Hi everyone, I found a method that lets you sometimes start a ship fight instantly. My theory is that the game will normally move the enemy ship back when you get too close to it while starting a fight, but since it's next to land, it can't do that. So you just instantly teleport into the ship and start the fight.

Unfortunately, this strat only works close to shore and you have to line your ship up right or it won't work. Luckily, you can often move closer to the enemy ship even if you miss and aren't able to teleport exactly to it. I think that this could be useful for runs with lots of ship fights, like Pirate Hunter, as it could save around ~10 seconds or so per ship fight where you're able to do this.

Here's a link to a video showcasing how it works:

Both me and Stede noticed that behaviour randomly while grinding other categories, i never tried to make it consistent though. The way i wanted to use it is to instantly get an indian war canoe, as you can force it to spawn at exactly the same time as you exit a settlement, and the ship is the fastest in the game

In Pirate Hunter specifically though, it's pretty much never going to be usable for the pirates themselves, as in my hours of running the category i don't think i ever had an opportunity to fight a notorious pirate right as they leave their pirate haven. The way the game loads objects combined with their behaviour script seems to pretty much guarantee that as soon as their haven gets into view, they will instantly leave it and you're just forced to chase them over open sea.

Thanks, that's good to know!

What would be very useful for that category is knowing how the cannonfight enemy AI works, as sometimes when you initiate a battle, the enemy ship tries to avoid you for as long as they can, peppering you with cannons, and other times they instantly charge you to initiate a fencing battle. So far it seems pretty random.

Interesting, thanks for the idea! I'll try to look into that if I can. I'm also thinking about gathering a list of all the possible pirate spawn points in order to track where you should go for that category.

For the cannon ai it looks like it depends on type of ship from what I've seen. Raiders and NPs shoot from afar generally.

I just know that I've fought for example Henry Morgan or Blackbeard in roughly the same conditions (same ship, same crew count) and had them sometimes charge and sometimes stall. Couldnt see any pattern