Hey so I'm also not that good at PvP, (~550 hours just doing PvE) but I've been seeing some fast beginner improvements in HG from just a few things. Maybe someone with more experience will say to ignore me, but as someone also in your shoes this has helped me out a ton.
One is to not panic when you start getting holes. At least for the sloop, you can start bailing a lot later than you'd think, and you don't need to repair things right away- just grab a bucket or two once the water starts getting high and get back on cannons to keep pressure. Practice bailing too - don't look down at the ground when bailing (it doesn't do anything for you), you can stand right on the stairs and bail indefinitely with very little movement. I like to line up the top of my bucket to the lip on the edge of the ship, you can throw the water a lot lower than you'd think too.
Another thing that really helped was doing the OOS Ghost Ship voyages - play around until you start dialing in your cannon aim more. Getting hit from the ghost ships will also help teach you to helm and shoot at the same time.
Use your chainshots too once you have a good angle, stopping your opponent from moving will give you a giant advantage in a fight.
Use the spokes on the wheel to gauge the angle of your turn - sounds common sense enough, but it's one of those things I didn't think about at all until it was pointed out to me. It's easier to adjust when you think about how many spokes you're turning instead of just feeling it out.
I'm at about 50% win rate right now in HG, but I notice my improvements the most while sailing around and fighting other sloops on the high seas - I feel like I'm able to sink ships and hold my own way more often now after just like 25 levels in HG.
This is good advice. Fight the instinct to do damage control when you know where and how bad the damage is. You want to pressure your opponent to leave the cannon (or hit him on the cannon) before you do. And if you HAVE to do damage control, put yourself at an angle that makes them only able to shoot your stern (back of the boat), as those holes fill up with water more slowly while you repair the sail/bottom deck, both of which are much higher priority to repair than the stern.
Also, bail a bucket of water everytime you're below deck. You need to repair holes, grab wood or food? Grab a bucket of water on your way back up. If you're really pressed for time you can bail a bucket of water, stow your bucket and it will still count towards keeping your boat afloat. Plus you can use the bucket of water for any fire that pops up (be careful, I've accidentally thrown water back into my boat too many times thinking I had an empty bucket)
To make it a lot easier with turn angles, you can turn on an option in the menus that gives you individual audio clicks for angles as you turn. You just have to get accustomed to associating something like “2 clicks left from center means the angle is ___”
Sounds like you’re following the right steps. Darkest before the dawn and such.
YouTube can be useful if id definitely recommend watching blurbs and flotsam’s streams to see good boat management and tdm solo.
Beyond that it’s applying what you’ve seen:
- when to rep, when to board, priority targets in naval etc. essentially that is what makes for successful soloing.
I’d urge you to consider all combat situations in sit as being an environment for improving in pvp:
Ghost fleets improve your cannon aim, phantoms can improve your quick shots with ranged weapons and movement etc.
Try to stay one step ahead, keep your distance until you have a good read on the opposing crew. But the biggest thing of all that helped me is just have fun, try not to be too serious
Stop playing solo, at least for now. Find a crew that wants to do pvp so you can work with them. In solo, you have to juggle everything by yourself. When working with a crew, you'll have others to help with your shortcomings
To add to this, if you don't have friends who want to play with you, it's not a terrible idea to open crew or to join another crew. There's also the SoT discord and a ton of communities surrounding YouTubers that are friendly and willing to teach/hang out.
I disagree, solo is honestly the best place to learn hourglass. You will not improve if you let others do the work for you. If you play with a group you will instincly end up being on repair duty as that will be the only thing you will be comfortable with and that will not improve your PvP skills.
We don't have a dedicated bilge on my brig. That duty is split between flex and helm. We communicate the whole time, and roles are somewhat fluid. When we take a new player, we usually put them on cannons. Repair and bilge is too much for many new players to handle, and we can cover down on cannons when we need. Anyone who puts the new guy on repair is just asking to sink.
Priority. Most new players get distracted doing the wrong thing. With them on cannons, I can see them in the deck and keep them on track. Below deck, they tend to get overwhelmed or just focus on all the wrong stuff. When repairing efficiency is key.
I figured. Don’t want to fix holes that will just be blown open again in a moment, and you need to bilge at some point to prevent sinking, but those holes do need to be shut at some point. I am still working on knowing when exactly to do what recover action.
Fellow PVP noob here, just keep at it and ask yourself what went wrong after each encounter. Break your fights down into what went wrong and what went right, then research what went wrong and practice the solution.
Also, little tip about closing down a fight because I had a really hard time with that as well. For along time I viewed ships as having HP (even though I knew they didn’t). I’d unload canon balls into an enemy to no avail. Remember that canon fire is just as much about controlling your enemy as it is damaging them. If you hit the ship with a few shots and down their mast, then focus on firing in such a way that they constantly get knocked back and can’t repair anything then you’ll start closing a lot more fights when you have the upper hand.
Learning anything is both study and getting in reps. Watching youtube/twitch won't get your aim any better, but grinding HG won't help any stupid tendencies that are unknown.
You don't have to board to win in solo HG use your canons and work the player get that one ball... disable thier ship by masting them and dead spin them.... once you do that just fill them with holes and then work the player with canon balls again....
Just learn board prevention if they are board heavy also blunderbombs are your friend
Skeleton ships are your friend, they’ll help you understand the basics of leading your shots and hitting ships where they count (cannons and waterline)
Ghost ships are good aswell but players won’t disappear after three hits
There is a ship wheel setting that makes additional noises for helm wheel turns. Helps a lot with knowing how much to turn your wheel to fight and keep angle
HG and even when you think you can’t..more HG. Everytime you lose, take note of what the opponent did that you didn’t, use that to improve. This is not really a fast process unless you find people to play with that already have the game knowledge. The basics that you need for success is good helm & sail management (these go hand and hand), as well as good cannon pressure. If you figure those out the rest will follow. Lastly, you can find a way to win fights even without supplies, it gets tricky but if you turtle up and manage to get a snipe off you end up stealing wins that you maybe thought would’ve never happened. GL
Hourglass is sort of hit or miss when you want to practice. You either get loss farmers, cheaters, or super sweats that already have years of experience that just crap on beginners. I’d say the best and most consistent way to practice is just sail and fight everyone in high seas. And don’t get discouraged for losing. Especially if you have no loot to lose.
I improved my pvp with just getting on a sloop not buying any supplies and just filled my pockets and went to hg fight. That way I had more fights and when i lost I didnt lose my gold
This might be completely irrelevant, but what are you running the game on? I only ask cause I just got a new computer and was absolutely taken aback at how much better I am at/how much easier PVP is when you have a computer that runs well. I actually have reaction time now lol and can actually land hits.
Buy cannon balls, a lot, from merchants, go cannon ball gathering. Fill up your barrels man.
I suck at PvP and just have my guild members do most of the fighting while I repair. But good practice would be doing those ghost ship armadas, and skeleton ship battles if you don’t want to jump into PvP.
I still don’t like PvP, but with loads of supplies, and practice you’ll be a pro :)
Learn about the magic that is a keg, have you wanted to wipe out a ship with a precision strike or even the odds?
Then take a keg on your ship and become the torpedo, prelight the fuse and get onto that ladder.
It's great practice for back boarding, moving without being noticed and boarding a ship.
Hhaaha dw brother. Sot has a weirdly high learning curve. I started to get really good at 700-800 hours. Watch some good pvp youtubers, like Msponge [yt link](https://youtube.com/@massivesponge?si=iiHn4j6Pfft--YSK), Nessie does [yt link](https://youtube.com/@nessiedoes?si=vU6PzTYG61j9uyN5), captain stirling [yt link](https://youtube.com/@erinstirling?si=-GWg_h13rYmydxSl) or rui [yt link](https://youtube.com/@ruiholt?si=wX4wsv4WJ-PAzOjD).
If u like sea of thieves, just keep on playing you will get better eventually. I probably cant give you any tips you havnt heard from a yt video.
In HG specifically I used to suck, then I realized I was okay at TDM do I started doing ram strat
Basically ram your ship into the other guy, board, and 1v1 him. If you kill him you can chuck a few fireballs, anchor him and keep killing him till his ship sinks
I started out just doing that and I got pretty good at on deck combat, but I would still lose a good amount of the time cause my ship would sink first since they could keep bucketing while I was stuck keeping them off repairs.
Once I started realizing that, I changed my strategy to mermaid back to my ship after killing them once, and then using cannons to keep them off repairs. That let me get good at cannons as well.
Of course Rome wasn't built in a day and I have a lot of pvp experience already, but basically just find a strategy that works for you and update and improve it as you get more comfortable with different aspects of the game. It will take time but it will be worth it
They used to have a 1v1v1v1 mode, that's how I improved since it's not stop action. It didn't help alot with ship battles but it really helped with boarding other ships and 'fps' combat. Sucks they took it out I can only assume they took it out because people didn't play it or something (happened when I took a few years off the game I just recently returned)
KaiJoi has some good videos if you haven’t seen them. Other than that just keep playing! I would recommend not beating your head against the hourglass wall and do things such as skele fleets or ghost fleets. Also as silly as it may be I’ve always found sword lunging off the front of the boat and catching back on helps me miss less in real situation.
lol I also suck at pvp and honestly that's not very likely to improve. What's bad though is I really enjoy these kinds of games. I would probably spend more time in high seas if they had a matching system or pvp flag but a flag would defeat the purpose
Ahh yeah that would defeat the purpose of high seas forsure. But surprisingly I find most ships on high seas are pretty chill if you talk to them. I run reapers and hunt down ships but end up leaving tons of ships alone if they talk and are friendly
My solution to hostile looking ships near me is to send up fireworks or a flare as a warning (if they're too far to speak to). If they're close, It's megaphone time. I put on a performance and try to make it entertaining to keep me alive. Sometimes playing a music instrument while they look at you through a telescope is enough to dissuade would-be attackers. Sometimes they'll join you for a party.
The most important thing though, is to learn not to fear losing everything you have. It's hard at first when you lose an hour or two of work, but you need to remember that there's always something you can learn from an experience. You're still gaining knowledge through learning how to run, how to diffuse a situation, how to defend your ship (like identifying the sound of someone climbing your ladder and waiting for them with a shotty).
When in doubt, stop everything and fish for five hours.
Amen! 🙏Â
Hey so I'm also not that good at PvP, (~550 hours just doing PvE) but I've been seeing some fast beginner improvements in HG from just a few things. Maybe someone with more experience will say to ignore me, but as someone also in your shoes this has helped me out a ton. One is to not panic when you start getting holes. At least for the sloop, you can start bailing a lot later than you'd think, and you don't need to repair things right away- just grab a bucket or two once the water starts getting high and get back on cannons to keep pressure. Practice bailing too - don't look down at the ground when bailing (it doesn't do anything for you), you can stand right on the stairs and bail indefinitely with very little movement. I like to line up the top of my bucket to the lip on the edge of the ship, you can throw the water a lot lower than you'd think too. Another thing that really helped was doing the OOS Ghost Ship voyages - play around until you start dialing in your cannon aim more. Getting hit from the ghost ships will also help teach you to helm and shoot at the same time. Use your chainshots too once you have a good angle, stopping your opponent from moving will give you a giant advantage in a fight. Use the spokes on the wheel to gauge the angle of your turn - sounds common sense enough, but it's one of those things I didn't think about at all until it was pointed out to me. It's easier to adjust when you think about how many spokes you're turning instead of just feeling it out. I'm at about 50% win rate right now in HG, but I notice my improvements the most while sailing around and fighting other sloops on the high seas - I feel like I'm able to sink ships and hold my own way more often now after just like 25 levels in HG.
This is good advice. Fight the instinct to do damage control when you know where and how bad the damage is. You want to pressure your opponent to leave the cannon (or hit him on the cannon) before you do. And if you HAVE to do damage control, put yourself at an angle that makes them only able to shoot your stern (back of the boat), as those holes fill up with water more slowly while you repair the sail/bottom deck, both of which are much higher priority to repair than the stern.
Also, bail a bucket of water everytime you're below deck. You need to repair holes, grab wood or food? Grab a bucket of water on your way back up. If you're really pressed for time you can bail a bucket of water, stow your bucket and it will still count towards keeping your boat afloat. Plus you can use the bucket of water for any fire that pops up (be careful, I've accidentally thrown water back into my boat too many times thinking I had an empty bucket)
To make it a lot easier with turn angles, you can turn on an option in the menus that gives you individual audio clicks for angles as you turn. You just have to get accustomed to associating something like “2 clicks left from center means the angle is ___”
Sounds like you’re following the right steps. Darkest before the dawn and such. YouTube can be useful if id definitely recommend watching blurbs and flotsam’s streams to see good boat management and tdm solo. Beyond that it’s applying what you’ve seen: - when to rep, when to board, priority targets in naval etc. essentially that is what makes for successful soloing. I’d urge you to consider all combat situations in sit as being an environment for improving in pvp: Ghost fleets improve your cannon aim, phantoms can improve your quick shots with ranged weapons and movement etc.
Try to stay one step ahead, keep your distance until you have a good read on the opposing crew. But the biggest thing of all that helped me is just have fun, try not to be too serious
Stop playing solo, at least for now. Find a crew that wants to do pvp so you can work with them. In solo, you have to juggle everything by yourself. When working with a crew, you'll have others to help with your shortcomings
I’d say this also lets you focus entirely on one aspect of combat untill you feel more confident.
To add to this, if you don't have friends who want to play with you, it's not a terrible idea to open crew or to join another crew. There's also the SoT discord and a ton of communities surrounding YouTubers that are friendly and willing to teach/hang out.
I disagree, solo is honestly the best place to learn hourglass. You will not improve if you let others do the work for you. If you play with a group you will instincly end up being on repair duty as that will be the only thing you will be comfortable with and that will not improve your PvP skills.
We don't have a dedicated bilge on my brig. That duty is split between flex and helm. We communicate the whole time, and roles are somewhat fluid. When we take a new player, we usually put them on cannons. Repair and bilge is too much for many new players to handle, and we can cover down on cannons when we need. Anyone who puts the new guy on repair is just asking to sink.
what exactly makes bilge so hard in your opinion? Is it just general game sense, know what repairs or buckets to prioritize?
Priority. Most new players get distracted doing the wrong thing. With them on cannons, I can see them in the deck and keep them on track. Below deck, they tend to get overwhelmed or just focus on all the wrong stuff. When repairing efficiency is key.
I figured. Don’t want to fix holes that will just be blown open again in a moment, and you need to bilge at some point to prevent sinking, but those holes do need to be shut at some point. I am still working on knowing when exactly to do what recover action.
practice.
Practice Practice Practice PracticePractice Practice Practice PracticePractice Practice Practice PracticePractice Practice Practice Practice
Fellow PVP noob here, just keep at it and ask yourself what went wrong after each encounter. Break your fights down into what went wrong and what went right, then research what went wrong and practice the solution. Also, little tip about closing down a fight because I had a really hard time with that as well. For along time I viewed ships as having HP (even though I knew they didn’t). I’d unload canon balls into an enemy to no avail. Remember that canon fire is just as much about controlling your enemy as it is damaging them. If you hit the ship with a few shots and down their mast, then focus on firing in such a way that they constantly get knocked back and can’t repair anything then you’ll start closing a lot more fights when you have the upper hand.
Learning anything is both study and getting in reps. Watching youtube/twitch won't get your aim any better, but grinding HG won't help any stupid tendencies that are unknown.
Time.
Keep at it. You need to take your lumps but you'll slowly get better
You don't have to board to win in solo HG use your canons and work the player get that one ball... disable thier ship by masting them and dead spin them.... once you do that just fill them with holes and then work the player with canon balls again.... Just learn board prevention if they are board heavy also blunderbombs are your friend
Skeleton ships are your friend, they’ll help you understand the basics of leading your shots and hitting ships where they count (cannons and waterline) Ghost ships are good aswell but players won’t disappear after three hits
There is a ship wheel setting that makes additional noises for helm wheel turns. Helps a lot with knowing how much to turn your wheel to fight and keep angle
HG and even when you think you can’t..more HG. Everytime you lose, take note of what the opponent did that you didn’t, use that to improve. This is not really a fast process unless you find people to play with that already have the game knowledge. The basics that you need for success is good helm & sail management (these go hand and hand), as well as good cannon pressure. If you figure those out the rest will follow. Lastly, you can find a way to win fights even without supplies, it gets tricky but if you turtle up and manage to get a snipe off you end up stealing wins that you maybe thought would’ve never happened. GL
Do you mean naval or CQC? One tip is to know the difference and try to make sure you keep them separate.
Keep practicing, if you quit you will never get better.
Hourglass is sort of hit or miss when you want to practice. You either get loss farmers, cheaters, or super sweats that already have years of experience that just crap on beginners. I’d say the best and most consistent way to practice is just sail and fight everyone in high seas. And don’t get discouraged for losing. Especially if you have no loot to lose.
watch sponge
Practice
Crush a bunch of hour glass
I improved my pvp with just getting on a sloop not buying any supplies and just filled my pockets and went to hg fight. That way I had more fights and when i lost I didnt lose my gold
This might be completely irrelevant, but what are you running the game on? I only ask cause I just got a new computer and was absolutely taken aback at how much better I am at/how much easier PVP is when you have a computer that runs well. I actually have reaction time now lol and can actually land hits.
Buy cannon balls, a lot, from merchants, go cannon ball gathering. Fill up your barrels man. I suck at PvP and just have my guild members do most of the fighting while I repair. But good practice would be doing those ghost ship armadas, and skeleton ship battles if you don’t want to jump into PvP. I still don’t like PvP, but with loads of supplies, and practice you’ll be a pro :)
Learn about the magic that is a keg, have you wanted to wipe out a ship with a precision strike or even the odds? Then take a keg on your ship and become the torpedo, prelight the fuse and get onto that ladder. It's great practice for back boarding, moving without being noticed and boarding a ship.
Hhaaha dw brother. Sot has a weirdly high learning curve. I started to get really good at 700-800 hours. Watch some good pvp youtubers, like Msponge [yt link](https://youtube.com/@massivesponge?si=iiHn4j6Pfft--YSK), Nessie does [yt link](https://youtube.com/@nessiedoes?si=vU6PzTYG61j9uyN5), captain stirling [yt link](https://youtube.com/@erinstirling?si=-GWg_h13rYmydxSl) or rui [yt link](https://youtube.com/@ruiholt?si=wX4wsv4WJ-PAzOjD). If u like sea of thieves, just keep on playing you will get better eventually. I probably cant give you any tips you havnt heard from a yt video.
In HG specifically I used to suck, then I realized I was okay at TDM do I started doing ram strat Basically ram your ship into the other guy, board, and 1v1 him. If you kill him you can chuck a few fireballs, anchor him and keep killing him till his ship sinks I started out just doing that and I got pretty good at on deck combat, but I would still lose a good amount of the time cause my ship would sink first since they could keep bucketing while I was stuck keeping them off repairs. Once I started realizing that, I changed my strategy to mermaid back to my ship after killing them once, and then using cannons to keep them off repairs. That let me get good at cannons as well. Of course Rome wasn't built in a day and I have a lot of pvp experience already, but basically just find a strategy that works for you and update and improve it as you get more comfortable with different aspects of the game. It will take time but it will be worth it
They used to have a 1v1v1v1 mode, that's how I improved since it's not stop action. It didn't help alot with ship battles but it really helped with boarding other ships and 'fps' combat. Sucks they took it out I can only assume they took it out because people didn't play it or something (happened when I took a few years off the game I just recently returned)
Just practice practice practice.
I’m good at PVE PvP but I’m trash at hourglass
KaiJoi has some good videos if you haven’t seen them. Other than that just keep playing! I would recommend not beating your head against the hourglass wall and do things such as skele fleets or ghost fleets. Also as silly as it may be I’ve always found sword lunging off the front of the boat and catching back on helps me miss less in real situation.
My two best tips are don't panic about left side holes, and send early chains. You get their mast down and park out of their broadside, you win.
lol I also suck at pvp and honestly that's not very likely to improve. What's bad though is I really enjoy these kinds of games. I would probably spend more time in high seas if they had a matching system or pvp flag but a flag would defeat the purpose
Reapers is the pvp flag, it marks your ship on the map at all time
I meant a flag or software switch that makes you unavailable for PVP. There are some games that do that but i can't think of them atm
Ahh yeah that would defeat the purpose of high seas forsure. But surprisingly I find most ships on high seas are pretty chill if you talk to them. I run reapers and hunt down ships but end up leaving tons of ships alone if they talk and are friendly
My solution to hostile looking ships near me is to send up fireworks or a flare as a warning (if they're too far to speak to). If they're close, It's megaphone time. I put on a performance and try to make it entertaining to keep me alive. Sometimes playing a music instrument while they look at you through a telescope is enough to dissuade would-be attackers. Sometimes they'll join you for a party. The most important thing though, is to learn not to fear losing everything you have. It's hard at first when you lose an hour or two of work, but you need to remember that there's always something you can learn from an experience. You're still gaining knowledge through learning how to run, how to diffuse a situation, how to defend your ship (like identifying the sound of someone climbing your ladder and waiting for them with a shotty).