I thought for a change from all the topics about crossplay, double gunning, etc, that I would make a new thread as a distraction. What is your favorite experience playing SOT?
Mine was around August/September last year when I was on leave from work and playing with a friend during the day. We sacked a skull fort but didn't have time to loot it as another sloop was almost on us, so we ran with the key and they followed us. This ended up being an adventure that lasted for hours - literally, as for part of the voyage I was sitting on an outpost doing an urgent teleconference with my work that went for about an hour and a half, during this the chase continued.
We tried running into a storm to lose them, no luck. We tried out sailing them but they were able to maintain the distance. We tried ducking and weaving but again they were good enough to stay with us, though we did gain a little distance on them (as with two identical ships the leader always has the advantage, though whether they can exploit it is different). Eventually at night we had managed to get some distance and they were still coming out of the storm so their visibility was reduced. At this time I slipped off the sloop and hid on the outpost (can't remember the name of it but it is the one with the ship that is wrecked on top of the mountain). While hiding on the outpost, in case they found me, I hid the key on the roof of one of the stores while I hid further away. The intention being that if they killed me they wouldn't know whether the key was on the outpost or still on the ship, and at the least would lose time trying to find it (I doubt that they ever would have as it was very well hidden on top of the roof). They obviously didn't see me get off our ship and continued to chase our ship, so I stayed at the outpost (this was during my teleconference) and just made sure that I picked up the key every 5 minutes or so to make sure that it didn't despawn.
During this time my shipmate continued to sail around to various islands on the map, making sure to every now and then to jump off the ship near an island to create confusion as to where we may have hidden the key, before eventually sacrificing our ship by sailing it into the red.
Interestingly our chasers knew the game well and instead of looking for the key or giving up, they instead went back and checked to see whether the fort had been opened (which obviously it hadn't) and so they hung around at the fort. So we were dismayed after all that time that we would have to risk losing the loot. Knowing that a chance of loot is better than no loot, we attacked them at the fort by running past the fort and dropping my shipmate over the side to engage them on the island. While they had done a phenomenal job up to that point, this was their mistake as they allowed themselves to be distracted by my shipmate giving me an opportunity to get the jump on their ship and sink her with cannon fire. We then finished the enemy crew off.
So we ended up with the loot, an awesome tale of endurance to get it, and the best part was that they also had a reasonable amount of loot on their ship that we were able to collect as a bonus.
A great session and, even better, just one of many that I have had with this game.
