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Okay my bud and I have been playing SoT for a few weeks now as noob sloopies. We're pretty terrible at the close quarters gun/sword combat but slowly getting better. Here's some general observations I have that might be helpful to the new player: -Audio cues are really huge. You can hear the sounds of swimmers in the water, or someone getting on your ladder. There are audio cues for when you kill a player or when your cannon rounds hit. Your boat makes concerning timbers shuddering/creaking sounds if it takes on a significant amount of water alerting you that you need to start bailing water soon. (I feel like they've changed this recently to make those sounds earlier). I'm just starting to get more attuned to these. -As Thief posted, fire damage by itself is the least effective in ship to ship combat and it's very difficult to sink a ship with fire alone unless it's allowed to spread completely unchecked. You can try this yourself sometimes and set your own ship on fire with a few firebombs and see how long it takes to do critical damage or sink. The main benefit of fire is it becomes a serious complication when added to other major problems like holes in your ship or being boarded and other pirates killing you aboard your ship. It causes visual chaos, injures you in a way that has to be addressed and makes it difficult for you moving about the ship to do damage control or fighting boarders. But for a competent crew simply being firebombed by swimmers is mainly a nuisance, although it could slow a pursuer. -Actions that would have more effect on a pursuing ship would include boarding them and anchoring them and/or killing any crew, or mining them with a powder keg, either from the water or by boarding them. I suppose sniping crew with the Eye of Reach would be good but I'm not very good at this, particularly when there are any waves, I view sniping mainly as a means to keep pressure on the pursuer or the prey and deter them from being on top of their sail adjustments. -The only way to catch up or gain distance on identical ship types is to do a better job with sail adjustments and/or utilize rocks and islands to force adjustments on the other ship as previously posted, or pin them against an island or the edge of the map. There are also specific game properties to know like sloops are fastest when going straight upwind (sails "facing" the wind) and can gain on larger ships upwind but are slower in every other direction of wind. -Bailing water is a huge priority over patching holes, at least in sloops. You can outbail a huge amount of leakage in a sloop, or at least keep up, and patch a hole here and there when you get ahead of the water level a little bit. Even just PvEing and fighting skelly ships or megalodon/Kraken you can improve your damage control priorities and skill. -Whether you sink or can repair/bail through it seems to be determined by the water level in your ship rather than a specific amount of damage/holes absorbed. In a sloop, water can cover the chart table and you can still survive and bail through it but you are super close to sunk. If it reaches the top metal hoop on the barrel next to the shelf near your voyage table you are sunk. I'm guessing that wave action washing water through the window may accelerate this but not sure. -Harpooning the other ship tends to be very helpful, it keeps you in their "blind spot" for cannon shots and lets you set up your own better. Obviously you are now in close range to be sniped, firebombed, or boarded by a swimming or sword lunging enemy. It's very useful fighting skelly ships to harpoon them and gives you a huge advantage, given that the main edge skelly ships get is hitting you with magic balls and taking the crew or ship out of comission in various ways with those. You need to keep a man on the harpoon though to ensure the other ship stays "on the hook". -In general I feel that close quarters combat is OP compared with cannon play in this game. With the exception maybe of a small ship being heavily outgunned where a galleon barrage can sink it quickly. It's very easy for an enemy in a smaller ship to defeat or sink a larger one if they are much better at close quarter fighting and can get someone aboard the other ship and kill and spawn camp the crew of that ship. So if you are "winning" a ship battle heavily, you have to become aware that the only way for the other crew to get back into the game is by boarding you, and you have to be prepared to either avoid getting boarded (sail faster or away from other ship or repel boarders by shooting them in the water, shooting or slashing as they attempt to board, or blunder bombing the deck as they hit the top of the ladder) or be prepared to deal with them once they have boarded. I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to get better at close quarters combat. It feels like the answer is probably playing arena, especially sloops, because you can constantly be fighting with cannons, boarding or being boarded, and/or fighting it out close quarters at the chest turn in spots. PvP encounters are much more sporadic in adventure mode and you can go hours between them. I suppose you can play Adventure mode in such a way where you don't bother with voyages and engage every ship you see but it would still be less efficient than Arena for levelling skills IMO.
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May 25, 2020 18:06
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Zwabu posted:Okay my bud and I have been playing SoT for a few weeks now as noob sloopies. We're pretty terrible at the close quarters gun/sword combat but slowly getting better. Here's some general observations I have that might be helpful to the new player: I'll put at least one firebomb via cannon into a ship if only to make the top deck a zone of attrition where a glancing cannonball hit might actually take somebody out instead of getting a direct hit. Close quarters combat seems to be a lot of jumping around while your blunderbuss reloads or wild sword swinging. My adrenaline always kicks in though and makes me clumsy in close quarter. I love using the throwable blunder-bombs to knock people off ladders, when I can't quite tell if somebody is on or not I'll toss one at each ladder to make sure they're clear. It surprises me how often some pirate is just on the bottom rung waiting for the coast to be clear to climb up and anchor. Phuzzybond makes good SoT videos, he keeps a weird calm almost at all times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q48AD_rlzAc
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May 25, 2020 18:18
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Sekhmnet posted:I'll put at least one firebomb via cannon into a ship if only to make the top deck a zone of attrition where a glancing cannonball hit might actually take somebody out instead of getting a direct hit. Close quarters combat seems to be a lot of jumping around while your blunderbuss reloads or wild sword swinging. My adrenaline always kicks in though and makes me clumsy in close quarter. Yeah, I don't think I'd dislike the close quarters stuff as much if you couldn't jump around like a bunny, I dislike that in any shooter, and close combat winds up like that for me also. I feel like I'm going to try just equipping two guns, like maybe pistol/blunder, and force myself to NOT jump and move smoothly in circles or back and forth to line up better shots so win or lose I don't feel like it's so random. The tricky part for me with blunders is the timing. If you're reacting to seeing a guy atop your ladder he's already aboard and you missed your chance. Does the blunderbomb knock off a guy clinging to bottom of the ladder if you hit the deck at the top? I like that the game has all kinds of little tricks and nuances like the two different types of sword lunges. One other comment about damage control is that fires and water leakage have a certain symbiotic efficiency. While it's better not to have fires or holes in your ship, they can contribute towards fixing each other. If you have a lot of fire on your upper deck and holes/leakage below, it's good to leave at least one or two holes and use the leaking water to put out fires. You can actually bail/toss water at the upper deck from below and quickly get rid of water and fire at the same time, ditto for the rear canopy on the sloop.
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May 25, 2020 18:35
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Broadly this game is about problem management Any decent crew can deal with one problem like fire or a few holes in the deck pretty easily. In both avenues of pursuit your job is to create too many problems for them to handle. Usually once you hit three problems (fire plus anchor plus boarders, or cannons plus mast destruction plus harpoons) it’s only a matter of time
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May 25, 2020 19:42
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Zwabu posted:
It goes through decks/sides so if they get hit, and being on the ladder would put them in the splash zone, they'll let go of whatever they're grabbing. It might not knock somebody off a ship but it will make them let go of the cannon/anchor/wheel/ladder. Unless they re-grab that ladder fast they're not getting back on. This is just my experience though; maybe if you're at the far edge of the grenade's sphere of influence, or whatever you want to call it maybe it doesn't force you to let go. This tactic might not work so well if the pirate you're knocking off is carrying a splody boy though. (gunpowder)
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May 25, 2020 20:40
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Sigh, when you have 4 people on your pubbie galleon, and 1 proceeds to constantly drop the anchor, throw away your loot overboard, and change the flag to the reaper's flag so that everybody comes chasing after you. And the other pubbies can't figure out how to brig him. Cheap entertainment for some bored kid.
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May 26, 2020 07:26
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Damnit, open crew galleons are the worst, you almost never get a crew who know what to do. And the worst part is, they're not willing to learn either. Not to mention the amount of planks and balls you need on a galleon is virtually in the 100s, and stupid kids cba to stock the ship either...I think they deserve an occasional troll
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May 26, 2020 09:45
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DreadCthulhu posted:Sigh, when you have 4 people on your pubbie galleon, and 1 proceeds to constantly drop the anchor, throw away your loot overboard, and change the flag to the reaper's flag so that everybody comes chasing after you. And the other pubbies can't figure out how to brig him. Cheap entertainment for some bored kid. If you're going into an open crew whatever, your only expectation should be nonsense multiplied by even more nonsense. God forbid you have in game chat above 5% if only to hear other crews try to scheme. Your *sigh* should have been when you chose open crew, not with the open crew. I only go into open crew to slap on cool ship skins and put down an athenas, if they want it. I'll ride it out a bit from that point but once 2 or 3 of the maps are cleared ppl drop because ... people don't usually have 2-5 hours to spend on video games every day.
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May 26, 2020 10:38
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Sekhmnet posted:It goes through decks/sides so if they get hit, and being on the ladder would put them in the splash zone, they'll let go of whatever they're grabbing. It might not knock somebody off a ship but it will make them let go of the cannon/anchor/wheel/ladder. Unless they re-grab that ladder fast they're not getting back on. This is just my experience though; maybe if you're at the far edge of the grenade's sphere of influence, or whatever you want to call it maybe it doesn't force you to let go. This tactic might not work so well if the pirate you're knocking off is carrying a splody boy though. (gunpowder) Yeah my friend and I tested this, you're right. If I'm clinging to the ladder anywhere on it and he blunderbombs the top of the ladder I let go/fall off, that's really good to know that I can just "clear the ladders" with a couple of bombs without having to time the boarder being right at the top etc. I wish we could test gun/sword methods against each other too, but unlike blunderbombs and firebombs we can't damage each other that way. Cannon shot doesn't do any collateral damage to your crew either although it can damage your ship (such as aiming your cannon straight up at the sail/boom and hitting it with chain shot).
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May 26, 2020 13:02
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Sekhmnet posted:If you're going into an open crew whatever, your only expectation should be nonsense multiplied by even more nonsense. God forbid you have in game chat above 5% if only to hear other crews try to scheme. Your *sigh* should have been when you chose open crew, not with the open crew. I only go into open crew to slap on cool ship skins and put down an athenas, if they want it. I'll ride it out a bit from that point but once 2 or 3 of the maps are cleared ppl drop because ... people don't usually have 2-5 hours to spend on video games every day. Fair. Is the solution to pretty much only ever do premades? Seems like Rare hasn't figured out how to make open crews work well consistently?
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May 26, 2020 18:31
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DreadCthulhu posted:Fair. Is the solution to pretty much only ever do premades? Seems like Rare hasn't figured out how to make open crews work well consistently? randos are randos in p. much any game, but in this one it's probably worse than in like a deathmatch because the operation of anything larger than a sloop requires a certain degree of cooperation and immediate understanding of what needs to be done. getting a crew of friends makes it a totally different game
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May 26, 2020 18:51
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It's a shame the Steam release didn't hit while I was working from home.
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May 26, 2020 19:42
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Groovelord Neato posted:It's a shame the Steam release didn't hit while I was working from home. my crew and I sunk 10 dang ships last night in two hours and I can't imagine what it'll be like when June 3 rolls around
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May 26, 2020 19:48
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I've heard some talk that a Steam version might be more stable than the current PC version, is there any reason that might be? I will say that the mouse control "losing focus" or whatever it's called is rather annoying (my usual solution is to switch to sword and swing the sword, that seems to get rid of extraneous nonfunctional mouse cursor.
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May 26, 2020 19:48
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So long as I don't have to touch the xbox companion app again I'm happy, few days ago spent 30 minutes trying to get some friends invited and by the end one of them still couldn't join.
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May 26, 2020 19:53
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:So long as I don't have to touch the xbox companion app again I'm happy, few days ago spent 30 minutes trying to get some friends invited and by the end one of them still couldn't join. yeah that thing SUCKS, I don't know why grouping up is so difficult in TYOOL 2020
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May 26, 2020 20:21
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Had a terrible night with a four man crew. We were on for 5 hours and saw a total of two player ships. Wish there was an easier way to hunt people down. e: also, what's the min - max number of players on a server? googling shows SoT forums that disagree on the point tokenbrownguy fucked around with this message at 20:41 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 20:35
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tokenbrownguy posted:Had a terrible night with a four man crew. We were on for 5 hours and saw a total of two player ships. Wish there was an easier way to hunt people down. if we're on a dead server we either try to head toward high-traffic areas like the Reaper's Hideout or wherever the Athena voyages are that month, or we just switch servers. switching servers is a lil irritating because you have to restock but a good four-man crew can locust the gently caress out of a starting outpost in a few minutes
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May 26, 2020 20:42
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tokenbrownguy posted:e: also, what's the min - max number of players on a server? googling shows SoT forums that disagree on the point It's max 6 ships per server, but I've never seen more than 5 in the past few weeks.
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May 26, 2020 22:49
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:So long as I don't have to touch the xbox companion app again I'm happy, few days ago spent 30 minutes trying to get some friends invited and by the end one of them still couldn't join.
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May 27, 2020 08:51
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I've been blessedly lucky with the xbox app. The only real problem I had with it was two days ago, and it turned out it was because I was sending crew invites to the wrong profile (thanks to random numbers after the target name). Regarding finding other ships, you can always try lighting up a fort of the damned. It does require a ritual skull (which you can possibly get from a roaming captain or ship or a regular fort) and a white flame, which still aren't all that common, but if that doesn't draw other ships to your position, likely nothing will. And hey, if it doesn't work, you get the awesome FOTD loot all to yourself. Took advantage of the relative calm yesterday to get to the upper tiers of gold hoarders and merchant leaderboards, it all went smoothly apart from one occurence of being ganked by a sloop where I gave terrible orders to the crew and got us sunk, but later the same evening I was able to do the second half of my merchant grinding uninterrupted. Chev fucked around with this message at 17:52 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 12:05
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tokenbrownguy posted:e: also, what's the min - max number of players on a server? googling shows SoT forums that disagree on the point i've heard from ppl that play more than i do that its 16 player servers based on max crew size regardless of who is actually on it so like 8 solo sloops would count as a max server supposedly but idk how that actually works out during peak hours i've seen several ships that i've lost count without a server merge so surely there's some sort of drop in/out element to it? e: Merijn posted:It's max 6 ships per server, but I've never seen more than 5 in the past few weeks. lol this is prolly more reliable than whatever info i heard Thief fucked around with this message at 14:28 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 14:26
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All I know for sure is that I have never ever seen or heard of more than 6 ships on a server.  I've been doing more Arena than usual lately, just to get the 25k silver for the cutlass from the Competition of Courage event. I've given up on getting the figurehead at 6/20 wins and only one day to go. Arena is so unfun to me.
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May 27, 2020 15:09
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specifically trying to get 1st place in arena can be very frustrating because even with roundtimes halved its still very time consuming if you lose you only need to get in the top 3 for the initial grind to get the glorious sea dog gear. even though this is 100 matches, you can get top 3 practically every single time so it always feels like you're making progress from there you gotta win 25 in 1st place to get the blue jacket. players at this point experience the same feeling you have towards the figurehead and it can be horrible even without the time constraint but after that, arena becomes fun again because as a Sea Dawg you get to enjoy it for what it really is: a TDM clusterfuck
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May 27, 2020 15:35
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Thanks folks. Wish there was a way to tell how many people were on a server. I get that's not feasible for the "two-ships-literally-passing-in-the-night" that makes the gameplay fun, but its hard to be thirsty boys out there in the big empty seas.
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May 27, 2020 19:07
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I just saw the video for the next update and it made me very excited. As a solo player, these new save points for the tall tales might just be what will make me come back to the game.
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May 27, 2020 22:53
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Bonus reaper chest stuff should be good.
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May 27, 2020 23:02
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Is there actually a reasonable way to get ancient coins without paying for them or are the ancient skeletons so rare that it's pretty much just a loophole to avoid any legal matters with a cash shop when they come to steam. Catching 300 ruby splash tails (and turning them in) in under a month just for the tiniest amount of ancient coins. And crew catches don't count apparently.
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May 27, 2020 23:06
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Is there actually a reasonable way to get ancient coins without paying for them or are the ancient skeletons so rare that it's pretty much just a loophole to avoid any legal matters with a cash shop when they come to steam. I've only come across two or three of the ancient skeletons since they got put in, I don't play a lot but they do seem to be pretty rare. They don't seem to be shrouded ghost rare though. I'd guess that varies a lot from player to player. If you're only interested in one or two things out of the cash shop you could conceivably just pay for it with incidental ancient skeleton spawns but I imagine trying to hunt them down would be very frustrating.
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May 27, 2020 23:47
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fwiw i basically live inside this game and have seen the box of secrets thing twice meanwhile i've never seen the coin skeleton or ghost shark at all may as well drop  if there's an item you really want. pets are cool and cute and you can shoot them out of cannons to spoof boarding attempts because iirc they make the same sound as ppl
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May 28, 2020 00:00
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Xbox related question: I've been getting really bad lag spikes, rubberbanding, and disconnects when playing Sea of Thieves. Disconnected from party chat, Xbox live, and/or the game. No other game gives me this issue. I do play on wifi but I regularly ping single digits in other multiplayer games. Has anyone encountered this before? I also think it only happens on a four man crew.
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May 28, 2020 01:03
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Thief posted:fwiw i basically live inside this game and have seen the box of secrets thing twice I've found one Box of Wondrous Secrets so far, a few weeks back, and I play almost every night since the last 18 months. I've killed 6-7 Ancient Skeletons. I have two pets, several dumb emotes and a banana sword all for free. But I have never ever seen a Shrouded Ghost. FastestGunAlive posted:Xbox related question: It varies per server, but yeah sometimes I have it too. I just saw a notice from Rare in all my SoT discords that they're aware of lag problems and working on it currently.
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May 28, 2020 10:17
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Merijn posted:But I have never ever seen a Shrouded Ghost. Well never seeing it at all is far better than seeing it and not killing it because the game decided to gently caress you I don't even wanna play anymore, everything seems pointless now
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May 28, 2020 10:37
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I mean, even without going into the "everything in this game is pointless" thing, once you'd killed the shrouded ghost you'd still have the "kill the shrouded ghost 5 times" thing.
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May 28, 2020 11:10
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what is even the point of getting 5,0000 commendations and dumping 10,000 hours of grind into the game if I'm gonna get cheated out of the rarest thing ever also no I would then have kill the shrouded ghost 4 more times, leave me alone Mr. Pickles fucked around with this message at 12:15 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 11:54
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all the faction specific stuff they added recently is cool got them all except the gold hoarders ones because after i while i just kept turning that stuff into the reaper hideout
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Jun 2, 2020 09:05
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I got all of them, here's the Gold Hoarders ledger sail. They glow in the dark too, I really like them.
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Jun 2, 2020 09:40
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Shrouded Ghost - is that a fog only shark or is it so drat rare we don't have confirmation either way?
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Jun 2, 2020 13:56
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Fog is inconsequantial, it'll just spawn on you whenever it wants, playing the same dumb music every other shark does and acting just the same. Kids on reddit sometimes talk about fog and stuff because megs appear kinda white-er in fog and they get confused. I can tell you, for a fact, there's nothing special about this shark except for its color
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Jun 2, 2020 14:23
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Okay now I've seen everything. Something just happend that I'm not sure could have happened in any other game I've played. Friend and I began lighting up another sloop that was docked. As I began shelling it the scared kids crewing came on voice comms and offered to give us all their loot if we would not sink them and they could not have to restart their Tall Tale. So they loaded up their rowboat with their stuff minus some gems they needed for the Tall Tale and let my friend aboard to verify they weren't holding out on us. He was very solemnly telling them on the megaphone thing that they were surrounded etc. Then we dropped our rowboat in exchange, docked theirs, and... sailed off to turn in their loot. We were laughing like hyenas. Should anything like that ever happen again we need to play some tunes with them and give them some cooked shark or something.
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Jun 3, 2020 07:59
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