The naval playability pass
The sea war had good bones — penetration, fire and flooding, torpedoes, division AI — but a full audit (code review plus live playtests plus a headless balance probe) found the experience around them was leaking fun. So this was a broad playability pass: cut the dead time, make the gunsight teach, wake up the objective, and fix a long tail of small papercuts. Here's what changed.
Cut the sail to the fight
The single biggest retention risk the playtest found was time to first contact: a fresh spawn could sail three-plus minutes across empty water before it saw an enemy. Players now spawn at a rally point pulled inward from the home flank toward the nearest live capture zone (the AI keeps the wide flanks), with a safety margin that walks the berth back if it lands too near an enemy hull. And when you go down, a click now skips straight to the respawn screen — even before the killcam clip arrives — because high lethality is only fun when you get back in fast.
A gunsight that teaches
Long-range naval gunnery is a feedback loop: fire, read where the splashes fell, walk the next salvo on. That loop needs to be legible. So the gunsight now shows shell flight time next to the range, and its four lead ticks are calibrated — one tick is the on-screen travel of a cruising hull over one shell-flight, so “lead two ticks” becomes a real, learnable skill. The fall-of-shot itself got readable too: splash plumes are now tall naval columns you can spot at five kilometres, hull hits throw a metal spark instead of a puff, and your last salvos fade as white dots on the minimap so you can correct beyond visual range. Each hull now fires a salvo of shells, so the dispersion reads as a pattern instead of a single coin flip.
An objective that bites
The domination zones used to sit neutral almost the whole match — the bots homed on the enemy and brawled wherever they met, kilometres from any cap, so the scoreboard read “0–0” forever. The fix leans on a fact the old AI ignored: a warship's turrets train independently of its heading. So an engaged hull can now steam onto its objective while still broadsiding the enemy — the fight drifts onto the cap instead of orbiting in open water. The central cap is now contested or held a third of the time (it was under a tenth), and a purposeful helm dropped the rate of bots running aground along the way. A lower score-to-win means matches reach a climax at the cap instead of petering out at the bell.
Night you can see in, shoals you can dodge
Roughly half of rounds ran after dark, and the naval night had no city glow to read hulls by — a new player had even odds of a first round where they saw nothing. The sea now keeps a brightness floor at night, and a freshly-booted server starts in daylight. Running aground was a silent trap, too: now a “shoal ahead” warning fires before you nose the shallows, and a hull that does stick works itself decisively astern instead of grinding there pinned.
The long tail
A lot of fun lives in small fixes, so the pass swept up a batch: a threat-bearing on the “detected” banner, an incoming-torpedo warning, capture-zone status and fleet-order callouts, the ship's own engine and bow-wash audio (it was silent), a spectator camera that frames the fleet instead of empty ocean, the killfeed calling ship AA “ship AA” instead of “flak,” and the battleship's HP finally able to exceed the cruiser's on the wire — so the top of the unlock ladder is genuinely tankier, not just better-armed.
Guarding the seam
The naval and air games are separate server instances that still share a few load-bearing pipelines — the shell physics, the torpedo model, the snapshot wire. To keep an innocent air-side change from silently retuning the sea war, this pass added an isolation pair: a golden test that hashes the air world's wire bytes and fails loudly if anything perturbs them, and an un-gated naval smoke test that proves the sea war still fires, hits, and works the caps. The shared files are now marked as dual-mode contract code, so the next person knows to run both.