
The server picks the zone centres at match start — a central point plus north/south flanks, each nudged to the nearest clear water so a cap never lands on the rocks — and ships them in the welcome. The per-tick loop that scored the single cap now runs once per zone: count each side's hulls inside the radius, set that zone's holder, and add points for every zone a team holds alone. Holders ride the score block as a small array, centres ride the welcome, and the client draws a flat ring at each. It's all still behind the naval seam — the air game's Sky Ring is a separate path and never sees any of it.