There's not much to tell really. Some years back I called up a salesrep for a sail boat company and asked if boat-X could be handled by a single person. He emailed back saying "Yes, but you'd have your hands full."
And that's kind of what it's like soloing in a galleon. I did this by pure mistake. I hit what I thought was the closed crew then sloop option before hitting the "set sail" tab, all the while I think I was hunting for something on my desk, and the game goes ahead and launches for a seconds. I find whatever it was I was looking for, and then spawn in a tavern.
I check the barrels, grab bananas, wood, cannon balls, and then immediately outside the tavern doors I already see a three masted ship. I panic thinking someone's camping the area because I'm no longer a beginner (noob), and that the game's trolling me once more.
Ah, but it turns out there's no other crew around, and that this is in fact my ship. So I take her for a spin.
Hauling up the anchor, unfurling the sails, and then trimming them once under way, was no small effort, as I was literally running from the fore and mid sections of the main deck and back to the wheel again to keep course. But once the sails were trimmed the galleon took off. I made excellent speed across the map. It seemed much faster than the sloop I'm used to piloting, but that may have just been an illusion. Yet it seemed like I got from one end of the map to the other in record time. Again, it seemed faster than my sloop, but I don't know for certain.
Handling the beast was like driving an ocean going truck. She responded, but required several turns of the wheel to get any real reaction out of her, again unlike the comparatively nimble sloop. I scared one sloop, another galleon simply ignored me, and another sloop just saw me and reefed its sails while still in port as I sailed by. Skeletons fired on me, which was no surprise.
But the real test was could I take her through a storm. Short answer; no.
Reason; unlike the sloop where a single man can race below to bucket out a few scoops of water, the galleon takes on water faster in a storm (for whatever reason...probably because it's assumed that there's a full crew manning her). So, even though I got through it, by about three quarters of the way through I was flooding, though I didn't know it. And like the smaller sloop, storms punch holes in your hull, and I simply couldn't bail fast enough to effect repairs.
And so ended my first solo galleon effort.
The second time was just another pleasure cruise to see what I could do with her. But again, like the salesman from many years back, she was too much ship for me to handle. I mean the truth is I would have to plan to reef in the sails to slow down the ship so I could drop the anchor in a timely matter to explored an island. It was too much work. So after a couple of laps, I exited the game.
Again, kind of an interesting experience, but I think as a soloist I prefer the sloop.
I hope this was worth something to someone.
