Earn your fleet

June 27, 2026 · naval combat

Until now every naval captain could spawn the battleship on their first match. The hull classes were a rock-paper-scissors triangle but not a ladder — there was nothing to work toward. So the naval theater gets progression: you start in the destroyer and earn the cruiser and the battleship by doing the one thing the mode is about, sinking ships.

The warship picker in the naval hangar: the Tachi destroyer selected and available, while the Bastion cruiser and Dreadnought battleship are greyed out with lock badges reading SINK 5 SHIPS and SINK 15 SHIPS — The hangar greys out what you haven't earned yet — the destroyer is yours from the start, the cruiser at five sinkings, the battleship at fifteen.

A ladder built on what was already there

The game has remembered your career for a while now — kills, wins, medals, and, for the sea, the count of ships you've sunk, all persisted to your pilot record between sessions. Progression didn't need a new currency; it just needed to spend one that already existed. So each hull carries an unlock threshold in ships sunk: the Tachi destroyer is free, the Bastion cruiser opens at five, the Dreadnought battleship at fifteen. The first rung lines up with the SHIP KILLER ribbon, so you earn the cruiser and the medal in the same breath.

Honest about where it's enforced

A lock that only lives in the browser isn't a lock. The gate is server-authoritative: the server checks your record the moment you ask to crew a hull, and a request for a ship you haven't earned is clamped down to the best one you have — so a hand-edited client can't sail a battleship it didn't pay for. The hangar greys out the locked hulls with a “sink N ships” badge purely so you can see the goal; the browser and the server agree because they read the same threshold from the same config.

The moment it pays off

Crossing a threshold fires a callout mid-match — NEW SHIP UNLOCKED — and the hull opens in the hangar then and there, no reconnect, so your next spawn can be the cruiser you just earned. The AI fleet is untouched by all this: bots are built straight into their hulls and never ask the hangar, so a battle still fields a full destroyer screen and a battle line no matter how green the humans are. It's a small system — one threshold per hull, one number from your record — but it turns three ships you could already drive into three ships worth working toward.