The Captains Guide to Crew Management

[Sienihemmo]

I wrote a guide today about being a captain since I noticed that no matter where I looked, all advice had more to do with piloting the ship than actually leading your crew. So I wrote this in a couple of hours. And because of being written so quickly, I may have missed a few things here and there.

So, you've decided to become a captain. This guide will assume you already know what the other classes do, so if you're fresh on the boat then you may want to first play at least a few matches with both the engineer and the gunner, to get a feel for the crew point of view. Good leaders know how to do everything they ask of their subordinates.

The role of captain is hard to learn, and many tutorials and guides focus more on the role of pilot when discussing captains. While the roles are often closely tied together, they are separate roles and have distinct differences.

The role of pilot is to simply steer the ship, to give gunners good opportunities at firing at the enemy, and to back off when taking damage to give engineers time to repair.

The role of captain is to determine how to steer the ship, when to steer it, and how to manage the crew to a position where they can best take advantage of the ships current situation.

Put simply, the pilot is the driver and the captain is the boss. The captain and pilot can be separate players, but this has multiple negatives and I won't go trough them in this guide. Almost all of the time they are both the same player, and for the sake of this guide I'll assume they are.

Read the rest of the guide over at the Steam Community: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=264113014

Also, I'll gladly take feedback, suggestions and other comments but please post them on the Steam site rather than here, because I'm more likely to read them over there.

[Wundsalz]

Looks quite good.

Some remarks:

2 gunners and one engineer is acceptable only on certain ships

There are no builds where using two gunners on a ship does not imply severe drawbacks compared to 2engie + 1 gunner or 3 engie crews.

You'll almost always have more than one ship per team, which means you will have 1 or 2 other ships on your side.

always 1-3 other ships

If they are trying to rebuild with the mallet and only buff one side engine so that the ship keeps listing, don't berate them for it. Consider suggesting the proper ways to do it, but do it after the match has ended, not in the middle of it

I've made good experiences when using idle-times to elaborate certain roles for my weakest link on my ship. GoIs gameplay is rather slow paced and there are always breaks where's little to do and you just travel, re-position yourself or outright wait. These time-slots can be used to point out a flaws and suggest how to handle something a bit more efficiently.
Occasionally it's also useful to throw in very specific orders in the middle of encounters "X, chem spray our balloon again!", "Wait until the hit markers turn red before you shoot the mortar!" and alike.

Some might enjoy your valiant last ditch effort at ramming the 3 enemy ships at once, someone else might be furious that you just decided to give up.

If you want to give up, use the surrender option. If I see an ally running into 3 vs. 1 in a "valiant last ditch effort" that'll most certainly piss me off as your co-pilot. A lot of matches can be turned around even if you fall back by 0:4. Suicide runs are certainly not the way to turn the tides though.

[Alistair MacBain]

Maximum one gunner and maximum one pilot.
That is all thats needed for classes. The rest is changeable. You can swap in a engineer for pretty much every role on the ship. There is no situation you would want two gunner or two pilots. But additional engineer can always have a benefit in certain situation. Even if it allows to be countered easier.

[Omniraptor]

Reads a bit like this guide by a veteran gunner https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,96.0.html

It's a very good point that you must keep up camaraderie and good spirits on the ship. They're all that's keeping you in the air, and blaming/berating each other will only get you blown up more quickly.

Good guide in general, a few corrections/additions.

In the lobby, you can use the captain-voice-chat key (default C) to speak with your team only, someone should really bug muse to add that feature to the manual.

As stated before, two gunners is never good. You can occasionally get away with 2 gunners, but only where you could have also gotten away with 4 gunners i.e. the enemy team all went afk at once.

The perpetual loop of death is called 'meatgrinding' in common goi jargon.

crew members often ARE children and I've heard at least one dog over voice chat

[Sienihemmo]

Looks quite good.

Some remarks:

2 gunners and one engineer is acceptable only on certain ships

There are no builds where using two gunners on a ship does not imply severe drawbacks compared to 2engie + 1 gunner or 3 engie crews.

You'll almost always have more than one ship per team, which means you will have 1 or 2 other ships on your side.

always 1-3 other ships

I corrected the first two points, thanks for that. But I thought I'd explain my reasoning behind the other 2, because I'm not sure about them.

I've made good experiences when using idle-times to elaborate certain roles for my weakest link on my ship. GoIs gameplay is rather slow paced and there are always breaks where's little to do and you just travel, re-position yourself or outright wait. These time-slots can be used to point out a flaws and suggest how to handle something a bit more efficiently.
Occasionally it's also useful to throw in very specific orders in the middle of encounters "X, chem spray our balloon again!", "Wait until the hit markers turn red before you shoot the mortar!" and alike.

I haven't really noticed a slow paced part of the game, whenever I play with my crew it's to the contrary. But maybe that's because I fly a Goldfish with a carronade-flamer combo and that requires me to get right next to the enemies. I have to order people around a lot, and literally the only lulls we have that you could discuss improvement during are if we die and are waiting for respawn, and maybe when we're boosting back into the fight.

Also, this reminded me that I was supposed to write about how to hand out orders.

If you want to give up, use the surrender option. If I see an ally running into 3 vs. 1 in a "valiant last ditch effort" that'll most certainly piss me off as your co-pilot. A lot of matches can be turned around even if you fall back by 0:4. Suicide runs are certainly not the way to turn the tides though.

Of course the surrender option is good and should be used, but I saw this more as a way to get the crews spirits up in time for the next match. If your team has a ship who simply doesn't know how to avoid a Galleons broadside and the game is 0-4, then it's safe to conclude that it's only a matter of time before the squid who barely knows how not to hit mountains is going down (this is an actual example where the pilot actually killed the ship himself, by crashing to the bridge in Fjords). But yes, I do know that 0-4 games can still be turned around, I've even had games where the enemy pulled their figurative asses out of the fire and kicked mine. But every time this has happened, It's been because the ships worked together.

But again, maybe it's different in the veteran world since I'm not one, and I didn't even try to include a veterans point of view in the guide.

Maximum one gunner and maximum one pilot.
That is all thats needed for classes. The rest is changeable. You can swap in a engineer for pretty much every role on the ship. There is no situation you would want two gunner or two pilots. But additional engineer can always have a benefit in certain situation. Even if it allows to be countered easier.

That's a better way of putting it, thanks.

Reads a bit like this guide by a veteran gunner https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,96.0.html

It's a very good point that you must keep up camaraderie and good spirits on the ship. They're all that's keeping you in the air, and blaming/berating each other will only get you blown up more quickly.

Good guide in general, a few corrections/additions.

In the lobby, you can use the captain-voice-chat key (default C) to speak with your team only, someone should really bug muse to add that feature to the manual.

As stated before, two gunners is never good. You can occasionally get away with 2 gunners, but only where you could have also gotten away with 4 gunners i.e. the enemy team all went afk at once.

The perpetual loop of death is called 'meatgrinding' in common goi jargon.

crew members often ARE children and I've heard at least one dog over voice chat

From what I gathered by glossing over that guide, it seems like what I had in mind. I firmly believe that using psychology and understanding the human mindset is key to becoming a better captain/squad leader/commander in games.

I added lists of the default commands for voice and text chat ingame, including the one you mentioned.

I also added a mention for the proper term but I like "perpetual loop of death" because it sounds more sciencey

And yeah, I've heard enough adolescents on voice chat to know this is true, but I thought I'd add that note just in case someone commented "did you just call me a dog" and got really pissed off.