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This battle’s not just indulgently awesome, it’s an excellent metric of my progress. You see, Blackbeard’s one of the more famous pirates in history; my intuition tells me that his stats in general will be slightly higher than most of his piratical brethren. From which I may conclude that, should I happen to win this battle, the Brethren of the Coast ain’t got shit on me. Which means I’ve hit the peak of the game’s flume climb of difficulty and am about to slip down a six-mile-long gentle incline of baby-soft grinding.<\/p>\n
Here’s, uh. Hoping?<\/p>\n
<\/div>Believe it or not, it’s at times like this that my gambling exploit really comes in handy. Filling my war chest with the help of outfoxed NPCs means I don’t have to pursue other sources of income, like, what’dyou call it—“piracy.” This means I can dispense with securing anything valuable, like “his men’s lives” or “his ship” or “anything I don’t feel like clicking on.” Which means for the battle itself, instead of coming in close and gently spritzing him with grapeshot to keep his ships standing, I can just merrily blast the bejeesus out of him from range and not worry about sinking profits.<\/p>\n
And so the bejeesus I blast, cracking ships like eggs, until finally he actually makes ready to engage my men…<\/p>\n
<\/div>Oh, boy. This isn’t even worth wasting a bomb on. I absolutely will, because I’ve got like a whole trunk of grenades at this point and I think they go bad after a few months*, but still.<\/p>\n
*Is this grenades or avocados?<\/p>\n
The whole thing’s over before I even find an enemy combatant. It made me wish I’d found the game’s hang back guys I got this<\/em> button, just so I could have the pleasure of actually trying out this fancy pistol I hadn’t actually got a chance to fire yet.<\/p>\n Now badly outnumbered, his ships fare little better than his crew. Before five minutes have passed Blackbeard’s whole fleet is scattered. In the twist of the century, I actually manage to capture <\/em>him instead of just watching him ride a dolphin to the safety of the coastline. Behold, my prisoner!<\/p>\n
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