Battle 2.8 — a proper sea

I’ve played this game top-to-bottom since version one, and it never felt right. I wanted to start at the bottom of the map and sail north — bow first, straight at the enemy. I even flirted with ditching the grid entirely, miniatures-style, tape measure and all. The hexes stayed: they’re unambiguous, and one day they’ll port cleanly to a physical board. Rotating the whole grid 30° gave me the straight line I wanted — flat-top hexes, vertical columns, no more zigzagging north.

Movement became a voyage instead of a slide. Ships now accelerate over a couple of hexes, reach their class speed and hold it — a destroyer visibly overtakes a battleship, which is the whole point of having classes. It’s about five times slower than before, deliberately: speed differences you can’t see might as well not exist. Courses are smoothed into curves, and the prettiness turned out to have rules in it — if you can watch a ship arrive, the direction it arrives from has to matter. Your bow now points where your last leg pointed, and that sets the cone of your next move.

The balance pass has a theme: commitment. Depth charges hit for 15 but only connect half the time — sub hunting is now high risk, high stakes, one good drop settles it. The battleship stopped being a sniper and became what it always should have been: the thing that crushes you up close, broadside at point-blank. Destroyers lost their torpedoes and found their role. And the water got its due — propeller wash, bow spray, Kelvin wakes spreading at ±19.5°, because physics deserved the cameo.