Gunning Bot For Puzzle Pirates Download
Argimiro Krishnamoorthy
This guide teaches advanced Gunning tactics, to turn the above-average gunner into a Top Gunner. There is a significant amount of information here that applies to gunning with speeds above Grand Master and Legendary. Strategies for lower-standing gunning are much more solid and proven, and can be found off the main gunning page. This guide was created by Rapportus.
Gunning during a pillage usually consists of finding a good board and camping it. Note that this usually is not the best strategy for scoring, but is often better for the good of the pillage. This is because camping a board will spend more time in the puzzle loading a cannon, resulting in a lower score, but the gunner will load more cannons per battle turn. Often the best gunners will load two or three cannons and reset, as if it were Navy Gunning. This reduces the number of overal cannons filled, but increases the gunner's score since he was efficient at those fills.
The barrel is often a good place for starting a loop around a cannon, such as in the example above. Note that the barrel can move during a pillage when the ship turns, which can both help and hurt the board. Pausing the puzzle while the ship makes its turns will save the barrel from moving. Often using the barrel frees up an arrow for corralling new pieces into the loop.
Navy Gunning tends to be simpler because you don't have to clean dirty cannons, and there is no pressure to load cannons before a turn is up, like on a pillage. For an excellent guide on navy gunning, check out Boothook's Navy Gunning Guide.
Board shopping is repeatedly entering and leaving the puzzle without making any fills, until a good board is found. This is bad! It may not seem like much time, but it still takes almost two seconds to enter and leave the board. Considering the best gunners average about 6 seconds per cannon loaded, that is a lot of time wasted!
This justifies the wasted time at the start of the puzzle when pieces are still being shot out of the barrel. Also, every puzzle - even the worst ones - will have at least one 2-cannon loop that can be used -- the loop across the middle of the board, shown above in the Cannons with No Loop - Filling the Easy Cannons section.
Gunnery is the duty puzzle responsible for loading a ship's guns. When a cannon is loaded in the puzzle, a cannon becomes available to the navigating officer to fire in sea battle. The number of loaded guns is indicated by the cannon counter.
The goal of the puzzle is to correctly load the four guns as quickly as possible. The gunnery pieces are sent out in all four directions from a wooden barrel, in random order, until there are two of each piece on the board. By default, the barrel is in the middle of the board. However, in a sea battle the barrel will move as the navigator turns the ship. When a piece is used, another of that type will be sent out the barrel. Pieces travel in a straight line until they strike a fixed obstacle (such as a crate, gun, or gunwale), at which point they turn right. If turning right is impossible, they turn left, and if neither is possible, they reverse direction. If one piece runs into any other piece both reverse direction.
Like most puzzles, the difficulty of the gunnery puzzle when a player enters it is set relative to that player's past performance. Gunnery lacks the difficulty meter and progressively increasing difficulty the other duty puzzles have; doing things "right" will very slightly raise the difficulty, and doing things "wrong" will very slightly lower it. Generally, the higher the difficulty, the faster the pieces move, though since release 2008-12-16, the speed can be adjusted manually using a slider below the gunning board. See gunning scoring for more details.
When playing the gunnery puzzle in the navy the guns will be fired after all four cannons are loaded. Pirates must have at least apprentice experience at rigging or sailing, carpentry or patching, and bilging to access the gunning mission.
Pirates who wish to gun while jobbing with another crew are advised to ask the executive officer politely. If they are refused, it is advised that they find another open duty station or wait until one becomes available. Having a good gunning puzzle standing is advantageous to such requests; it is suggested that less able pirates practice gunning on navy missions to improve their standing.
I don't really understand how most of the shipboard duty puzzles are calculated. I wish to increase my standing on most of them to respected/master and I'm trying my best but I have no idea how to consistently get good/excellents. The only puzzles I'm sure of how they are calculated are gunning, bnav, SF/rumble and the other pvp puzzles. Gunning is just raw speed cannons/minute (might have certain "check" times but basically its just how fast you load cannons), bnav is how well you score in cannon hits when engaging enemy vessels so that's easy to understand, treasure haul may just be coins/min or chests/min so I can understand that. But bilge, sailing, rigging I'm a bit confused about, in these 3 is speed more important (clearing boards fast) or do the combos mean more, I can get lucky and get a bingo/donkey with sailing but some boards are so much trickier that I spend too long trying to make the combo or I scupper it up by letting by putting pieces in the wrong places or letting the board fill too much before I clear it (if you take too long it seems to just make you go to poor or booched regardless of how much of a combo you are building up). Do you just hold space a lot and try to make combos really quickly? If a board is hard do you just clear it instead of trying to make big comboes? The same goes for bilge and rigging, do I make small colour clears really speedily or try to set up 3x3, 3x4 etc.? Is it ok to skip a rigging rotation because you're building a large string clear on the next 1-2 turns? How can you consistently score good/excellents? Is it speed or accuracy? Confused
The Navy Gunning puzzle can be solved by using the same sequence of arrows on every single board. Strategy is not required, since you can solve every single board using the exact same method. In other words, Navy Gunning can be reduced to a game of pure reflexes, because you can solve every board using the same sequence of arrows.
Since abandoning the puzzle will give a fresh board aboard a navy vessel, gunnery scoring is very simple in this context. To attain 100% efficiency (and therefore a rating of fine) one cannon must be correctly loaded a little under every 30 seconds, or about once per league point assuming the vessel is at top speed.
To provide some arbitrary numbers, imagine that correctly loading a cannon is worth 30 points and that a player lose one point for every second she is playing the puzzle with at least one cannon left to load.
Since all scoring is relative and gunnery is often a very competetive puzzle, the difficulty of scoring an incredible can vary across oceans. A score of around 100 points, or one cannon per 5 seconds of play, will usually be considered incredible gunning.
It is obvious from the above that the faster the pieces are moving, the easier it will be to score highly. The initial speed of pieces whenever a player enters the puzzle is based directly on that player's standing in gunnery. Additionally there are a few factors that will change the piece speed temporarily within the puzzle.
Note that these changes are cumulative such that it is possible to greatly increase or decrease the speed of pieces from the initial value during long battles on the same set of guns. However, any time the puzzle is re-entered, speed will again be set by the player's standing in gunnery.
Important disclaimer: All point values used within these pages reflect relative values and weights as determined by players. No developer has commented on the current accuracy of any of these. Any forum post from developers that gave point scoring information is from pre-release days (pre-Midnight), and potentially has been changed. In particular, sailing (at least) has been known to have had major changes to scoring at least once. Use at your own risk. Past performance is no guarantee of future potential. Scoring may be changed in any update. Star levels do change the challenges that you face, and may change the scoring; the same play at different star levels may score differently. While this is known to be true in bilge, it potentially may be true in any puzzle.
(Emerald ocean) I've played this game occasionally over like 13 years. I have always been great at sailing, pretty good at gunning, and decent/mediocre at the other duty puzzles. After coming back to the game like 3 or 4 weeks ago, I'm having tons of trouble getting a decent rank in rigging, carpentry, bilging, and even gunning. On my pirate that got merged from Sage ocean, I have master+ in all the duty puzzles. Since I came back I have been playing on an alt to get used to the puzzles again. However, sailing is the only puzzle that i have been able to get a good rank in (currently half GM). I have managed master/renowned gunning, but it always goes down when I'm trying to pillage with my brother. My biggest problem is that I can't even get past proficient/distinguished in carpentry & bilging. I try to use some of the strategies from guides, but I only get good/excellent occasionally when i get a little lucky. Is the ranking just harder because of a lack of new players? It seems like when I'm in the puzzles, the smallest waste of time/pieces/moves or mess up will sink me straight from sparkling gold excellent to fine in half league. Specifically with carpentry though, I'm having trouble getting consistent MP chains. I feel like most of the time the game is giving me bad pieces on purpose . I try to minimize the influence of the randomness as much as a can, but it keeps doing stuff like giving me the piece I needed right after forcing me to break the MP. I feel like it's taunting me.
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