Islands that block your view

June 27, 2026 · naval combat

Concealment came to the sea a while back — ships hidden beyond their spotting range, smoke screens, star shells. But the islands were just scenery you could run aground on. Now they're cover: terrain breaks the line of sight, so a hull tucked behind an island is invisible to anyone on the far side.

Two warships on opposite sides of a wooded island on the open sea — a destroyer to one side and a cruiser to the other, the island's high ground breaking the line of sight between them — The island breaks the sightline — the destroyer on the near side has slipped behind it, hidden from the cruiser searching beyond.

Line of sight, not just range

Spotting used to be a pure distance check: an enemy inside your concealment range saw you, full stop. Now every spot also has to clear a sightline. When the spotting pass asks “can this enemy see that hull?” it walks the straight line between them and samples the seabed-to-summit heightfield; if the ground anywhere along the way rises above the line of sight, the view is blocked and the hull stays hidden. Both ships look out from about masthead height, so a low sandbar won't hide anyone — but a proper island hill will.

Aircraft are the exception that proves the rule: a spotter plane looks down from its altitude, so the sightline runs over most terrain. Only a tall peak right next to a hull will mask it from the air. That falls straight out of using each spotter's real eye height in the same check — ships at the waterline, planes up where they actually are.

What it does to the fight

This is the piece that makes the islands matter. A destroyer can now run the island chain to close the distance unseen, pop out to loose torpedoes, and duck back behind the rock before the cruiser's guns can answer. A damaged ship can break contact by putting an island between itself and the shooter. Hold-the-island-and-peek becomes a real tactic, the way it is in the game this borrows from. Smoke is still your portable cover; the islands are the cover the map gives you for free.

How it sits in the engine

It's a dozen lines in the naval spotting pass and one tunable — the masthead eye-height that sets how tall an island has to be to mask a view. The raycast samples the existing terrain heightfield (the same one the ships run aground on), capped to keep long sightlines cheap, and only runs for pairs already within range. The AI still navigates with full knowledge, so it keeps fighting; line-of-sight cover, like the rest of concealment, is the human captain's to exploit — and it's all behind the naval seam, so the air game never samples a thing.