Battleship

🧭 Part II: Shipyard Strategy 🛠️🧑‍✈️

“Captain on deck! Time to plan your fleet deployment.”

Welcome to Day 2 of your Battleship conquest. Yesterday, you built the battlefield and launched random sneak attacks. Today, you get to be the Admiral. That’s right — it’s your turn to decide where your ships go!
But with great power comes great responsibility:
- - 🧠 You'll need to ensure your ship placements are smart, valid, and don't collide with any other vessels. You’re coding both the brains and the battle plan of the fleet.

🎯 Part II Objectives:

✅ Prompt the player to place their own ships

✅ Accept and validate coordinate input like A4, J10, etc.

✅ Allow vertical or horizontal orientation

✅ Check that all ships:

Stay within board boundaries
Don’t overlap other ships

✅ Hide ships from the player (This is war, not show-and-tell.)

🛳️ TASK 1: Accept Coordinate Input / Checking

🎯 Goal: Let players enter coordinates like A1, B5, or J10 and convert them to board positions you can actually use.

🔍 Overview:

You must accept coordinates like:
- - - A1, C5, J10
    - That means:
      - First character is a letter (A–J) → column
        Remaining characters are the row (1–10)
✅ Create a function to Do Conversions:
- - Convert A1 → (0, 0)
  - Convert J10 → (9, 9)
Check if the input is in a valid format and on the board
🧠 HINT: Use .upper(), ord(), and isdigit() to help with validation.

👀 What's Going On Here?

Your player is about to call out a shot across the digital sea:
- - - “FIRE TORPEDO AT C7!”
But your computer doesn’t understand "C7" — it needs real numbers like (2, 6) (row 6, column 2). So your job is to build a translator — a function that:
- - Takes A1 as input
  - Checks if it’s real and valid
  - Returns it as a tuple of numbers you can use on your 2D board

🧱 Step 1: Ask the Player to Enter a Coordinate

Start Simple with an input statement

coord = input("Enter a coordinate (like A5 or J10): ")

Use .strip() and .upper() to clean it up if needed

🔍 Step 2: Separate the Letter and the Number

You need to split the input:
- - The first character is always the column (A to J)
  - The rest is the row number (1 to 10)

letter = coord[0]

number_part = coord[1:]

Treat the string like a list!

The first position of the string is [0]
We use a list slice to get the next character to the end! [1:]

🧪 Step 3: Validate the Parts

Make sure:
- - The letter is between A and J
  - The number is between 1 and 10
  - Nothing weird was typed (like Z25, A-1, or 1A)

❗HINTS:

- - Use .isalpha() to check if the letter is a letter
  - Use .isdigit() to make sure the number part is actually a number
  - Use ord() to convert A to a number (did you know ord('A') is 65?)

Use Try/Except to make your life easy!

If what you want doesn't happen, raise an error and print an error message!

🔄 Step 4: Convert to Board Coordinates and return

Your board is zero-based. That means:
- - A1 should become (0, 0)
  - C5 should become (4, 2)
  - J10 should become (9, 9)

📏 Think:

- - We can do this 1 of 2 ways...
    - - FIRST WAY: BIG IF/ELSE STATEMENT
        Why? It's really easy, and easy to read!
      - 2nd Way: Use ord( )
        ord() is a built-in Python function that turns a letter into its secret number code — also known as its ASCII value.
        ord("A") → 65
        ord("B") → 66
        ord("C") → 67
        EXAMPLE:
        ord("B) - ord("A) = 1 which is the 2nd position on your board (B Column)

📏 TASK 2: Deploy the Fleet! 🛠️🛳️

🎯 Goal:

Let the player choose how many ships they want to place (between 1 and 10), then give them the power to manually deploy each one by entering a valid coordinate and choosing a direction.

No random drops this time, Captain. The player is now in charge of their own navy.

🧱 Step 1: Ask How Many Ships

Your program needs to ask:

“🛠️ How many ships do you want to place (1–10)?”

🎯 What you need to do:
- - Use input() to ask the question
  - Turn the input into a number using int()
  - Make sure it's between 1 and 5
  - If it’s not valid, keep asking!

Each ship needs:

A coordinate (like "A5")
A valid location (on the board, and not taken)

Your program should keep asking until the player gives you a proper coordinate. One wrong move and they could be trying to place a ship on land, or worse — on top of another!

🎯 Step 2: Ask for the Ship’s Coordinate

Your program needs to ask:

🛠️ “Where would you like to place ship #X? (e.g., A1 to J10)”

You must make sure

- The spot must be on the board
- It must be a valid coordinate
- And it must be empty (See Below)
- If all conditions are true you have to SAVE THE SHIP LOCATION IN A LIST OF PLACED SHIPS!!

🎯 Checking for Overlapping Coordinates and Saving the ship...

Now that you’ve validated the coordinate, double-check that it isn’t already occupied. You don’t want two destroyers parked in the same square.
You can use:

if (row, col) in player_ships:

To SAVE the ship:

player_ships.append((row, col))

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