Job description: a Pirate is an obnoxious and repugnant fellow. It is unknown if this is due to being constantly planked or if planking is the direct result of his character. The duties of the Pirate may include anything and everything but consist mostly of taking orders from superiors however absurd and foolish they may be.
Requirements: broad experience in bilge, sail, carp and gun.
Before pillaging
Before pillaging (either running your own or participating in another's), there are some basic questions to ask yourself.
- Do you have enough time? This is especially important when running your own pillage, but leaving after five minutes won’t make you a popular jobber or earn you very much (if any) PoE. A pillage can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 4+ hours. There is nothing wrong with asking "How long will we be out?" before you commit to the pillage.
- What is your mood? Even though this might sound strange, it’s quite important. If you are irritated and throw thoughtless comments to your jobbers or the officer in command, you will probably never be hearing from them again. This will most probably give you a bad name in the jobbing business.
- Do you have enough energy? When you join someone’s pillage, they will count on you to work. Puzzling for a half hour or more can really be tiring. If you’re running your own pillage, having enough energy is very important since you can’t just leave when you get too tired. Do you have enough energy (and patience) to explain to newer players why they have to work? Do you have enough energy to cover both battle navigation and another puzzle if someone leaves in battle? Do you have energy enough to inspire your jobbers to carry on, even if the pillage isn’t going that well?
- If you are concerned about your stats , consider joining the pillage with an alt , cause you could be called upon to switch positions in case of emergency and this could affect your performance.
- When you first arrive on the ship, it's always nice to say a quick "Ahoy!" to the rest of the ship.
- Don't challenge someone to a swordfight / rumble / drinking game, or accept someone's challenge.
- If you are asked to go to a specific station, then take it immediately without complaining. If you are an ultimate carpenter and are ordered to sail, go sail. If nobody orders you to a specific station, ask the commanding officer where he/she wants you to be, or take a look at how many people are on which stations and what needs to be done. You only hamper the ship if you are not working.
- Don't repeatedly ask to gun or navigate.
- Don't shout unless you are an officer.
- If you needed to leave suddenly for any reason, the next time you log on it's a good idea to try to send a message to the person running the pillage explaining what happened.
Battle starts when a ship is pursuing another ship - this is shown by a message in your chatbox, plus a shaded yellow circle appears around the boat being pursued on the miniscreen at the top right of your screen. The number and abilities of the bots on the ship you are fighting are set before you start pursuing each other. The brigand ship spawns with a certain might and has a might adjustment shortly after the initial spawn. This means if you are on your ship when the brigands spawn/adjust their might, but off the ship when they engage, the battle might be too hard to handle without you (especially true on a sloop where a loss of one person can be 20% or more of your crew for the swordfight).
- When the pursuit of a ship has begun, do not leave unless it is a true emergency. If it is a true emergency, if possible, type a short message explaining what happened before you log off. Before that, it's generally considered acceptable to leave, preferably with a quick message saying goodbye to the crew.
- Team with your mates. The ideal team size in swordfighting is three (because above that, bots start stalling). In Rumble, bigger teams of 4 or 5 seem to be more effective.
- Do not deliberately die in the swordfight.
- After a battle has finished, win or lose, it's always helpful to get back to your duty stations as quickly as possible. Don't stand around waiting for an order; return to the station you left. Do not jump on someone else's station just because you are tired of bilging/carping/sailing. Ask to see if anyone is willing to trade.
- Just because the crew you are with loses a battle, do not leave. If you do need to go soon, announce it before the battle. Then if you do lose, the captain and crew will not think that you are leaving because of the loss.
- If you need a break, ask the commanding officer the permission to leave the station. Since this is an exception, make your break be short or consider the opportunity to leave the pillage if you would need to rest more.
- Don't reapetedly ask to port. If you can't stay longer, leave the ship as soon as the battle is over, letting the commanding officer know that you are going to quit the pillage. When the ship will port, your cut will be payed regularly.
- It's nice to thank the officer and say goodbye when you leave.
- If you want to be full member ask the officers onboard.
Many players tend to think that time is the most critical factor in bilging, while it is not. Bilging is not about clearing the highest number of pieces, but rather clearing them efficiently not wasting moves to build columns, rows and combos. Time is a minor score effector, thus you can take your time to think how to set up a combo efficiently. The less moves you deploy to clear a combo, the highest your score will be: that's the only thing that really matters in bilging. It is believed that one move to set up a stack of 3 pieces and three moves to set up a 3x3 combo is the key of a 100% efficiency.
Sailing is not only about completing platforms as unexperienced players may think. It is mainly about completing them either as a consequence of a cascade either triggering a cascade or even both. Cascade are therefore the key. Clearing a platform and not involving a cascade is simply useless. The easiest way to complete a platform and make a cascade is filling it up leaving an just empty space for the last piece, then build beside the platform a pile of three pieces of the same color and wait for a piece that is colored half with the pile-of-three color, half with the empty slot color. Clearing the pile will cause the piece to drop right in the empty slot, completing the platform. On this basis, building a structure that can trigger more cascades will score much more.
There are not blatant mistakes in carpentry as its goal is pretty clear: fill holes quickly and efficiently. Nevertheless people may not know or underestimate the frequency of shapes. Carpentry is not only visual thinking it is also statistics. Good carpenters take frequency into account and usually complete the holes leaving at the end one or two empty slots that can be filled with most frequent shapes. A table with the frequency of shapes can be found here.
