Pirates gone wild!

[Officerpuppy]

I have a level eight character (captain difficulty) and in charge of a brig of 167 sailors plus officers. Yet I've run into pirate fleets up to six ships big. Not only that, but more offten than not they have at least one to three ships that outclass me so badly its not even fun. I'm talking about galleons, war galleons and even warships. More offten than not I had to savescumm my way out or if it got too bad, cheat
Taking prizes is a great way to make money but it would be nice if the odds were even or at least if I'm taking on two or three ships, let them be my class or lower, not a second or first rate ship vs my little brig.

True its only a game....but afaik, the only real pirate to have a fleet was Blackbeard and he only had one galleon and several smaller ships. I live in fear of pirates since I've rarely see them sail solo or groups less than four anymore.

Lastly...whats up with these "supermen"? I was doing the Isabella quest and made it to the part where I had to kill these two guys after Sal ran off. So here I am with my three fighters ready to take on two guys, piece of cake....... They kill one of my fighters with one shot from a pistol, my other officer gets murdered in about five slashes and then its up to me to take down two guys who at most, I do maybe 3-4 damage with my light sword which ordinarly should do at least 12 or more damage I think. Before I could even get one of their health a quarter of the way down, I get gunned down by the other thug with his one shot kill pistol. These aren't the only "supermen" I've run into either. Was my character too weak to of begun this quest?

About 15 tries later I had to cheat....again. I used the shotgun cheat (massive damage shotgun blast), these guys took at least six to eight shots each before going down.....come on! I could have a hundred officers fight these two thugs and probably see half of them die before one of the thugs go down.

Am I alone in these experiences? Am I doing something wrong? I've played POTC to death, played AOP for a good while and I've never seen the AI just abuse me or make things so unfair that I had to resort to cheating just to get out of a situation in either game.

I love COAS, I've pretty much ignored every game I installed on my PC in favor of COAS; I just wish the game was balanced. I don't think I've built up my character improperly, I was doing great for a while then suddenly its as if the game difficulty went up ten.

 

[Luke159]

I can't say that i've had problems with superstrong enemey troops/pirates, but i haven't done that quest so i can't say if thats what its ment to be like or not.

I do agree that pirates are a problem and they do give huge difficulties, i have a have just bourght a Packet Brig which is a class 5 ship my first ship coming from a class 6 Sloop, my character can make the ship go above 16 knots due to having an officer with a navigation skill of 100% so i should easily outrun most ships now right? wrong, i often find the wind changes direction or is a low amount of wind in which cass for some strange reason the pirates or enemy ship can still sail faster than me, ok a Xebec i can understand, but once i had a Xebec and a Brig attack me, i easily damaged the sails of the Brig (i was in the Sloop at the time) so i couldn't afford to get into a battle with them, the Brigs speed dropped by about 1.4 knots letting me easily pull away from the Brig. The Xebec however made life a little more challanging to a point that i had start broadsiding the Xebec with grapeshots, i don't know if its the way the sails are designed on the Xebec or if the game was cheating but i couldn't damage the Xebecs sails so i had to switch cannon type, so i switched to something a little more meaningful the explosive bombs lol, it didn't take long for the Xebec to be paying a visit to davy jones by this time the Brig was within firing rang for his grapeshots, i turned thinking bye bye and tried to sail away, his saili bar was still at half bar so no repairs had been made but he was able to keep up with me, so i shot grapeshots at him and knocked a mast down and that was enough to sail away, this was the last of the two pirate fleets i have come across they now have 4 to 5 ships in them, i think the more you destroy of the pirates the harder they get. I know they use better ships as your rank improves and you buy or capture better ships. As for the enemy, i know England is at war with Spain and Holland, but at the start if you have done no harm to either nation you should not be attacked, you should be able to do your trade runs only fearful of pirates, of course you shouldn't be able to enter enemy ports to trade there but you shouldn't be hunted down by convoys like you are, when i get courght by an enemey convoy it has 7 ships mostly made up of class 3 ships, i only had at the time a class 6 ship no match for such a hard battle, i had no choice but to load a previous save and hope i could avoid all military convoys which i have done so far but i dread the day when i make the faital mistake and get courght out.

For the pirates problem you can change the way they work by installing this mod view the topic here http://forum.piratesahoy.net//index.php?/topic/13625-smuggler-mod/ i don't have it installed because it took the challange away in the end but it does limit the pirates to certain ships and classes.

 

[steelrat]

Yes, those pirate fleets are definitely exaggerated. In reality pirates preferred smaller and faster ships. And I think even the major powers usually didn't have large standing fleets in the Caribbean with ship-of-the-line, man-o-war and such. Those big ones usually were with the home fleet. The one exception may have been the Spaniards protecting the Golden Fleet.

But then again this game doesn't claim to be an accurate history simulation (thinking of the living dead and Flying Dutchman). So that's ok for me . But I agree that the game is much to hard and unfair at times :urgh

A thing which really helps me is the 'old seadog' skill perk. Now I can avoid unpleasant encounters most of the time.

 

[Scrogdog]

When attempting to escape, keep in mind that the best way may not be to use your best sailing point, but rather your opponent's worst.

 

[Handel]

The truth is (as in almost everyone single play computer game) the devs try to make the game challenging by increasing the number of the enemies you have to fight... and for this game the truth is once you have the "pro gunner" perk (or appoint an officer with this perk) even this super-increased number of enemies stops to be even the smallest challenge...

 

[Luke159]

The one thing i wish wasn't possible since it couldn't be done in real life would be to have the ability to rig your sails and still turn the ship, when you loose all your masts you was prity much a sitting duck but in these kind of games you can still turn and open fire on your enemies, i find that very annoying and unrealistic, if the ability can't be removed it would be nice to see the ability made more difficult so without masts a ship would take a very long time to turn and the one other thing is the enemey can still shoot at you when even though they have too few men to man all the guns or worse still have no men left, i know the dev's try to give more of an advantage to the AI so that it doesn't get too easy but as long as you maintain a healthy amount of food onboard your ships you can make a simple fleet unstoppable and the game becomes very easy. The ship i have after fully upgrading it is the Constitution and nothing so far has managed to escape and i only have to have battle sails set and i am able to keep up with fast ships which otherwise would be hard to catch, thats why i like to sail small ships so the challange remains hence the reason i didn't enter the mod i pointed out earlier in this post.