Edward Low and Impossible difficulty

[Keero]

Hiya everyone!

I've played this mod for few months now and I love it. After testing the game with several different difficulties and mastering myself with swordfight I felt confident enough to start a new game with the impossible difficulty and with the slowest experience accumulation. Being familiar with several quests, skill system and the gameplay in general I leveled up quite quickly and thought to myself that the difficulty isn't as "impossible" as it would seem. That was until I had to hunt down Edward Low (again).

I never had any severe problems (well, any problems that save/load wouldn't fix) taking Sea Wolf down with other difficulties, but this time... holy hot damn!

On the way to Cumana, I boarded some random Lugger and took it under my control in order to find Edward Low. After visiting Cumana and getting the quest onward I just randomly pick a spot from world map to find him. Luckily, Sea Wolf was sitting like 100 meters (yards? feet?) away from me and I quickly steered my ship next to it and boarded. Woah this boarding is tough one! I got my ass kicked every time and after several tries I decided to try to kill the crew before I would board. Bad idea. He was too fast and too powerful. Even if I got a lucky with the wind and parked my ship in front of his shooting grape shots, he took my crew down faster with his front cannons .

At that point I gave up and I knew I was going to need help. I was wondering If I'd manage to lure him near the Cumana fort. I undocked from the port and looked around trying to pinpoint where the Sea Wolf was. Fortunately, there was not only the fort, but a Spanish Black Angel near the port as well. I finally saw the Sea Wolf and it was steaming towards me with high speed. I had to wait quite long, but eventually it got around 1200 meters away and started to take pot shots at me. The Black Angel went after him as well. Fort wasn't shooting, probably because Sea Wolf was still out of range.

I was taking cover near the fort and I got behind the sea rocks so he wouldn't hit me as hard. Even though he was far away, he still managed to get me at 75% hull and kill few of my crew members. The Black Angel got at range and started to pound the Sea Wolf, but it seemed it wasn't hitting very well. After few minutes Sea Wolf was arounf 800 meters away from me and the fort opened fire. Sea Wolf wasn't firing at me anymore and had switched to bombs. To my dismay I noticed the Black Angel had lost like 40% of his hull hp already and Sea Wolf had lost just a tiny sliver of his. Crap.

Just a moment later the Black Angel sunk and Sea Wolf started approaching me again. The fort wasn't hitting very well. Fortunately, with 80 cannons the fort kept the barrage up constantly and fortunately the Sea Wolf was shooting at the fort. I kept hiding and monitoring the situation. Suddenly the Sea Wolf stopped shooting. It had ran out of cannon balls. Finally the Sea Wolf was at my range and I started shooting it myself. Sea Wolf switched to bombs and I ran for cover again.

Ha! Wind changed! He was going against the wind and he was immobile. Fort started to get some good hits on the Sea Wolf, but the hull or sails wasn't going down as fast as I had hoped for. To my relief the crew was still going down rapidly. For several minutes the fort and the Sea Wolf were pounding each other in what seemed an endless contest. Sea Wolf finally ran out of crew and this was my chance. I steered my ship from behind the rocks and managed to board the Sea Wolf, while it was still immobile. This time the boarding was super easy. I wonder why . After the battle I check the fort with my spyglass. Woah! The Sea Wolf had taken down 17 cannons from the fort. This whole ordeal took about 30 minutes.

While I didn't contribute anything to this battle, except the boarding at the end, I found this battle to be the hardest and the most rewarding this far. It was like it's almost impossible, like the difficulty says

TL;DR: Edward Low and the Sea Wolf was impossible for me to take down at impossible difficulty. I used Cumana fort and a Spanish Black Angel as a meat shield and I hid behind sea rocks like a coward. Cumana fort killed Sea Wolfs crew and I boarded it and took it over.

Keero

 

[modernknight1]

Great salty yarn Mate!!!

I love your story Keero. I've used similar tactics as you describe many times, but you are a better man than I playing on Impossible setting. I'm very comfortable with Corsair which is hard enough well over half way up the difficulty scale.

Maybe I'll have to scale it up after hearing your story.

MK

 

[blackmane]

I like the Edward Low mission I must say I have never played it on impossible because this game simply crashes too often for my liking so I regularly quicksave and just being able to save in churches is a bit counterproductive in my opinion. For those of us who play on Admiral, I think the mission requires good preparation. It helps to upgrade the ship in Bermuda (I mean it is like setting up a trap) and it really pays off to have three really strong fighter officers. It is still challenging but quite doable. The sad thing is that you get the nice ship a bit late in the game, when you are able to do this mission you will have tons of better ships

 

[Keero]

You can still save where ever you want at impossible difficulty as long as you're not playing with hardcore mode. But yeah, I'm not playing with hardcore mode either since the game crashes about once per playing session (like 2-6 hours of playing). + While it would contribute to the immersion of the game, it would be just too hard, at least with the impossible difficulty.

Fighter officers really help at boarding, but in this particular boarding with Edward Low I found it just impossible : . During the first boarding, with full crew in my lugger against full crew of his brig, my officers got slaughtered in the first 15 seconds leaving me fighting alone against 4 or 5 enemies. Heavy swing with my poleaxe took out only around 1/5 of enemys hp. I tried to position myself so I would have to chance to fight them one by one, but every time I got eventually shot in the face by someones pistol .

Keero

 

[Luke159]

Good story Keero, i have only ever done this quest twice and both times it was testing the changes made so you can use more ship types like the ones we have added but at the same time keeping it ina similar focus as not to give the player the advantage. I can't remember exactly which ships you can use but i know all class 7 ships can be used. In fact this will need updating for GOF because of the recent changes to ships, i will get to that tonight or tomorrow, depends on how long it will take for these updates to finish popping up lol.

 

[blackmane]

I just did the Edward Low quest on Admiral difficulty
My preparations were excessive, I have done all quests and the english questline (the most unrewarding and boring one it seems) so my fighters were Mr. Douglas (lvl 52), Mr. Workman (lvl 51) and Ms. Sheppard (41). I went on a little boarding spree and trained my sailors to master soldiers and captured a heavy lugger. I upgraded the ship so I could pack 168 sailors on it, upgraded the hull and the cannon calibre to 16 lbs. I took only grapeshot as ammo and filled the rest of the cargo space with planks, sailcloth, weapons and medicine. My tactic was to reduce his crew with grapeshot and taking the damage he deals to the hull with repairing and a high stock of planks. But soon I realized that this was doomed to fail because he did more damage to my crew with cannonballs than I did to his crew with grapeshot. So I initiated boarding with about 130 sailors left and it really was a challenge but not really impossible, I came out of the fight with about 40 sailors left. I think that is because the heavy lugger from the CMV3.2 is stronger than anything of the class 6 ships the vanilla game had to offer and the bermuda upgrades have been beefed up a bit too, I think.

I know the error in my thinking, i first started the game on impossible with hardcore mode and linked the game saving to the impossible difficulty but I am kinda glad that I didn't play on impossible, some of those fights in the coas are already a bitch, I think I was swearing like a true seadog when I restarted the fight with the admiral for the I-dont-know-how-manyeth time because John Workman kept dying like a dog and I desperately wanted to keep him alive (I already had the expensive cuirass for him, i just couldn't give it to him, because he wasnt my officer yet...).