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Solved Terrible at fighting

Strannik

Sailor Apprentice
Programmer
Provisional
Hearts of Oak Donator
Hi all again. This mod is so good, it is starting to worry me that it will take over my life! However I'm so bad with a sword that I pretty much only win the brawls ;)

I looked on the forums but haven't been able to find tips about it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
 
Block ... alot the majority of early combat is just block hit block hit block hit ect from there you will start to get an idea of how the combat works it is very hard and some opponents will just cane you ive lost count the times i have been 1 hit Ko allso don't forget the Z key to jump back and don't fire your pistol while your in a close swordfight because your just giving them free hits.
 
I am bad at fighting, too. Try to get enough money to buy a cuirass as soon as possible. Gregor Samsa often has even the gold coloured cuirass in the very beginning. This will help a lot.

Also give them to your officers.

Finding good swords, guns and cuirasses is really helpful in the beginning.
 
Be smart! If your ganna be dumb you had better be tuff. :fiddle

Fight Malcolm a lot and get to at least level 4 before leaving the ship. :duel:Get better weapons as fast as you can. Talk to people and get the special weapons and use them. Cobblestones and the poisoned throwing knife works on town guards, and they have the best weapons. The Dutch have the best weapons of all, so they have a high attrition rate around me. :aar

When fighting don't stand still. Run and gun. :guns: Soon you will get stronger and can stand up to them. :g2
 
Thanks a lot for the tips guys! I have another question. Very often Im in the back during boarding and cannot reach the bad guys for the life of me. I have to helplessly watch as my officers die. If I try to use my gun, I end up shooting my people. Is there any trick that will allow me to prevent this situation?
 
Make your officers stronger? I know the issue, but fixing it properly requires a lot of locator-work that nobody has been willing to do so far. :facepalm
 
If you want to move to the front of the battle put your sword away and shoulder your way to the front.
 
If I try to use my gun, I end up shooting my people. Is there any trick that will allow me to prevent this situation?
Grapeshot pistols would do that. Especially when firing to far/long distance targets. It'll include nearby folks. Try guns that don't use grapeshot.
 
First rule of survival in a sword fight: keep the "Block" key pressed, wait for the enemy to try to hit you, then immediately hit him back - he's just swung at you so won't be ready to swing again, and he's just swung at you so his block is down. Watch for him to flinch - if he does, hit him again. Otherwise press "Block" again, keep it pressed, wait for the enemy to try to hit you...

Don't let your officers into fight until their Melee skill is at least 4 and you've given them a decent weapon, and preferably armour. You can talk to your officer, go down the list of answers to "About you", then say "Why don't you sit out the next boarding". When he's ready you can use the same procedure to tell him "Next boarding, you're coming with me".

If you're playing the standard storyline ("Tales of a Sea Hawk"), get yourself a good reputation and then go to the tavern in Kralendijk, Bonaire - there's a chap sitting just to the right of the door with a problem which he'll tell you about if you're a decent type, and the reward for helping him is one of the best swords in the game. Otherwise go on a dungeon crawl. Save often in case you get killed, but when you're low level, so are the enemies, making them easier to beat. And you'll probably find a decent sword lying around somewhere.

Shooting your people doesn't do any harm apart from wasting a shot - friendly fire doesn't do much damage. I'd have thought a grapeshot pistol which hits everyone in front of you would be a good thing as your men don't take damage but enemies do. However, I don't often carry one so I can't speak from personal experience. A single shot pistol probably will hit the nearest person in your line of sight - these are primitive pistols with no gunsights so precise aiming is not an option!
 
Don't let your officers into fight until their Melee skill is at least 4 and you've given them a decent weapon, and preferably armour. You can talk to your officer, go down the list of answers to "About you", then say "Why don't you sit out the next boarding". When he's ready you can use the same procedure to tell him "Next boarding, you're coming with me".
If you don't want your officers to come with you, you can also remove the from your "shore party". They'll still contribute their skills even if they aren't in there.
 
The snag there is that, as I understand it, when you gain experience then so do the officers who are active with you. So do the officers who are just on the passenger list, but not as much. So the ones who are active are the ones who are going to gain Melee skill quickest and therefore be soonest at a level to help in boardings.

If you go into a dungeon, any officer who you told to sit out boardings will not follow you. But he's still on your active list and, I believe, earns experience accordingly. A dungeon crawl therefore raises both your Melee skill and his, without risking getting him killed in the process.
 
Officers gaining fencing skill without fencing? Didn't know that....
 
Not just fencing. By the time I finished my last play through "Tales of a Sea Hawk", pretty well all my officers had Grappling, Defence and Repair at 10 because of all the sea battles and boardings I'd had. Even the ones who had never been active.

Otherwise it would be Catch-22. If they can't get Melee skill except by getting into fights themselves and they don't survive fights unless they have high Melee skill, then you never get to take officers with you as boarders...

So if an officer kills an enemy, he gets experience. If you kill an enemy, everybody gets experience. If a crewmember kills an enemy, nobody gets experience. Which means once I have gold armour, I tend to fight like a berserker. :D
 
I'm amazed at how nice is this community. Thank you all for your answers and suggestions. I'm kicking serious butt now. I think my main problem was that I was very impatient! :modding:napoleon
 
Officers always had the ability to gain a share of your experience. In the stock game you need to take the perk "Shared experience" for it to happen, and then it's only your active officers. In Build 13 officers got a share of your experience; I can't remember for sure whether it was only active officers, or whether they got more than inactive officers, but I'm pretty sure "Shared experience" wasn't required, it just gave the eligible officers a bigger share. Everyone's experience skyrocketed when you had "Shared experience" and so did your officers. In Build 13 I was still using the standard system of allocating points to skills manually (and of course in the stock game there was no alternative). In Build 14 I've been using the newer system of learning by doing. Unless someone actively disabled the sharing of experience, it's probably still happening as before. But if you're using the system of learning by doing then your points go into percentages of skills, and presumably those are what are shared. Build 13 probably would have done likewise if I'd switched to the new skill system.
 
That "shared experience" perk is the most important one and is the one I get first and all officers get first, if they can survive long enough. It really makes a difference, but inactive officers still get almost no help at all and always stay at a low level.
 
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