“Interesting” Pirate Tactics

The other day, I was playing on a sloop for the first time in ages. It was just Bacxaber and me, working towards some Reaper’s Bones commendations that Bacxaber needed. We didn’t really have much of a plan, we were just piecing together a treasure map and looking for a vault. It was reasonably quiet, just slow. As we finished the vault and sailed away though, we caught the attention of another Reaper ship. One that was hungry for our loot.

Seemed like a normal fight at first

This sort of thing is pretty normal. It’s generally assumed that any emissary with a higher level flag will almost certainly have some loot on them, and selling emissary flags is good business. What wasn’t normal though were the pirate’s tactics. They filled us with holes then cannoned themselves over while we were repairing. This pirate did actually kill us, and we were afraid we’d lost all our loot, as neither of us could maintain our sloop.

Except, well, nothing happened. I expected to respawn at an outpost, sans ship. But we both respawned back on our sloop. With no extra damage or anything. And their ship, another sloop, completely vanished.

They disappeared?

We somewhat waltzed against this ship for a bit, about a few minutes later. It was tricky trying to keep them in cannonball range, and they sent themselves flying over again. However this time round, I killed them as they tried to climb the ladder, and Bacxaber used several cursed cannonballs to make them panic. That seemed to scare them off briefly, especially since they said they were on low supplies, however they did come back and started chasing. But then, for some reason, they either sank or scuttled their ship. Why? No idea. The crazy guy tried to ambush us in the Reapers’ Hideout, only for them to die swiftly against our superior gunfire.

After all that, we lowered our Reaper Flag and they stopped trying to attack us, mostly because they couldn’t see us any more.

Overall, that whole battle was pretty weird. And during it, there were many decisions that made little sense. Why DID they scuttle, when they could have gone to an outpost to restock and then come back? They knew where we approximately were, even without our Reaper flag, but they never returned. And because we lowered our emissary flag, they assumed that we had sunk, when we were alive and well.

Crazy tactics

But the thing is, people just seem to have crazy tactics, or no tactics at all. Battles like this can be curiously common. In my short time of playing (100 hours, 20% of which is loading screens and booting up the game), I’ve seen a TON of weird tactics happen. There have been weird ramming attempts, where people risk their ships in the hopes of smashing ours. But they rarely seem to work. We’ve had plenty of ships attempt to attack us, fail and then come back for more, using the same strategy. Or, alternatively, they try and ram into us, get blown to pieces and leave us with 10 minutes worth of grabbing loot and putting it on our ship.

By far the weirdest tactic I’ve seen though actually came from a rank 5 Reaper ship. It tried to charge directly into us, before very suddenly swerving to avoid us. That Reaper ship, that we ran into later on, claimed that they’d been scared off by our ship’s nameplate, and they recognized Bacxaber. They also apparently threw a lot of loot overboard too, all out of fear. Then again, this was a pirate tactic to not die, rather than a tactic to kill someone else.

At the end of the day though, pirates in the Sea of Thieves are a VERY mixed bag. So no wonder that pirate tactics will also be very hit or miss. But still, it surprises me just how many weird things people will do for both loot and stealing loot from others…