Star shells and the night sea
Time to stop adding to the naval theater and start nailing it. I sat down and played it like a player would — and found the night was pitch black, the scoreboard never moved, the HUD was a plane's, and running aground stopped you dead forever. Here's the pass that fixed all of it, headlined by a new toy: the star shell.
The night was the problem — so light it up
Naval battles are fought across kilometres, and every match opens at night. With no way to see that far in the dark, gunnery was guesswork. The fix isn't to cancel the night — night fighting is great — it's to give the fleets a way to see: the star shell.
A star shell is an illumination round. It climbs on a high arc and bursts near the top into a flare that floats down under its light, casting a pool of warm illumination over the sea and lifting the enemy hulls out of the black. The AI ships fire them on their own once it's dark — partly so the night battle is lit, and partly so a human captain sees them go up and learns the mechanic exists without a tutorial. And the captain can answer in kind: star shells are a third main-battery shell alongside AP and HE — cycle to SS with X and your guns loft an illuminant along their bearing, lighting whatever you're about to shoot at.
Under the hood the flare is a real light: the climbing round rides the
existing shell system with a Star flag and bursts into a
drifting illuminant, and the client hangs a point light on it that
genuinely relights the hulls and the water beneath. No fog of war to
fake — the sea is simply dark until someone lights it.
The scoreboard that wouldn't move
The bigger, quieter bug: in a fleet of mostly-AI warships, the FLEET ACTION score sat at 0–0 no matter how many hulls went under. The scoring only credited player kills, but the AI ships fire with no player behind the trigger, so every AI-on-AI sinking — and every fire or flood that finished a hull — scored nothing. The objective was effectively dead. Now any enemy hull lost moves the score for the other side, so the round is a real race again.
A bridge, not a cockpit
The warship HUD was still the aeroplane's. It showed altitude (zero, forever — you're on the water) and a speed that read the engine telegraph, not your actual way through the water, so a ship stuck fast on a reef happily reported 63 km/h. The naval conning display now drops the altimeter and reads true hull speed from the ship's track — a beached hull reads what it's actually doing.
Two more rough edges
The lobby was the airfield's: it talked about dogfights and the Sky Ring, defaulted you to a fighter, and offered a carrier catapult — then spawned you a warship anyway. It's now a warship lobby: pick your hull, read ship controls, SET SAIL. And running aground no longer welds you to the shoal — the hull eases astern off the shallows with a warning so you can work free and steer clear.
None of this touched the air game — it all lives behind the naval theater's seams. The sea war is a lot closer to being its own game now: you can see the fight, the round means something, and the bridge tells you the truth.