"The Spanish fleet thou canst not see because -"

Well, because - in the words of Sheridan - "It is not yet in sight!".

I see no ships

I now quite like the aesthetics (that word rings a bell) of my cheap as chips C&C Napoleonic prototype, but I have been worried about it's utility. Specifically about the impact on line of sight of using offset squares instead of hexagons. In the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach it is never really a problem because we are playing ancients and virtually all ranged fire is at two squex distance where the concept is intuitive. In Napoleonics however, artillery has a somewhat longer range and the thing gets complicated.

I can see for miles and miles

A quick look at the maths tells us that only a grid of offset rectangles with the width equal to √3 times their height will give the same line of sight result as tessellated hexagons using C&C's centre to centre rule. If I had worked that out before I drew lines on my doormats I might have reflected it in the squex sizes, although (a) it probably wouldn't have looked as good and (b) I didn't have enough mats anyway. I need to come with a quick and dirty alternative to the centre to centre rule to match my quick and dirty playing space.