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battleshipexYou take your winnings off to the Shoulder Dragon Cafe, planning to settle in for some hot pot and a well-deserved rest. You also really want your new octopus friend to meet the shoulder dragons; you think they'd get along well.
But when you step through the door of the cafe, there's a weird shimmering blur. It's magic, but not a kind you've ever seen before.
Inside the cafe, things seem... different. Everything looks flat, and pastel-colored. Every sound is tinny, and just at the edge of hearing, there's a little song playing over and over and over.
"Welcome to your first day as a cook at the Shoulder Dragon Cafe!" cries a cheerful voice. It's a rainbow-colored shoulder dragon, hovering over one of the tables with jerky flaps of its wings. "I'll show you how to keep our customers happy! Are you ready? Let's get cooking!"
"Oh no," one of your companions whispers, just as you start to really regret pushing the buttons on those mysterious goblin machines. "We're in a cooking simulator."
THE GAME IS OVER... FOR NOW
Congratulations, everyone! You've done an amazing thing. Take a look at this year's stats and be awed!
Main collection | Crystal collection | Mermaid collection | Tunnel collection | Volcano collection
If you were on Team Tunnel or Team Crystal, you can claim a tag for next year. If you were on Team Mermaid or Team Volcano and you completed two or more treats during the anon period, you can claim a tag for next year. If you guessed a board 2 rule correctly, as verified by the Spreadsheet Fairy, you can claim a tag for next year. If you made two or more gifts for giftless/treatless people, as verified when your work was accepted into your team's collection, you can claim a tag for next year. These claims stack! Please claim your tags here.
We welcome your feedback in comments on this post or emailed to battleshipexchange@gmail.com. Please send feedback one of those two ways even if you also left feedback in Discord; that channel scrolled real fast and we want to make sure we didn't miss anything important.
It seems like just minutes ago that Battleship 2024 began, and now it has come to an end. It's been an incredible ride full of surprises and delights. Thank you all so much for being a part of it.
Join us next year for BATTLESHIP: ISEKAI EDITION!
(no subject)
8/8/24 07:24 (UTC)Going to make a very long, overwhelmingly positive post to get all my thoughts out! To give context to my data points, I would consider myself a medium-fast creator, on the competitive side of the spectrum, I’m a writer exclusively, from the CET timezone, and I was in Volcano this year. I’m going to give my thoughts on various debated issues in no particular order
Caps
7 works per board was a near-perfect sweet spot for me: for both boards I forced myself to whip something up for my last work during late night scrambling to finish and woke up the morning after to find my team dealing with the boss. It felt super motivating to have a cap that I was actually likely to hit. However I realize some people are faster than me and that it can be a real impediment on a team that for whatever reason doesn’t have many people playing and needs to rely on their heavy hitters more. So I would support raising it to 8 or 9 if it’s the prevailing opinion.
Definitely changing the boss cap from 5 works to 50k was very freeing, though I also enjoyed forcing myself to write 10k on a short notice. Perhaps if you do two bosses again you could even have one with the old limit and one with the new limit! (Probably a terrible idea logistically, also I didn’t actually much enjoy having two bosses, but if…)
I appreciate you raising the art cap somewhat, I think you’ve done a good job of being sensitive to feedback and balanced on something that will always be subjective and difficult like art-fic equivalencies. I did feel guilty about my fic being passed unscrutinized when artists had to do so much more work to include their tags, but I suppose there is no way to avoid it.
Pure volume rounds
Not a huge fan of the full board clear as an ending, but I didn’t find it upsetting or demotivating. In Volcano our captain mentioned something about the full board clearing being used to replace the second boss, and I floated the idea of swapping the order so it’s full board clear - boss - puzzle round - boss - traditional battleship instead, and I think both of these are really good ideas.
I did find the bosses very hard to deal with this year, I get that the two fast teams were getting unstoppable but they were so big! However I realize Battleship must cater to all styles of creators including people who may have unfinished works from previous boards, so I’m just saying this as a data point. I still wrote and partook through both bosses and made it work.
In general I’m not really someone who ends up with a lot of unfinished fic that became irrelevant, because of my creation style, and also any sort of “but what if my favorite tag doesn’t get written because there isn’t a trap under it” concern isn’t relevant to me because I’m in all small fandoms. I also have 0 attachment to clearing the board VS leaving it unfinished at the end of the game. So in general I’m not the participant that these rounds are made for and that’s okay!
Approvals
I really appreciated the mods’ hard work doing approvals, and that they kept fairness in mind by alternating which team they started with, and having the final roundup - I took advantage of it many rimes. I also really, really appreciate you rejecting any sort of time-based slowdown strategy as one of the dozen people living in a country that isn’t the US. Overall I really think you’re doing the best you possibly could here and I hope that recruiting more helpers allows you more peace! I wanted to say, on this account, that I would be very willing to be one.
I also think a separate channel for approval announcements would be amazing given general gets really buy.
Team Composition
Another “if it’s not broken let’s not fix it” for me. I found the Volcano vibes impeccable, if your giving us a bigger number of people outside the US timezones was on purpose than know I really enjoyed that, and ultimately I think this was done well. I like the suggestion in the chat of having a “how many works you produced for last Battleship” question and specific numbers rather than just “many” “few” “long” “short”, but I also would get it if you want to just wash your hands of the additional responsibility of composing fair teams and leave it up to fate. Ultimately I think team speed will not depend on any individual person being more productive but on how many people actually play, which is so much more down to luck and cannot be predicted, especially with an influx of newbies who might realize fast that the game isn’t for them.
In general I think you handled the two teams to four teams transition! There is so much more movement and challenge to the game like this, and there's less harsh competitivity of having a single Arch Nemesis and either winning or losing.
Tags
Anecdotally, this is my first year regularly running out of word count well before I run out of tags to claim.. I don’t think it ever happened to me even once in Frost/Forest or in the 2023 Test Rounds. This is very neutral: before we started I feared that would mean the game wasn’t very challenging, particularly with all the tags that were really some generic widely applicable emotion. However during the game that proved to be untrue and I certainly appreciated the flexibility when things got rough for my team. But since you’re looking for ways to slow the game down maybe a harder tagset could be helpful? Particularly adding specific AUs or plot beats might be a slowdown
Every tag pairing seemed well balanced to me - even though some require smut and I don’t write it, I feel like it’s something we need to accept that in a fanfic contest it will be a big thing? Maybe though it would have been fun to mix the pairings up for board 3. The only one I disliked was Dwarves/Mermaids because unlike other lore tags like Crystal/Volcano or Dungeon/Tower it really forces you to create or accept Original Work.
Bonus fun things
Please please don’t make us do compulsory cooperative boards. I will be yellowvoiding. I will not be capable of avoiding it.
LOVED Magmaid! It’s such a satisfying word and pleasing mental image. I can’t believe it’s not already a fantasy creature. I’m not a person who enjoys doing little incentives and initiatives outside the competition myself, but the optional final challenge was lovely and clearly uplifting for many people, it really improved the vibes
I liked various suggestions for extra points like points for adding a new fandom to the collection, points for gifts outside your team etc. but I don’t really feel the need to add extra interest to the boards and already find them plenty interesting enough. Maybe that could be more helpful for the bosses? I def thought that giving im-game incentives rather than tags for stuff like writing for the giftless list might be fun, but I understand it is laborious.
(no subject)
8/8/24 07:54 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 09:07 (UTC)At the beginning of the game, I thought that some tags were overly specific or niche. As I wrote, though, I found that I would have enjoyed more overly specific or niche tags more in my wheelhouse— I think that having very general tags is good, but it was the specific ones that made me have fun trying to think about how to combine them or incorporate them into a fic.
(no subject)
8/8/24 09:34 (UTC)Things that I really enjoyed:
• All of the lore and worldbuilding. Thank you lailah for all those wonderful details, they made the game really special!
• The ability to be as hands-on or hands-off as you like. I've previously played Battleship via the Treasure Hunter/Merc role, and was glad that I was still able to do 'Minimalist Battleship' despite being on a team. My team (Volcano) were very supportive of different approaches to the game, and never made me feel like I was letting them down.
• My team, Volcano! They were such a chill and friendly group, thank you Captain Soulstoned for setting the tone.
• The spreadsheets were amazing, and very accessible to a (relative) novice!
• Knowing in advance that Board 2 would contain all the tags not used on Board 1. As a slow creator, this was a big incentive and gave me a goal to work towards.
Unfortunately, there was one negative: I did find it difficult to engage with #general once the game had begun. I ended up muting the channel after a point because I found the wordcount bragging a bit disheartening. I always cheered on my teammates when they reported in #volcano-chat about what they were working on/how much they'd posted, but seeing wordcount reporting in #general from a team that was holding the lead most of the game felt a little ungracious. It's a minor detail, but I did feel like I missed out on a bit of cross-team camaraderie by sticking to my Volcano Lair.
Regardless, I really enjoyed this round and am excited for next year! Thank you again for all your hard work, I can't imagine how much planning goes into creating a game experience that's as frictionless as the one I had. You're all amazing ♥♥♥
(no subject)
8/8/24 10:41 (UTC)Thank you again for another amazing round of Battleship <3 This is always my favourite event every year, and I really appreciate the work that mods put in to make it fun for everyone! I left a lot of bits and pieces of feedback in the channel throughout the game, so I've tried to paste in the relevant parts here.
---
Teams
I loved how having four teams panned out! It made the race more exciting to me, and I thought the team sizes felt just about right. Both first and second place teams getting tag claims felt really nice in a four-team game.
I don't know if there are plans to bring back the same captains again next year (assuming they still want to captain after dealing with all of us this year :p), but I just want to say that as a member of Team Tunnel, gaialux was an absolutely amazing captain who went above and beyond for us in terms of encouraging creators of all speeds, in boosting team morale, and generally in keeping things fun and organised for the team. They were really receptive to feedback and extremely patient and fun!
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Boards & Tags
I really missed the larger tag list from last year! Although there was plenty of great stuff on the boards, it was a little sad that it was reduced by ~200 tags.
In terms of balancing tag numbers, I noted this during the game, so copy-pasting some of that feedback in here: I feel like a lot of easy hurt/comfort and fluff tags started at low numbers and went down too quickly, and could stand to be increased in future rounds so more people have chances to hit them. I know that with this many tag pairs, it's tough to balance or estimate what people will find hard/easy, but it feels a little sad since it means the board gets less and less RTMI as time goes on haha. I would also suggest a poll for tags we find easy/difficult (more below) to help with tag balancing.
I think the board goals are a fun idea, but requiring each archive warning to be hit 20 times with no OR in place felt like a lot! I think I would have significantly preferred 2 archive warnings with a total of 30 for a board goal where you can hit either or both warnings.
I enjoyed the full clear as the last board, since it brought back all the tags and made everything useful by requiring every square. Puzzle boards are still my favourite, but I really liked that we were guaranteed a place for all our abandoned works to be useful, and I think this was a fun execution of it!
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Specific Stall Mechanics Suggestion - Big Board Goals + Buying Board Goals
I loved the cute animal board goals in Board 3, and had a lot of fun incorporating them. With that in mind, and building off my favourite stall mechanic in previous years, the pirate ransom in Abyss vs. Void: as a scuffed suggestion for an additional stall mechanic, a board could have a large 'pool' of board goals, consisting of a base set of tags with a very high tag requirement (like maybe 300 or something), and then teams can add tags to the board goal pool somehow or other! Maybe for every tag they knock down on the actual board they can add something to the board goal pool? Or currency is earned in previous rounds? Plus optionally the rest of the board is smaller to make up for it. So there's some element of strategy in choosing easy tags or tags that are highly applicable to your team, but it's also still a full clear where everything is useful... and if something isn't useful, you could buy some tags so it is LOL.
Some potential difficulties to consider: difficulty or disagreement in deciding/voting what tags to buy if currency is earned on a per team rather than per person basis (so a per person basis may be nice); whatever complicated spreadsheet things this would require; number balance in terms of a high board goal while still having a full clear. For a per-person claim: I didn't love how tag claims were tied to rule guesses this year (more below), but I think earning currency based on gameplay mechanics things like that would be fun.
This is a lot more tracking so it's probably pretty ambitious as a suggestion haha, but the pirate ransom is still my favourite stall tactic after all these years and I always hope to see it back in one form or another! :D
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Participation/Pre-Game Survey
I would love a poll where we voted on tags we found difficult or easy to help guide tag balancing. Tunnel had a very simple ticky box form for what tags that we would personally find difficult to create for; I think it was really good information to have! I would like to suggest a multiple choice grid in Google Forms where the two columns are simply 'Difficult' and 'Easy', and people can choose whether they find a tag difficult or easy (or leave it blank/skip the section if they have no opinion).
I also still feel like there could be value in asking some measure of anticipated participation specifically for returning players, even if it may not be 100% accurate. Something as simple as 'how many works did you create for Battleship last year?' + 'do you anticipate that you will create around the same amount this year?' might be helpful. The 'how many works' question could be a multiple choice with ranges (1-2, 3-5, 6-10, 11+) if mods don't want to bother with a fill-in field that might involve typos. I felt like the options in this year's survey didn't really cover all scenarios (I had no idea what was really 'long/complex' vs. 'short/simple', just that I'd make a lot), so it was also difficult for the survey respondent to estimate.
Answering these questions, like tag voting and anticipated participation, could be set up as an opt-in page: for instance for past participation, on page 1, you'd tick whether you're a newbie/returner, and if you're a returner, you can select whether or not you want to answer the anticipated participation section that would be on page 2. Everyone would get the option to opt in/out of tag voting.
In general, while I know the participant form wasn't necessarily helpful for mods this year, I definitely feel like it could be useful to have the information around, and I support collecting the data!
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Tag Claim Options
I don't love how extra tag claims were given out this year:
Aside from the winner's claim, I prefer tag claims to be awarded non-competitively and to be widely available (the rule guessing, in particular, had a window of less than a week since most teams weren't on board 2 for that long). I would also be fine allowing people to stack multiple tag claims via a single method they find works best for them, up to a cap - e.g. if the max cap is 3 tag claims per person, and tag claim methods are winning or post-game treats, someone from the winning team earns 1 tag claim for winning and can earn up to 2 more via post-game treats, while someone from the third or fourth place team can earn up to 3 tag claims via post-game treats.
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Art Queries
While I noted in the channel that I do find art queries stressful, I feel like it's worth emphasising that I do also think they're a vital part of the game and would significantly prefer that querying continues to happen vs. other suggested methods such as tag caps. As much as I don't like being queried (and I'm sure mods don't like querying either), I would like a tag cap even less!
For a bit more elaboration on my personal stress point for queries: a big one for me is the delay in approving the work as a whole, meaning the other tags that are unambiguous also don't make it in at the same time. For me, personally, this would be hugely alleviated if mods still accepted the work first for all unambiguous tags while querying for any ambiguous ones, because then I'll feel a lot less like 'oh shit, my team is counting on my work to down [other tag that I 100% know I hit] but now it's in purgatory'. I don't know if this works with the process, since I know the general policy is not to go back and add missed tags, but I figured it's worth raising!
I also feel like some of the current rules surrounding tags that will or won't be approved for art could stand to be noted somewhere clearer, such as whether or not a tag will be accepted if it's mainly visible via speech bubble. I found myself pre-justifying a lot of stuff I might just have assumed the mods would be able to see before to avoid querying, especially for complex works, aiming to avoid a query so I can just get the work in and get my unambiguous tag, and honestly in hindsight, I feel like I could have spent that time making more things xD
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Caps
The word count equivalent cap instead of a work cap for bosses felt SO freeing. Thank you so much for implementing it! I technically contributed way less to the second boss, but it just felt great not having to plan around making really long things. I'm fine if the number of works per board gets bumped up a little (even though I definitely didn't cap for board 3, having a round 10 felt nice haha), but I think the caps are in a really good place now at 7 works/board and 50k/boss, and I'm very happy with them as they are.
---
Finally: another huge thank you to the mod team for all the work it takes to run this every year. I sincerely appreciate the amount of time and effort <3 Thank you for putting up with the gremlining and encouraging the creation of thousands of works! I love Battleship to bits and seeing how it improves every year is amazing :D Kudos to all the mods!
(no subject)
8/8/24 10:55 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 11:04 (UTC)Firstly, thank you to the mods for such a great Battleship this year! Your flexibility in adapting the game to a large number of new participants so quickly and to feedback was much appreciated. ♥ I had a great time this year!
Secondly, my feedback!
Things I liked -
What can I say? We krilled it. :)
I wanted to say that it was a pleasure getting to talk to the Volcano team members and encourage them during this round. It was a lot of fun calling our last shots together! ♥
I am a big fan of the tags being split between two boards with all of them eventually being featured. Perhaps it's best to shuffle this around if you do choose to include a full-clear board so we don't anticipate it as the final board next year. I feel Board 2 being a different puzzle spices the game up, too (and I say this as someone who Does Not Get It).
I also still love how we have to hit one of two tags to clear a square. I feel having two tags per square worked well this year, and that we didn't feel any need for the minions/mercs roles. Please keep this!
I also think the Boss rounds are needed for wind downs and to allow players who may not be fond of the tag strategy to play or who take longer to create can still have a positive impact on the team's progress, so even though I'm admittedly not a Boss round player, I'd like to see this stay for next year.
Things I did not like -
1) I found it frustrating that two teams were so far ahead of the other two when we entered the Boss 2 and Board 3 phase that it became very discouraging for me to want to continue. Mermaid had a frank conversation about how we felt there was no point in even trying to catch up by the time we got off Boss 2 — we were 2-3 days behind Tunnel and Crystal at this point, and they cleared their boards within hours of us having this chat. We didn't even get to clear a square before the game was over. I know it's inevitable that someone will be ahead, but this seemed to be a consistent experience for Mermaid.
2) I also wanted to include in this section of feedback if the mods would consider how they equalise teams when one team has significantly fewer players participating than the other teams. I don't know if this happened this year, and I'm not asking the mods to confirm this, either! I wanted to share that from my experience, it felt like Mermaid rallied together well, we had motivation and the energy, but every time we did, we stayed behind. Was this because we had fewer people participating than the other teams (because this is how it felt to me) or was this bad luck? In the past, when a team rallied, we made progress that we felt. I didn't feel this progress in Mermaid.
Even if we didn't have fewer players participating, do the mods have something in place where if a team has 20 people participating against teams with 40-50 participants to help make it fair for the team that has 20 players playing?
I'm not posing these questions for an answer—they're meant to be thought starters/hypotheticals and I wanted to express how it felt from the inside if it assists in creating the team roster next year.
My team felt like there was no chance of us winning. By this point, I felt my team wasn't engaged anymore, and it was hard for myself to be engaged, too. I feel the strategy tag board has mechanics naturally built into it that allow teams lagging behind to pull ahead (something my team expressed in our chat), but because I feel we languished on the Boss 2, we didn't get our chance to give the other three teams a run for their money.
Things I have no opinion on -
Thank you again for a fun Battleship! I really enjoyed myself, and I'm so glad I can walk away from this round with new friends! ♥ See you next year!
(no subject)
8/8/24 11:15 (UTC)I think I prefer four teams to two. It gives more room for surprises, and it defrays a little of the tension that can crop up when it's just one team playing against one other.
I loved the two tags per square mechanic last year, it was great this year too. Definitely leaves room for more strategy and flexibility than just having one tag per square. Four got a little overwhelming for me, but I might be able to figure it out if I tried again or hit on some kind of spreadsheet solution to make it more manageable.
Posting the giftless list at the start of a boss battle was a good idea. A boss battle makes it easier to create for specific people because you're not worried about whether they requested or DNWed strategic tags. Between that and removing the works cap, people absolutely demolished that list.
I loved boards one and two. Board two especially was a lot of fun for me. I liked that the nature of the board itself was a surprise, and then within the board, it was surprise after surprise as we tried to guess the secret rules. I'm not strong at puzzles like that, but I like trying. I had so much fun coordinating with my team to figure it out, and I was so thrilled when I did manage to guess a rule correctly. I loved how solving more of the secret rules helped us narrow which squares we needed to target. That felt like a very natural, organic way for one element of gameplay to feed into another.
I liked when you removed the work cap for boss battles. With boss one, I hit the work cap early and then kind of sat on my hands. With boss two, I was pushing myself the whole time working toward the points cap. It was a much more rewarding experience. This year, because of the higher point cap on comics, I was pushed to make my first comic. I love it when Battleship makes me stretch like that and try new things.
I saw someone suggest that if archive warnings continue to be board tags, it would be helpful to have people opt into or out of archive warnings in their signups, to make their requests more searchable. I'd like to second that. I think it might also be helpful to ask creators what archive warnings they could potentially create for as part of the participant survey at the beginning. I think that part of the game would be more fun if the creators for archive warning works were more evenly distributed across the teams.
Board three didn't work as well for me. The first two boards were motivating for me because they specified limits, and that reduces the executive functioning work of writing because I can focus on the most useful tags. It gives me a direction. They were also motivating because of the surprises and the strategy. The surprise of finding something under a square or using that information to strategize is dopamine for me, and it makes it easier to write. A blackout board with every tag doesn't have those limits, or that level strategy or those surprises. It's less motivating in that way.
All in all, I had a wonderful time. I hope you run it again next year, because I can't wait to come back and try again with what I learned from this round.
(no subject)
8/8/24 12:06 (UTC)1) Having four teams: I think 3 might also accomplish this, but for me having more than two teams going head-to-head made this round feel more fun competitive, even if you weren't in the lead.
2) Loved the pixel art reveals on the end boards, especially the foxy <3 The magmaids channel combination was lovely!
3) One very minor point: instead of a second boss, I would love a final boss board or something similar. Alternatively, having a more strategic play option while going up against the bosses would be great as someone who does get bored/loses momentum on boss levels. Or even for just for fun/cute aesthetics. Like side quest style of "complete 5 works for underused tag x to use a potion that adds 50% damage to hitpoints" or "complete five gifts for firebird to get a cute pixel phoenix in the corner of your teams' spreadsheets"
As always, the lore was a delight and I had an awesome time <3
A cooking simulator?! I'm so excited for next time *\o/*
ExtraPenguin, Team Volcano
8/8/24 13:38 (UTC)The Good
My team! Volcano was a nice and chill place to be and we had fun together. I also think we might've had a disproportionate amount of non-US-timezone people, in which case: thank you! I loved how the chat didn't die just because the Americans were asleep.
Four teams. At this size, four teams was definitely the right call.
Magmaids! This was a fun concept and I wholeheartedly support the post-game team merge.
Getting to play with the board in the anon period. I think this is the way to go for losing teams in future years. Much better end result than Tower being unleashed upon Dungeon.
Tag earning via treats only for Magmaids. This felt fair.
Changing the boss work cap to a points cap. Much better for more shortform creators!
The Bad
The full board clear. When I woke up to Crystal (and Tunnel?) having gotten to the final board and the game logic there being a full board clear, I went back to bed and cried. I couldn't bring myself to create anything anymore. I straight-up stopped having fun until the announcement of the Magmaids board. I already prefer boards to bosses and then it turned out that the reward for getting through the boss fight was not a nice board with strategy stuff (where closeish gaps could be closed/reversed through better strategy, and teams further behind could at least delude themselves that the gap is closable by being gr8 at strats), so it felt like a grindy punishment: Not only will you lose, you also don't get to have fun with strategy to console yourself!
(I also don't care if my favorite tag doesn't get written. Like, at all. If it's not in my fandoms, I am never going to see it, even if there's hundreds of works centering on it. The bingo last year was I think a good option for underwritten tags, though I understand that it's not feasible to repeat due to the amount of work it was.)
The Meh
Board side-goals. (M/M, Underage, etc) This really guided my works so that for board 1 I had to go in search of of F/M Noncon prompts and for board 2 I had to find F/F Underage. I agree with the criticism on Discord that they were hard to see at first; I also think they could've been better placed for boss battles, as then those amongst us who are indecisive without the goal of "okay we need to obliterate that square" (me, I'm speaking about myself) could have a goal beyond Write/Pod Many Words/Draw Many Arts, and shortform creators could e.g. see that we need 20 Other works and go "Sweet, my fave is nonbinary; I shall fill the collection with shippy stuff about them!"
Four tags per square. See above re: me being indecisive without being guided by strategy. This was compounded by the fact it needed a full board clear. I get that this is a mechanic for slow creators, but please at least don't couple it with a full board clear.
Suggestions
More people doing approvals and shots, esp in a non-US time zone! See my comment from last year. I think this impacted Team Volcano a fair bit in the enthusiasm early on, since getting to see the results for the square you targeted is super enthusiasm-generating, and being able to adjust your strategy when your creators are awake and creating/do agile strategy is fun and exciting. (I am not saying this is why we fizzled out – well, idk, maybe! – but we would've had a bit more fun getting joint third in our volcano lair by the sea, if you get what I mean?)
Objective measures for the pre-game survey. We were asked to make a subjective assessment of our creation capabilities, but that's just that: subjective. Instead of asking whether people see themselves making "many" (how many?) works this Battleship, ask whether they see themselves making under 5, 5-9, 10-14, or 15+ works this Battleship (or whatever dividing lines you pick). Some people will be hit by competitive spirit and make more, or hit by RL and make less, but this should at least help with team balance more than this year's survey.
Announcements channel. Something where mods could post "Starting approvals with Mermaids in 15 minutes!" and "Team Tunnel has cleared the first boss!" so it's not completely lost in the sea of #general.
(no subject)
8/8/24 15:01 (UTC)What I liked:
I love the creativity Battleship inspires in finding ways to incorporate as many tags as possible and double-tapping key squares.
I was initially a bit nervous about the 4-team approach, but I think it worked out well. I loved my team (Tunnel) and thought it had a great vibe and a fun mix of creators with different skills and interests. I also appreciate how the mods changed the original single-winner approach to first place, second place, and tied for third.
I really appreciate how the boards and bosses prioritize different kinds of strategies, and I hope the mods continue that in the future. From my perspective, the boards are a better fit for short fics and single-panel artworks with high tag efficiency whereas the bosses are a better fit for longer works and comics with fewer tags, as well as to get some use out of works started on the boards whose tags were already claimed by the time they were finished. I realize it could be dispiriting if your skills are a better fit for the boards than for the bosses or vice-versa, but IMO it's important to give both kinds of players a time to shine rather than tailoring the whole game toward a certain type of player. I hope the mods will maintain that balance in the future.
What I didn't like
To me, the strategy of bringing back all of the tags for board 3 so players can use unfinished works on that board undercut Boss 2. If the Boss Battle is a great opportunity to finish and post your unfinished works but so is Board 3, then neither is unique and it's hard to determine where those works would be best fit. I also prefer the strategy part of play, and having to clear the entire board completely removed strategy from Board 3. It's also more fun for me to plan around a new set of tags than to have to think up new ideas for old tags. In the future, I'd prefer for Board 3 to be another puzzle board with new tags, as it was in 2023.
I fully realize this is outside of the mods' control, but in my opinion, a lot of tags this year were abstract concepts that are difficult to incorporate into art. I hope my fellow players keep the artists in mind when they claim tags for next year's game.
I appreciate the mods changing the art scoring system for Boss 2, but it did feel like this year prioritized multi-panel comics over single-panel art, which was a bit of a bummer for a primarily single-panel artist. I realize the initial rules were made in response to requests from sequential artists from past years, and I hope the mods will be able to find a balance in the future. As I said above, IMO Battleship works best when people with all kinds of different styles have opportunities to participate.
I strongly preferred when Archive Warnings, Ratings, and relationship types were incorporated into the boards (and paired with other tags) in 2023 vs. this year when each one was mandatory to hit 20 times apiece. A lot of players are unwilling or unable to create for certain Warnings and Ratings, and a lot of requestors DNW them. Making them mandatory for board completion without alternatives presents a major logistical challenge and can slow down the game to a slog when the only way to proceed is to rely on the relatively small number of teammates who can create for those tags and the relatively small number of recipients willing to receive those works.
What I was neutral about
The work and point caps never really impacted me either way since I never came close to either cap nor expected to. It seems like people were happy with the switch from work caps to point caps, so I'm glad the mods were flexible in that way. OTOH, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to prioritize different kinds of works on different levels, since that variety gives everyone a chance to play a role in the game.
I loved the idea of the pre-game survey, and I was disappointed to hear that the mods ultimately found it not to be useful. I do hope the mods will try again in the future, but consider adapting Tunnel's internal survey that identified which tags were challenging for the team as a whole and how many participants were willing to create for each tag. Having this information in advance of the game could be useful to balance out the boards and spread out those players willing to create for the most challenging tags. It can be hard to predict how much you will create, particularly for a first-time participant, but relatively easy to identify DNWs, triggers, and squicks, so IMO that information should be much more reliable.
(no subject)
8/8/24 15:42 (UTC)I had a gut feeling that both Mermaid and Volcano had fewer really excited/effective boss players than the other two teams, and I sensed low moral in the Volcano chat during bosses that matches peaked's observations in Mermaid chat. I think we could've caught up to board 3 if we had multiple boss rockstars cranking out huge wordcounts for the boss, but we didn't. I think Volcano's most productive members (myself included) preferred the boards to the bosses and got more done on the boards.
(no subject)
8/8/24 16:04 (UTC)stuff i liked
1) the board 2 mystery shapes! i love a bit of fun variety in puzzles, and it felt like a fun twist on the battleship format. the puzzle elements are my favorite part!
2) full board clear for the last board! i thought this was a really fun way to conclude the game, and i liked that all tags were potentially useful again.
3) shoutout to team captains! gaialux did a great job, especially considering the extra teams were a last minute thing.
4) uncovering the pixel art under board 3! so cute and satisfying!
5) i loooooove spreadsheets and lists!! thanks lailah and everybody else who did work on all the wonderful spreadsheets!!
suggestions for next year
1) please clarify how you want participants to format tag claims in author's notes so we can standardize it and make things easier for the mods!
2) some kind of "bonus points" mechanic for overkilling a square so that knocked-out tags aren't totally useless? not sure how this would work, maybe extra treasure for the boss fight or just something totally cosmetic like a bit of extra lore or it turns the square a different color.
3) public shots! i like cheering on the other teams, and i just didn't think to look at the other grids more than once every couple days.
4) some reconfiguring to not have an all-tags full-board-clear right after a boss fight! they didn't feel super distinct from each other gameplaywise, which made it feel more like one very long phase rather than two different ones. something else in between or having the full-board-clear be the boss fight might feel better i think! i really did love the full clear with every tag though.
5) shuffling tag combos for the full clear! i think one of the mods said they didn't do this because of time constraints (understandable!!) so hopefully next year it'll be doable!
pie in the sky ideas
these ones are probably not super feasible or practical but are things i think might be fun!
1) some way to get a big jump in points that's Difficult in terms of writing but not in terms of raw numbers, which is only available to non-first-place team(s), that's an optional challenge or sidequest type of thing. reverse tropes, fulfilling some kind of bingo, unusual tags, etc.
making it second-third-fourth-etc place only (or third-fourth only, or whatever) would make it so that the leading team couldn't use it to get an even bigger lead! also add extra strategizing... maybe you should try to slow down on purpose so you can use it!
difficulty-balancing is super hard and this would be pretty complicated i think! so it might not be really feasible. it just seems to me (from dungeon last year and from feedback this year) that the biggest issue with teams falling behind is that people get discouraged and slow down which means the gap gets bigger and it becomes a feedback loop of dismay, which is is hard to account for in game mechanics...
2) maybe if a team overkills a square then they could help another team with that same square (WITH PERMISSION)? maybe people would hate that, though... getting permission seems like it'd be important, but i'm not sure how that would work exactly especially with how fast the game moves and timezones and stuff.
3) i know a lot of people don't like it and it's a bad fit for how emotionally stressed a lot of people feel during battleship, but i would love to play Evil Battleship with sabotage and treachery and penalties and tricks. if anyone is thinking about organizing an Evil round, i would love to participate!
(no subject)
8/8/24 16:59 (UTC)So to the feedback:
1) I almost dropped out due to not knowing what Battleship was. If I didn't have my friend going into this with me, I may have actually dropped out. I recommend a Google Docs or a write-up on the mechanics of the game (with images or boards from past games), as well as how the goals/mechanics each year are dynamic. A list of previous mechanics from the past would be awesome, as well as something that says "This changes year to year, and maybe something new for this round." I'm not sure if you guys are even looking for more people, but it'd help newcomers understand what they're getting into. That said, after a few days, I understood what was going on, but it did take a bit. If you guys need a volunteer to write this up, I wouldn't mind doing it! I sincerely believe it would help new players know what to expect.
In addition to images of the boards, an example of how the discord channels per team would be set up would be great. Older players knew what to do but I was hesitant to do anything until a day or two had already passed, and this is a quick game.
2) For art specifically, I recommend a visual guide on how the scoring for the boss phases go as well as a clear listing of how art tags can count (like "Speech bubbles will not count for tag claims"). I know that new things pop up every year and you can't capture everything, but a growing? list of rules for art that can be pinned in discord or be placed in the Rules&Info channel would be awesome.
A suggestion for what the visual guides could look like:
3) I know everyone hates more channels but they're needed. I think it would be good to separate "Rules&Info" from "Announcements". The "Announcements" channel can even be used for approval call outs instead of creating a role bot like I had suggested some days ago. Any announcements in Rules&Info required a lot of scrolling up for the links and important info. I recognize that this DW had a lot of the information but going between AutoMagicApp, team spreadsheets, other team spreadsheets, Ao3, and (in my case) art-hosting sites required so many tabs. If all the info that is on DW could be copy/pasted into a non-chatter Discord channel instead, that would help so much. The growing art rules (because it's impossible to count for everything) could also go inside the Rules&Info channel.
#general did scroll often so any announcements in there got buried. I think the other lava fam can correlate to this too: we just didn't talk in #general much lmao so I time-muted it a lot.
I want to also support the idea that all shots channels be made public to all the teams but unable to chat in unless you're a member of that team or a mod. I agree that it helped when we knew other teams were progressing so it would get our butts into gear and create more.
4) THANK YOUUUU for increasing the points cap as well as removing the works cap for Boss 2. It helped so much and my work process was so much faster. I was terse in the beginning because I felt limited for Boss 1 and wasn't used to it. Now I realize that the limits are part of the game as well as the freedom. Not sure how many people will read this, but I do apologize for all the comments I made regarding work speed and progress to not only the players, but to you mods as well. I really do appreciate all the work you do and enjoy this game.
5) So I see in the stats that there is a "tags claim per 100 words" statistic. Could we get a "tags claim per art work" statistic in the future as well? :D
Thank you again! I loved this. I will now try my best to pull in my other friends into participating in exchanges hahaha
(no subject)
8/8/24 17:12 (UTC)- I REALLY appreciated that you opened the WIP tag list up for feedback before settling on the final list. I also really appreciate how you incorporated the feedback! The added tags had a lot of variety and included many things that were RTMI that weren't in the WIP tag list.
- Thank you so much for incorporating and acting on feedback about points for art!
- I second/third/whatever the observation that things just stop being fun when your team is extremely behind from the get-go and has no remotely realistic chance of catching up. I've done Battleship twice and been on teams that were absolutely crushed from the first board onward both times. I don't mind not winning, but when my team is squashed and days behind from the start people stop participating early and it saps so much enthusiasm from the team. I've also never gotten a chance to play on the final board, which feels very blah when it's something the team is looking forward to. I honestly don't know how this can be addressed in future rounds of Battleship, but I would love some kind of rebalancing to take place when the frontrunning team(s) pull out SO FAR AHEAD of the loser(s). Definitely not criticizing the mods here, I know you made an effort to balance teams from the start and you obviously can't psychically predict output! But, I do think some kind of rebalancing mechanism to keep the teams closer to neck-and-neck would be fantastic.
Thank you again for all you do!
(no subject)
8/8/24 17:36 (UTC)I was on Team Crystal, and we had an absolutely fantastic time overall. Good team culture, excellent friends, great energy. <3
I liked having four teams! Having more of a spread than just "winning" and "behind" felt really nice. I also enjoyed explicitly having the ability to request a team to be on, and hope that won't be too hard to balance again next year (especially if you start with the assumption of 3-4 teams).
I love
+1 to everyone who found doing a boss and then a full-board clear exhausting and kind of anticlimatic. Full-board clears are cool but I didn't actually enjoy doing it until near the end, when we were back to creating weird tag combinations because that's what was left; it was too easy at the start and that just left us like "idk what we should be doing". I like boards for strategizing and gameplay! Not always getting fics for my favorite tags is part of the game, and honestly even if we have all the tags back again some are just plain harder to create for.
I loved the animal companions and the flavor/lore of board 2, and having that carry over to the pixel art behind board 3 was great; thank you to the mods (and volunteer artist!) for making that art happen. <3
As a team that was ahead most of the game: I really wanted Mermaid and Volcano to come from behind at the end and make it a close(r) race than it was. I know that Tunnel and Crystal kept forcing each other to move faster so that by the end it was kind of like there were two races going on simultaneously that didn't have much to do with each other, but that wasn't as much fun as when it's closer. (The coolest part of the game was watching Tunnel do their unnecessary full clear on board 2 as they caught up to us!)
I also love the ideas various people have pitched about how to make the pre-game survey more useful! Absolutely love giving clearer numbers about what "lots of works" means, as well as potentially getting data on "how easy would it be for you to fill these tags".
I appreciate that this next year you're gonna require tags to be about the content and not the form of a work! (even if I might miss POV Second Person as an option...)
I still think it'd be funny if you made us play picross at some point. xD
I agree with the feedback that giving tag claims for correct guesses of board rules felt weird. Like, even if a group of people brainstormed the logic together, only one of them could make the formal guess! And there were a limited amount of rules! idk. I liked guessing rules but I would've done it just for a gold star sticker saying "good job! you got it right!"; honestly for me having a tag claim reward took some of the fun out of it? The reward that mattered was "you have a better idea of what's on the board/how to clear it"?
I also liked the suggestion of having a cap of 3 tag claims/person but letting them get there however they wanted. I felt sort of odd writing for people on the giftless/treatless list after I'd gotten my tag claim, like I might be taking that away from other people, but I also find writing for people who had few gifts very motivating, so I didn't want to stop creating for them! idk. It's a hard balance to strike!
I would also love a pan-team discord channel just for calling shots! Or at least one for mod announcements about approvals and when teams successfully find a thing they need! It's so fun doing emoji reacts on those announcements and I love being excited about other teams' progress too!
Overall, especially for a game where you were last-minute like "oh shit so many new people uhhh FOUR TEAMS NOW WHEEE", fantastic job, I think it was super fun and you did a fantastic job! Thanks again, mods! Looking forward to more fun next year! <3
(no subject)
8/8/24 18:12 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 20:42 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 21:09 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 21:22 (UTC)Bossfights:
As someone who mainly did art, I absolutely loved that the second boss had no works cap but only a points cap, letting me freely split my energy between elaborate and more doodly gifts. HOWEVER, there is one specific criticism I have upon reflection: The points cap was simply too high. I'd say it should be at half of what it was, maybe 30k or so max. (This assumes that points scoring stays the same.) I nearly hit my points cap for boss 2, and while I had fun, I would have preferred to to be able to sit back at some point while the boss fight was still ongoing and go "Alright, I've officially done all I can for this boss, I can stop crunching and take a breather or get a head start on board 3". I felt like I had to make art for points as fast as possible in order to not let our lead slip away, while the creators on Tunnel surely felt the same, that they had to give everything they had to catch up.
Giftless/treatless list:
I liked this list and the tag claim incentive. However, I can understand the concern of some people about feeling like it's too competitive. I only did art for giftless (mostly because of the fandoms requested, which I wouldn't normally write for) and was usually done without being caught by surprise by an approval round. But it does seem that this system would incentivise shorter gifts over longer ones, and put slower creators in general at a disadvantage. I don't know what a good solution would be, though. Maybe relaxing the rules enough that it counts to post a gift for someone who was ever on the giftless/treatless list? People who end up on that list due to their combination of fandoms or whatever are unlikely to have many gifts even when they're off the list. It wouln't be a bad thing to encourage people to keep making stuff for them, AND it would take some of the sting out of ending up on that list in the first place, because this way, your requests get exposure that never goes away while the event is ongoing! So, specific suggestion: At a certain point in the game, a Giftless/Treatless list is made, and posting a gift for those people at any point is eligible towards a tag claim. (Seconding Shadaras's suggestion about capping tag claims per person but not limiting how they get there.) Number of gifts is displayed, so people are still free to prioritise those with fewer gifts if they want.
Art tag queries
Chiming in as an artist, I would prefer there to not be a tag cap. I am seconding the suggestions of people who said that, in order to reduce stress for the artist and headache and work for the mods, unclearly claimed tags should simply be auto-rejected.
While we're on the subject of tags: I somehow wasn't aware that, unlike fic, art can claim multiple tags that are on the same square until board 3. Oops. Maybe that can be highlighted so people like me don't miss it!
The boards
We got through boards 1 and 2 too quickly for my taste and this made me a little sad. I wasn't involved in the strategy aspect at all and was barely aware of the special rules on board 2.
I would have liked more structure/strategy to board 3 than a full board blackout. It did get grindy, especially hot off the heels of grinding for boss 2. I would also have preferred it if the tag combinations were randomised rather than rehashes of board 1 + 2 put together.
Random suggestions:
I've seen suggestions in the feedback channel along the lines of adding more strategic elements such as bonuses, unlocks that shake things up in a qualitative way. I'd like that.
It might be fun if halfway through the game, people get randomly reassigned to different teams.
I would enjoy some kind of slowdown or timeout options but have no idea what these would look like. One possibility is a lower cap for works per creator for the boards. I only hit my works cap for board 3, at a point when the game was already decided, so, as with the bosses, I never got to experience feeling like I can take a break because I've done all I can. It might be tricky because it could contribute to decision paralysis about what to spend your precious work slots on, but on the whole, I think it's worth trying and would be a way to slow things down a bit.
Team balance:
Many people have talked about how it was demotivating to be on a losing team, and I'd like to chime in and say that the pressure to maintain the lead on a winning team was also not always great. The mods and our team captain did nothing to create such a pressure and were lovely and chill, but by god, I felt it anyway, and it's possible I would have had a more relaxing time on a slower team where I would have made peace with joint third place and just made nice gifts. But the fact that I could spend a lovely summer afternoon indoors with my tablet cranking out bossfight art meant that I had to do that, or Tunnel would win (gasp). (Then Tunnel won anyway so it's like, hm, maybe we could have both been more chill and still had the same neck-in-neck result?) Related to the comments about lowering the points cap for bosses and the works cap for boards, I would prefer it if the rules took the ability to overcommit out of my hands a bit or at least reduced the scope of it.
Thank you for your hard work, mods! I had a very positive time, possibly got too competitive and maybe even made some tentative new friends <3
(no subject)
8/8/24 21:58 (UTC)On to the rest...
Things I loved:
Archive Warnings and Categories as goals to clear. I don’t have previous Battleship experience, so I defer to the people who suggested there might be other ways to include these that help us keep them in mind, but I loved that we had to hit a certain number to make sure that some of all of these works were being created.
Controversial, but I loved the “all tags” board. It felt like the effort put into coming up with works that would hit a lot of tags but not finishing them in time to make a good impact on an earlier board was still worthwhile, because they could be used again.
Really appreciated the shift to a word count cap for the bosses rather than a work cap.
Things I didn’t love:
There were a few instances where tags that were very similar appeared on the same board (for 1 and 2). I know this can be difficult to avoid perfectly, but there were a couple where it would have been nearly impossible to write something that included one tag without the other (eg if you were writing “Past Child Abuse” on Board 1, you could also immediately claim “Abuse.”)
It felt like there were a lot of people on my team who didn’t understand the basic rules early on. I know this is unavoidable to a certain extent, because it’s a complicated game and there are newbies, but realizing that people weren’t understand that you could claim multiple tags for a work or both tags on one square DAYS into the game, despite it being said repeatedly was…frustrating. Obviously mods can’t force people to read the rules, but maybe there could be a streamlined version of the rules that people would have to click that they’ve read before starting the game.
Agree with the people who said it was wildly demotivating to get so far behind that we weren’t even going to get to play the final board before the game ended, although I’m not sure how mods would deal with that. I do suspect there may have been a lot of non-players on our team. I’m not sure if there are rules around this, but it might be good to have something where people who didn’t participate have to post 5 treats before sign-ups open the next year if they want to join again.
Other thoughts:
I agree with the people suggesting there should be a better way for us to see that work approvals are happening. I was active on the server every day and didn’t even know work approval announcements were a thing until a couple days into the game because I wasn’t keeping tabs on the general chat.
I don’t know if this is too unwieldy, but I would love it if people had to differentiate between the tags they actively want when making requests and the ones they are simply opting into for the sake of the game. I appreciated folks with broad requests, but as someone who also wanted to focus on creating gifts for people that they would really enjoy, the wall of tag options was often too overwhelming and had me backing away from creating for new recips if I didn’t have a reasonable picture of what they actually like. (Also, seconding the suggestion of having people opt-in to archive warnings.)
Undoubtedly the most controversial suggestion... I almost wish there were separate challenges for fic vs art vs podficcing. Not separate games, but just separate pieces of the board that have to be completed by each group. That might help with the scoring/tag claim issues that have come up regarding art, and somewhat address the concerns about work that perhaps didn’t make for the best gifts that came up towards the end. I think we all want to find a balance between competition and having fun creatively and making works that people genuinely want.
(no subject)
8/8/24 22:28 (UTC)(no subject)
8/8/24 22:32 (UTC)First-world problem, not venting, completely my issue: I worked off my PC, phone, and iPad throughout the whole game so re-opening all the windows that I needed whenever I switched was a pain lmaoo
(no subject)
8/8/24 22:52 (UTC)Things I Liked:
- I really liked having four teams. I think it created a better atmosphere, because it was harder to check on and worry about all of your competitors when there three instead of one. Also it made being behind feel less bad. I had a lot of fun in the beginning and middle of the game on Team Volcano jockeying with Team Tunnel to try and get second place.
- the team sizes also felt good. It felt like I could get to know most of the active people in my team, and I wasn't drowned in discord backscroll everyone time I checked on it after working or sleeping.
- The board goals. They added a fun creative component, and I liked going "hmm, is there anyway I can add mermaids *and* graphic violence to this fic?"
Things I Liked Less
- I liked the idea of a full clear board with all the tags in theory: it lets you use any works from previous boards that you didn't quite finish, and even with two bosses, it's pretty easy to have those. But in practice, it meant teams that were behind ended up /really/ behind, and it was kind of demotivating. Some people suggested making the full board clear the second board, which could work, but I worry that for participants who don't like the boss battles, it will make the middle feel very sloggy.
- The second boss. The first boss felt like a nice size, but on the second boss, I could feel the wind go out of my team's sails, and I know I spent awhile going 'well, I could chip out 2k on that boss, but that's really not much...' (I especially noticed that once the boss was small enough that it felt like a 2k work could make a difference, it got beaten very quickly, so I do think it had something to do with the initial size being demotivating.) I realise this is a tricky one to solve, because it was set to slow down some of the faster teams, and I know that the mods want bosses to last long enough to give them a break, but that boss just felt too big.
Suggestions
- Last year, I really liked the minesweeper board, because it created a nice catch up mechanic. The team that got onto it first could start calling shots first and maybe getting hits, but the team behind could see what we revealed and start solving the puzzle, so that when they got the board, they could make more strategic shots more quickly. It was nice catch up mechanic because it didn't feel like a punishment for the team that got there first, and didn't make them necessarily have to do more work, but it still gave the team behind a chance to catch up. I think it would be nice if the final board next year was a similar puzzle, to give the teams behind a chance. (Especially because it felt like the gap between teams grew as the game went along, so catch up mechanics would probably help more in the later stages of the game.)
Once again, thank you so much for running this. I had a lot of fun!
(no subject)
8/8/24 23:20 (UTC)I loved the Team Tunnel energy and positivity, and I thought having four teams instead of two made the entire event more fun. (Less head-to-head competition, maybe?)
I also loved the round 3 full board clear with no boss battle! BUT here is my brilliant (?!?) idea to make round 3's full board clear EVEN MORE BATTLESHIP. This idea would 1) give the strategizers something fun to do in round 3; and 2) create opportunities for a more level playing field for the final round. (Or possibly just create more chaos. Which could be fun too!)
Okay, so imagine that in board 3, 20% (or whatever) of the squares are MYSTERY REVEALS -- once they've been hit, they reveal either a boost or a burden (obvs the names would be improved to something cool...)
A boost would be something like: 'pick two adjacent squares to halve the remaining hits required,' or 'free hit on any remaining square.'
And a burden would be something like: 'now you have to clear this square again,' or 'one of your board goals is doubled.'
And the key is that the ratio of boost-to-burden squares would vary based on the order in which teams reached board 3. So the first team would have mostly burdens, and the final team would have mostly boosts.
I know this would create even more work for the mods -- sorry about that; I couldn't come up with any ideas that didn't? Also I had a lot of fun thinking about this, so thanks for that experience along with all my thanks for Battleship itself!