Reading the cap, taking cover

June 27, 2026 · naval combat

The capture zone works and the bots fight for it — but you couldn't actually tell who held it without watching the score creep, and a losing AI ship would sit in the open and die. Two finishing touches: a cap readout on the HUD with a callout when it changes hands, and an AI that slips behind an island to break contact when it's hurt.

A warship's view crossing the glowing boundary of the capture zone, the HUD reading ZONE: CRIMSON with a green ZONE CAPTURED callout across the screen — Reading the cap — the **ZONE** chip tracks who holds it, and a **ZONE CAPTURED** callout fires the moment it flips.

Telling you who holds it

The server already knew who held the zone — it rode along in the score packet the HUD reads every tick — it just wasn't shown. Now the ship's bridge carries a ZONE chip that reads CRIMSON, COBALT, CONTESTED, or OPEN, coloured to match. And because a points race is won and lost in the moment the cap changes hands, crossing that line now fires a callout — a green ZONE CAPTURED when you take it, a red ZONE LOST when they do — so you feel the swing without having to read the scoreboard. No new wire format: it's all derived from the holder field already on the snapshot.

An AI that knows when to run

The bots fight for the cap, but the last version had no sense of self-preservation: a ship that was clearly losing an exchange kept circling at gun range until it sank. Now, when an AI hull drops below a fraction of its target's health at close range, it breaks contact — and it doesn't just turn tail into open water, where it would still be shot. It looks for the nearest island and steers for the lee of it, the side away from the threat, putting terrain between itself and the guns. Combined with the line-of-sight spotting that already hides a ship behind an island, a wounded bot can actually disappear, lick its wounds with the repair party, and come back into the fight.

How it sits in the engine

Both pieces live behind the naval seam and lean on systems already in the game. The HUD readout is a few lines in the score handler reading the existing holder field; the callout is a change-detector on it. The take-cover behaviour is one new helper that ray-marches the terrain heightfield for the nearest land and offsets to its far side — the same heightfield the ships run aground on and the same spotting raycast that makes the cover mean something. The air game doesn't change, and a regression run still sails a full AI fleet action over the cap.