The field manual
This game is full of machinery the HUD never explains. A splashed pilot is worth points to whoever scoops him. Torpedoes swim where your turrets look, not your bow. A tank's rear plate is a tenth of its front. Nobody tells you any of this — until now. The death screen just became a field manual.
The problem: the game keeps secrets it shouldn't
We kept watching playtests where good mechanics simply never got met. Nobody flew search-and-rescue, because nobody knew the bobbing raft with the orange dye ring pays +4 team points if you fly over it low and slow for two seconds. Naval players fired torpedoes off the bow and watched them miss, never told that the fish launch along the gun bearing. Tankers bounced round after round off a Paladin's 600 mm face without learning the rear plate is 60. The systems narrate themselves once you know they exist — but the first meeting was pure luck.
The one screen every player reliably reads is the death screen. The killcam names who got you; the death-recap coach says why. That screen already proved players absorb one line of text while they wait to respawn. So it gets a second line.
The fix: one page per death
The field manual is a client-side table of a hundred-plus tips, one shown per death — on the killcam badge, restated on the respawn card for anyone who skipped the replay, and one on the join screen so the manual isn't gated behind dying first. Least-shown rotates first, so the whole book circulates before anything repeats.
Each theater reads its own chapters: the air book covers SAR, the two flak doctrines (the 88s solve for straight lines; ships' Bofors mounts track fast and burst), convergence ranges, the balloon fence. The naval book covers the torpedo bearing, citadels and shell choice, why your guns hold fire bow-on. The land book covers angling, the ammo-rack jackpot, shoot-and-scoot. The jets pages only ship in the jets era, and the combined-arms Gulf fights with the air and naval books both open.
Checked against the code, not the legend
Every line was written against the server's actual constants, not our memory of them — and that audit was the real work. The rescue window really is 40 m, 55 m/s, two full seconds. The ricochet angle really is 72°. Firing a tank gun really does bloom your spotting range for a full ten seconds. Where a number is likely to get retuned, the tip says “about” and points at the behavior instead of the digits, so the manual ages gracefully.
The confession: our own first draft lied. It had a tip about ramming enemy ships (there is no ship-to-ship collision — hulls only collide with terrain), one about war-emergency power (props have no boost lever at all; that's a ship-and-tank consumable), and a cheerful page on naval smoke screens — which ship disabled by default in the live config. Three confident paragraphs about machinery that doesn't exist, written by the people who built the machinery that does. The fix for the last one is honest kit-checking: tips about optional equipment carry a flag and only enter the rotation when the server actually turns the gear on.
One page per death. The coach tells you why you went down, the nemesis system tells you who to blame — and now the manual makes sure the trip back to the fight costs you a death but pays you a mechanic. If the game is going to keep killing you, the least it can do is teach you something on the way down.