Gunning is about reloading the guns as fast as possible. The more you take time, the lower your score.
| Time: | decrease |
| Guns loaded: | increase |
| Fired guns washed: | small increase |
| Pieces wasted: | no effect (but slows down puzzle) |
| Arrows placed: | no effect |
Recognition of a good board
Training your eyes to recognize a good board at a glance, it's the first skill you must develop to become a great gunner. The crucial point is to find, below the bottom cannons, a straight horizontal path for pieces that is not blocked by crates. If there is such a path on your board, place two arrows to make a loop of pieces and fill cannons with the third one.
Speed and score
Speed comes with standings. The higher your standings, the faster the pieces move, the faster you can fill guns (hence the reason low standings gunners should never gun), the easier you can achieve a good score. You need to be Grand-Master in order to score Incredible frequently. If you are below that level and you can score Excellent on a regular basis, you might be ready to get your standings up.
Threshold
From my personal experience, I could say there is major threshold in gunning at the Master level.
Everyone who has a basic knowledge of how the puzzle works, should be able to achieve a Master standing. Only making loops and taking several times the Navy mission you can get up to Renowned. There is no chance to go beyond Master, without taking Navy missions several times and persevere until your standings go eventually up to Renowned.
Gunning with the Navy
The easiest and faster way to improve your stats as well as get some practice in gunnery, it's the Navy. Make sure you took enough gunning naval mission, before starting to gun in pillages.
Note that gunning withing the Navy is very different from gunning in pillages, especially on sloops and dhows (see Gunning in a sloop or dhow pillage).
In order to avoid being interrupted too frequently by the break due at every league point, you should decrease the speed of the vessel you are on. How to do that? You can ask bots to move out from sailing station: if there are no players sailing, your speed will be very low and you'll have time to fill many cannons between one league point and another.
Gunning in a pillage
As I stated before, gunning is pillage is somehow quite different from gunning with the Navy. On a sloops and dhows, there are only 4 cannons to load, that mean you can sit on a board filling and refilling them without leaving the puzzle. On a such kind of pillage, the gunner should: 1. load the first 4 cannons like he/she was in Navy mission; 2. when the 4 cannons are loaded, leave and enter the puzzle until he/she will find a board where it is possible to create a loop around 4 cannons (2 at once).
On any other vessel, gun as you would gun in the Navy. Fill-leave-fill.
A common mistake made by the neophyte gunner is trying to load cannons even if the game has not spawned a good board. How does a good board look like? A good board allows the gunner to make a circuit (loop) deploying two arrows around two or more cannons. If you don't get a good board, don't waste any more time and leave the puzzle. There is no penalty for that.
Another frequent mistake is trying to fill all the cannons. Don't. Focus just on the bottom ones, unless you can make another easy loop on the top ones as well.
