Sea Battle looks like a game of pure luck, and the first few shots are. After that it is a game of counting. Every miss rules out every ship position that would have crossed that square, every hit narrows the search to a handful of lines, and every sunk ship clears a whole ring of water. The player who uses that information best wins, and the computer on Hard does exactly that, so it pays to do it too.
The fleet here is five ships: a Carrier of five squares, a Cruiser of four, a Destroyer and a Submarine of three, and a Patrol boat of two. Seventeen squares of ship hide on a sea of one hundred. Ships lie straight across or down and never touch, not even at a corner.
Hunting: where to fire before the first hit
A random shot finds a ship about one time in six. You can do better than random by using the shape of the fleet.
- Fire on a checkerboard. Picture the sea coloured like a chessboard. Every ship is at least two squares long, so every ship covers at least one dark square. Fire only at dark squares while hunting and you will find every ship while checking only half the sea.
- Spread out before you close in. Early shots are worth the most when they are far from each other. A shot next to an earlier miss rules out less, because the two shots overlap in the positions they eliminate.
- Favour the middle a little. A long ship can lie through a central square in many more ways than through a corner. Corners and edges are not empty, but they are less likely.
- Widen the grid as ships sink. Once the Patrol boat is gone, the smallest ship left is three long. Now a shot every third square along each row and column is enough, which saves even more shots.
Targeting: finishing a ship you have hit
A hit is the moment to stop hunting. Fire at the four squares beside it, up, down, left and right, to find which way the ship runs. Diagonal squares are never part of the same ship.
Once you have two hits in a row, you know the direction. Keep firing along that line, and when you reach a miss or the edge of the sea, turn round and go the other way from the first hit. The game tells you when a ship sinks and which one it was, so you always know whether a run of hits is finished.
Two hits side by side can sometimes belong to two different ships in other versions of this game, but not here. Ships never touch, so a line of hits is always one ship. That is a real advantage: you never have to wonder.
Using the water round a sunk ship
When a ship sinks, every square touching it, including the corners, is open water. The game marks those squares with small light dots. They are not shots and they cost you nothing, but they are worth reading. A sunk ship near the middle of the sea clears a large patch, and the ships still hiding must fit in the space that is left.
Look at the gaps between your misses and the marked water. If a gap is only two squares long, only the Patrol boat could fit there, and if the Patrol boat is already sunk, the gap is empty and you can skip it. Counting the gaps that are long enough for the biggest ship still afloat is the quickest way to find it.
A worked example
Say your opening shots on the checkerboard have found and sunk the Patrol boat and the Destroyer, and the Carrier, five squares long, is still afloat. Down the right-hand side of the sea you see a column with misses at rows 2 and 8. Between them is a run of five open squares, rows 3 to 7. That run is the only place in that column the Carrier could lie straight down. Fire at row 5, the middle of the run. If it hits, the Carrier is almost certainly there and two more shots in each direction will finish it. If it misses, the whole run is ruled out at once.
Moving through the levels
Easy fires mostly at random and often forgets to follow up a hit, so it needs around sixty shots to sink a fleet. It is a good place to practise the checkerboard and the four-square follow-up. Medium hunts on the checkerboard and never lets a wounded ship escape, finishing in about forty-five shots. Hard counts every way your ships could still lie and usually needs fewer than forty, so to beat it you have to hunt well and waste almost nothing. Your best win, the fewest shots you sank a fleet in, is kept for each level.
