Soloing
- Soloing may also refer to the tactic in swordfighting or rumble where a player is the only one attacking a particular pirate.
The act of soloing is when a player pilots a ship, usually a sloop, by him or herself or, more commonly, with only swabbies to accompany him or her.
Reasons for soloing
Players usually solo when memorizing league points, transporting gems, fruit or other commodities for profit, or when floating a ship to an island in preparation for a blockade. Highly skilled pirates may sometimes solo a sloop while attempting to win Kraken's blood.
Cost and jobber availability are often underlying factors in determining whether or not to solo a ship. For instance, a player who is memorizing may not want another pirate aboard to drink all the rum aboard. Similarly, a skilled pirate will often choose to solo a merchant brig full of commodities, instead of opting to pay jobbers expensive wages. In both cases however, there is a tradeoff between ship security (the ability to fight off attacking vessels) and cost.
Sustainable soloing
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It is possible to sail any ship solo with swabbies, but it has been determined that only ships with a capacity of 20 pirates or less can be sailed sustainably in this way. Sustainability in this context means that it is possible to reach the maximum speed after a number of league points, and from then on a pirate is able to sail the ship any number of leagues at speed without any net gain of bilge water or damage. Sloops may be sailed sustainably, since only one swabbie is required to address each station. An example of soloing unsustainably is a single pirate and four swabbies aboard a war brig. Here, two swabbies must be kept on carpentry, and one on bilging, for the entirety of the trip to avoid accumulating excess damage. However, even if a carpenter is temporarily placed onto a sailing station, it is very difficult (thought impossible) to generate maximum speed due to rising damage (and consequently rising bilge).
The merchant brig can be sailed sustainably, although transient damage is taken. One way that maximum speed can be reached is to place two swabbies on sailing, one on carpentry, one on bilging, and a skilled pirate on duty navigation. Once the maximum speed is reached, one of the two sailors are then typically placed on carpentry to remove the transient damage, and a single sailor plus the player navigating will result in a very low deceleration. Once the ship has decelerated to an arbitrary speed, a carpenter is then moved to a sailing station and the process repeats. In this way, the merchant brig is able to sail any distance at near-full speed sustainably, given the required rum. There are other ways to solo a merchant brig, but this is the method most commonly employed.
It is not often that pirates are seen soloing larger ships into battle, since it is difficult for one or two swabbies to generate enough move tokens, and difficult to reduce any damage gained. Any damage larger ships gain is also likely to render the operation unsustainable, since a lot of damage must be cleared before the ship can attempt to reach full speed again. Thus, larger ships are normally reserved for moving commodities, while smaller ships are preferred by players if there are likely to be battles involved, due to the possibility of easier damage control.
Historical notes
- Prior to release 2010-06-29, swabbies could not load cannons and could not be ordered to gun. Any pirates sailing solo before this release were required to fill guns themselves, often making battles more challenging since pirates needed to be competent at both gunning and navigating.
- Prior to release 2012-03-21, brigand and barbarian ships would not spawn in the 30 minutes leading up to a scheduled reboot. This often gave players a 30 minute window to transport commodities, or float ships to a destination. In turn, many PvP hunters took advantage of the many ships out at sea, and made fortunes preying on merchant vessels. However, after the release, brigand and barbarian ships were allowed to spawn, removing the window of opportunity from both traders and PvP hunters.
