On Three-Manning A Galleon
In Sea of Thieves, having less than the recommended number of players on a ship doesn’t always work. On a sloop, you can get away with being just one person mostly because sloops are deceptively tanky, they take a lot of chainshot to break their mast and their anchor can be raised super fast, even with just one person. With brigs and galleons though, the amount of bucketing needed to keep a ship afloat is a LOT greater than a sloop, so being down a man is a massive handicap. You also can’t make use of the extra cannons, the whole point of using a bigger ship.
Sometimes though, you do end up having not enough people, but it’s not the end of the world on a galleon. It’s still doable, you just need to work harder, because you really need to juggle patching holes and shooting. While you can survive with some top deck holes, you need to be super careful and not get too many lower deck holes because galleons can sink FAST. Still, in a recent session, Bacxaber, Zach and I kinda ended up three-manning a galleon, as our normal helmsman Fox never turned up.
Not wanting to waste time and gold on returning to the main menu and getting a brig, we decided to just go with it. In case Fox ever turned up. He never did. But it turned out, we never needed him. We just proceeded to kick major ass.
Not that we really had much of a plan. Initially, we kinda assumed that we’d just avoid combat, because we knew how challenging running a galleon was with less people. In fact, we actually opted to try and keep to ourselves, especially since we spawned on a server with a Servants of the Flame champion roaming around. The first thing we did though was go to a Sea Fort, in order to stock up on supplies. That champion was roaming near the sea fort we wanted to go to, so we took a detour and went to the next nearest fort.
Once we had supplies though, we weren’t really sure what to do. We all wanted to level up Reapers to level 100, to get our first rings (and Bacxaber wanted to work on his second ring) but being down a player meant that doing standard Reaper things – attacking other ships – wasn’t really an option. So we decided to just do a Gold Hoarder vault and a few other bits and pieces to pass the time. After all, we always needed gold.
This mostly went by without too much of a problem. The champion left the server, and we were the only Reapers around for a while. We had to get all 5 map pieces to find the X and dig up the vault key, and, annoyingly, there was someone at the island where our vault was. Fortunately for us though, it was just a sloop with XBOX sails, and they died fast. They also weren’t near the ship at all, and had made all the standard mistakes: parking with the anchor lowered and the sails down, with no one on lookout. Weirdly, they only had a single piece of treasure on board, an Ashen Lord skull. Where they had gotten it from, we had no idea, but they were gone now, so we did our vault and proceeded to try and leave, only for the XBOX sloop to come back. We sank them again. For reasons we couldn’t explain though, rather than returning to their ship, they fired over to the island and started digging up some treasure on the island. Treasure that we kindly liberated from them.
With some actual loot to sell, we made our way to the Reapers Hideout, where we were approached by an unpainted sloop with white sails, that had been doing the nearby Skeleton Fleet world event. I kept an eye on them while Bacxaber and Zach sold, but they… kinda just sailed by and sank. On their own.
We did manage to sell everything, and we did the nearby skeleton fleet, which had been left unattended. However, a rank 1 Reaper brig appeared, as did another emissary. While we were trying to sell the rest of the loot, I decided to go and get my promotion for level 90 (earning me the General of the Flame title I’ve wanted for a while). Unfortunately, my game… kinda just locked up. I was stuck on the promotion screen and had to force close the game. Just as a sloop attacked our galleon. And, immediately afterwards, a second sloop attacked our galleon. Somehow, Bacxaber and Zach managed to take down two sloops and earn two extra flags to sell to the Reapers in the five minutes it took for me to restart my game. And they’d hardly even moved away from the Hideout.
And just as I got back and we started selling the rest of our loot, we were attacked AGAIN! The rank 1 Reaper brig was now rank 4 and decided they wanted our loot. And at the same time, a sloop decided to join in on the fight, despite lacking an emissary flag. I don’t know how but we took out both of them, with Bacxaber expertly chaining the brig and setting it on fire, while Zach worked on keeping the sloop out of range, with the brig between us. I diligently patched up a handful of holes and went on cannons while Bacxaber boarded, and both ships quickly sank. Despite us being a massive target, they hardly hit us.
Still, the battle wasn’t quite over. We sold the rest of our loot, but from the brig, we actually stole a vault key. So we went and did that. Except there was a brig there waiting for us. A brig that was decidedly a non-threat and quickly sank, despite them firing a red flare (signalling they were enemies) and attacking us first.
We finished the second vault, but we spotted a new rank 5 Reaper at the hideout. Unsure what they were, we decided to wait for a bit (and we all took a quick break), and they decided to head off. Zach did want to try and keg them with a rowboat, but the Reapers randomly did a 180 and headed north. Another brig did approach us but it quickly changed direction upon seeing us, which is a shame, because we kinda wanted to fight it, but it was going into the wind and there was no way that we could give chase.
As we approached the Hideout again though, there was a sloop waiting for us. However, it kinda just… scuttled and disappeared. The ship left behind a mermaid though, indicating that someone was present. And they were. They had gone down to the secret Reaper Lair underneath the Hideout, for level 100 Servants of the Flame only. The three of us waited patiently at the top of the elevator and waited for it to come back to the surface. I can’t imagine the look on that player’s face as they reached the top, having just obtained the Skeleton Curse, only for them to be instantly shot in the face by someone using the Ghost Curse.
After that, we sold up and called it a day, having made nearly a million gold in the process.
Really, the hardest thing we fought was a Shadowmaw Meg in the middle of the storm. Because Megs have health that scales on ship size rather than crew size, galleon Megs have HUGE amounts of health because they expect you to use three cannons to shoot them. This Meg however kept on attacking at angles we couldn’t shoot at, required 4 hits to dissuade from charging (which is very hard to do with just two people) and was an all-round bastard. Really though, the storm bursts from the raging storm were the worst. We got, I kid you not, 5 storm bursts on the lower deck in about 20 seconds.
Still, we made a TON of gold, and didn’t sink once, despite three-manning a galleon. It was stressful, but it was fun. Next time though, we’ll probably just take a brig.