Navy Combat

Ship Roster

All 38 playable warships, across 5 navies. Every figure below is read directly from the game's own ship definitions — the armour values are the belt and deck thicknesses the penetration model actually resolves against, not flavour text. See How to Play for how a shell decides between ricochet, penetration and overpenetration.

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Battleships (10)

The heaviest guns and the only armour that reliably stops them. Battleships are slow to turn and slow to reload, so every salvo has to be worth firing. They win by absorbing punishment other ships cannot — provided the captain keeps the bow angled and does not wander into torpedo water.

Heavy Cruisers (7)

The generalists. Enough gun to threaten anything short of a battleship, enough speed to choose their range, and not quite enough armour to be careless. They live at mid-range, where their accuracy is good and heavy shells are more likely to overpenetrate or skip off.

Light Cruisers (8)

Fast-firing and thin-skinned. Light cruisers are the answer to destroyers and aircraft, and they win by starting fires and stripping modules rather than by punching through belts. Showing a flat side to a battleship ends the game for them immediately.

Destroyers (9)

Fast, hard to see and made of paper. Destroyers spot, launch torpedoes and contest objectives; they do not trade gunfire with cruisers. Their concealment advantage evaporates the moment they open fire, which makes every engagement a decision rather than a reflex.

Aircraft Carriers (2)

Carriers fight at arm's length, launching strike packages that attack on their own — or that you fly yourself. The finite air group is the real resource: a carrier that has spent its wing and gets found by a destroyer is finished.

Submarines (2)

Three depths, a battery that only charges near the surface, and torpedoes against targets that cannot manoeuvre. Depth is genuinely simulated, so a depth charge detonating at the wrong depth does very little — surviving the counter-attack is the whole skill.

Reading the numbers

Hull is raw hit points, and it is the least interesting column — ships are lost to fire and flooding at least as often as to accumulated damage. Belt / Deck matters far more: belt armour is what a flat-trajectory shell meets at close and medium range, deck armour is what plunging fire from a long lob comes down onto. A ship with a thick belt and a thin deck is safe up close and vulnerable at extreme range, and the reverse is also true.

Effective thickness rises steeply with impact angle, so these printed values are a floor, not a ceiling. A belt presented at a sharp angle behaves like considerably more armour than the number suggests — which is why angling is the most valuable habit a captain can learn.