Balancing the fleet
The enemy fleet now fights a full battle on its own, cap and all — so we watched it fight, over and over, and three things stood out as plain wrong. All three are fixed, and you'll feel every one of them on the bridge.
What was off
- The battleship wasn't a battleship. It went down about as fast as a cruiser, despite all that belt armor, because its thick plating only shrugged off armor-piercing shells — high explosive, fire and flooding walked right through it. Now the belt eats a good chunk of an HE hit too. A destroyer's thin skin barely helps, a cruiser's middling belt helps some, and the battleship shrugs off roughly half of what HE throws at it. It's finally the hardest hull in the game to put under, the way a battleship should be.
- The fleet was turning into all battleships. As ships sank and got replaced, the mix quietly drifted heavy — the destroyer screen would vanish over a long match, leaving a line of slabs and no scouts. Now the fleet always replaces whatever class it's shortest of, so you keep a proper spread of nimble destroyers, cruisers and heavies on both sides.
- Ships kept running aground. Big slow hulls couldn't answer the helm in time and ended up grinding on the islands far too often. They look further ahead now and ease off the throttle sooner, crawling when a shore is right under the bow — so the fleet threads the archipelago, and as a bonus the two sides reliably find each other and fight instead of wandering past.
Where it landed
The result is a fleet action that plays the way one should: the two sides are evenly matched, destroyers die fast and battleships die hard, the capture zone trades hands constantly instead of sitting idle, and a round is a few minutes of genuine back-and-forth. Pick your hull knowing it means something — a destroyer is a knife, a battleship is an anvil — and sail into a sea that's always already at war.