Navy Combat

How to Play

Navy Combat is a naval gunnery game about angles, patience and damage control. Shells travel for real seconds before they land, armour actually deflects them, and flooding will sink you long after the shooting stops. This guide covers everything from the controls to the maths behind a citadel hit.

Controls

Touch controls are available on phones and tablets: a virtual stick for the helm, tap to aim and fire, and on-screen buttons for consumables.

Gunnery

Shells are simulated as real projectiles with gravity and quadratic air drag. A 406 mm round leaves the muzzle at roughly 800 m/s and can be in the air for the better part of a minute on a long lob, so at range you are not shooting at a ship — you are shooting at where it will be. The lead indicator helps, but a target that changes speed or heading mid-flight will make you miss.

Every salvo is spread by a dispersion cone. Bigger guns are generally tighter in relative terms, and weather widens the cone for everyone: a storm makes long-range shooting genuinely unreliable.

Armour and penetration

Where you hit matters more than how often. Each hull carries separate armour values for its belt, deck, bow, stern, turrets, superstructure and citadel, and the shell resolves against whichever it actually struck.

• Ricochet — an armour-piercing shell striking at more than about 70° from the surface normal skips off entirely. Angling your bow toward an enemy is a real defence.
• Penetration — the shell beats the effective armour and detonates inside. Effective thickness rises steeply with obliquity, so a flat plate hit square is far weaker than the same plate hit at a slant.
• Overpenetration — a heavy shell through thin plating passes clean out the far side before fusing, doing reduced damage. Big guns against destroyers often overpenetrate.
• Shatter — insufficient penetration; the shell breaks up on the plate for minimal damage.
• Citadel — a penetrating AP hit that reaches the magazines or engine spaces. Enormous damage, and it can touch off a magazine detonation that destroys the ship outright. The citadel has its own armour box, so a cruiser cannot citadel a battleship simply by getting a lucky deck penetration.
• Underwater hit — a shell that enters the water just short of the target can still strike the hull below the armoured belt. Less penetration, but severe flooding.

High-explosive shells do not need to penetrate. They do partial damage anywhere, start fires and wreck exposed modules — the answer to a target you cannot punch through.

Damage, fire and flooding

Hit points are only half the story. Fires burn hit points down over time and can be started by any HE hit. Flooding accumulates from torpedo hits, underwater shell hits and collisions, and it worsens on its own until it is pumped out — a heavily flooded ship visibly heels toward the damaged side and loses most of its top speed. Damage control repairs both, but it has a cooldown, so spending it on a small fire and then taking a torpedo is a classic way to lose a ship.

Individual modules can be knocked out: a wrecked engine cuts your speed, a jammed steering gear locks the rudder hard over and sends you in circles, a destroyed turret stops firing, and a hit fire-control system spoils your accuracy.

Torpedoes

Torpedoes are slow and deliberately dodgeable — they are an area-denial weapon, not a sniper rifle. Launch them where a ship is going to be, not where it is. They arm only after running a set distance, so a point-blank launch does nothing. Against a turning battleship they are devastating; against an alert destroyer they are mostly a way to make it turn.

Submarines

Submarines run at three depths: surfaced, periscope and deep. Only at periscope depth or above can you use the periscope and fire. Submerged, gunfire passes harmlessly over you — but you are slower, and running deep drains a battery that only recharges near the surface. A flat battery forces you up.

Surface warships hunt you with sonar and depth charges. Charges are telegraphed: they splash in, sink for a few seconds and then detonate, so a boat that keeps moving and changes depth can slip them. Depth is genuinely simulated — a charge that goes off at the wrong depth does little.

Aircraft carriers

Carriers fight at arm's length. You launch a strike package and it flies out and attacks on its own, or you take the stick of one aircraft yourself and fly the attack run. Loadouts matter: a torpedo strike against a turning cruiser is wasted, while level bombers are useless against a destroyer that will not sit still. Keep some aircraft back as defensive fighters, because a carrier that has spent its whole air group and gets found by a destroyer is finished.

Consumables

• Smoke — a screen that breaks line of sight. Firing from inside it still gives you away at close range.
• Repair party — recovers a portion of lost hit points over time.
• Engine boost — temporary speed, for closing a gap or escaping one.
• Star shell — illuminates an area at night, exposing whatever is under it.
• Radar / sonar — a sweep that reveals contacts through smoke or under water.
• Recon floatplane — catapulted from a capital ship to extend your spotting range.

Where to go next

Once you have the basics, the tactics page covers the things that actually decide fights — angling, ammunition choice, lead prediction and when to spend damage control. The game modes page explains all sixteen mission types.