Beginning with the Galleon

[Calico Jack]

A tip for pilots helping line up targets for the gunners - if you look at the stairs leading up to the steering deck you can see a two posts topped with spheres marking the top of the stairs - the on furthest from you and closest to the side of the ship marks the traverse limit of the front most gun, a little rear of it you'll see a rope coming down at an approx 45 degree angle from the upper rigging and connecting to the side of the ship, that marks the traverse limit of the rearmost gun - keep your targets between the two for a full broadside.

[Gambrill]

The way I close distance on a sniper in a galleon is by aiming the front at them and kerosening at them. That way the side guns are a bit more protected and I use a phoenix claw and reverse while turning to get those guns in position very quickly.

[Ventidius]

Generally flying a Galleon is more of a strategic game then a tactical one. Once you figure out the "sweet spot", lining up a broadside isnt that hard.

The actual challenge being: You need to be where the engagement will happen -before- it happens, you are too slow to fly reactively, you must dictate where the fight happens. All too often I see Galleons lagging behind the fight, being too slow to provide any meaningfull help. The Galleon is perhaps the ship where communication with the other captains is the most important.
Look at your map, look at where your team and your opponents are, tell your teammates where you are headed or ask where they will be and make sure you get there before the enemy does.

Failing that, due to respawns or the like: Remember you can take quite a pounding, do not be afraid to fly straight into a gunline if no other options are available. Provide a screen for your allies. You are a big juicy target, play the bulletsponge and let your allies get into the fight so they can do the damage and worry less about repairs.

Most important thing to remember: Although you bring impressive firepower, the Galleon is most valuable in a support role. Draw enemy fire, disable components with your manticore volleys, supress the enemy with any other weapon of choice, screen your allies and generally keep the enemy tied up so your allies can do the killing.


Bonus tip: Have your engineer buff the engines and bring kerosine or even moonshine. The Galleon may be slow, but it has rather good acceleration, combine the buff with the kerosine/moonshine and it can pull off quite an impressive short-distance-sprint. Use this to close the final distance when engaging.


EDIT: A word on weapons:

The Galleon is a very versatile ship and can be fitted to suit long sniping support, medium support or short range brawler roles.

You mention you wanted to brawl, the weapons you chose are an excellent fit: The manticore/carronade combo is absolutely lethal up close... You just need to get there.
Brawling in a Galleon is hard to do, you need to make absolutely sure you get the first volley: If your enemy is allowed to circle you with it's weapons still up (and remember, any other ship in the game can fly circles around you), you'd better prepare to go into panic mode.
If you do manage to land the first volley though, anything other then another Galleon is as good as toast.

I might recommend you try for a medium range support Galleon first. This lets you get a feel for the ship better, gives your engineers a little breathing room and still gets you close to the action.
Replace the carronades with heavy flak, retain the manticores and try and circle the fight counterclockwise. You should still get close enough for your manticores to be effective though.
Beauty of the heavy flak is that unlike the other heavy weapons, it does not lose effectiveness due to range (unless you are beyond max range offcourse), great for keeping up consistant damage in a wide variaty of situations.

The light turrets are up to personal preferrance, but I recommend a gatling on the middle deck for additional armor-stripping utility and a light carronade on the upper deck aft to pop the balloons of those pesky squids trying to get at you from behind.

Welcome to the I-luv-big-boats club and good luck!

[Captain Smollett]

Replace the carronades with heavy flak, retain the manticores and try and circle the fight counterclockwise. You should still get close enough for your manticores to be effective though.
Beauty of the heavy flak is that unlike the other heavy weapons, it does not lose effectiveness due to range (unless you are beyond max range offcourse), great for keeping up consistant damage in a wide variaty of situations.

I will have to strongly disagree with this statement.  Heavy Flaks DO have an arming time and lose half of their effectiveness at close range.  Furthermore with no heavy weapon below deck to strip armor it's likely that neither weapon will be able to make a kill when engaged in heavy combat since the top deck engineer will be too busy repairing to take the  7-11 seconds necessary to empty a chaingun clip.

[Pickle]

And, just a quick question, how would you say would be a good strategy to close the distance with enemies?  I

Oh, that's an easy one.

If you're in a Galleon just wait.  There'll be a Junker along in a minute to chew you up from the stern.

[Ventidius]

I will have to strongly disagree with this statement.  Heavy Flaks DO have an arming time and lose half of their effectiveness at close range.  Furthermore with no heavy weapon below deck to strip armor it's likely that neither weapon will be able to make a kill when engaged in heavy combat since the top deck engineer will be too busy repairing to take the  7-11 seconds necessary to empty a chaingun clip.

Absolutely true, in my example that would hardly be an issue however as you would aim to stay in medium range, not get -that- close up. Point being it suffers way less from this as for example the lumberjack.
Probably should have gone into a bit more detail on that one.

Furthermore, I strongly believe the Galleon is more valuable supporting your allies in keeping the enemy tied up/locked down rather then 100% killing power.
In the end the guy asked what a good starter build would be, I think this will get him into the Galleon nicely: Being an effective teammate without too much fancy stuff. 

[QKO]

So I'm gonna go ahead and use this thread for what I figured out so far (as I'm also fairly new at the galleon).

1. The ship doesn't work when people don't listen.
2. When the ship is under fire, players tend to get overworked, as they get stuck repairing and repairing and repairing and so your ship dies a slow and painful death.
3. Aside from the light mount point on side and rear of the ship, the galleon doesn't have any armor removal tools.

So, as my understanding of this game gets slightly better every day I play, I tried solving this problem. So I started off with the chaingun on the left, combined with flak and lumber jack on left side and two carronades on right side. If this ship gets up close, it fights reasonably well and tends to get kills quite ok. Sadly, especially against opponents trying to force range (fieldguns, long range weapons, etc), you will be looking like an idiot trying to close the distance(which was pointed out by my teammates).

So I swapped out the lumberjack(which was not an explosive weapons and doesn't really hit all that well at long range) with a second flak and the chaingun with the fieldgun. This combo worked in 3v3, this was however with better players on my team piloting other ships, so I wasn't really decided on whether this loadout is good or not. Furthermore, this of course only works at long range maps, where your teammates can more easily scout for you and you're guaranteed to have a firing line if a square box shows up. Doing this, I can highly recommend circling counterclockwise as previously suggested. However, if the fight is on the edge of the map, you cannot circle around them because they will see you when you are hitting the edge of the map trying to pass them by. So when I get to the edge of the map, I reverse and circle clockwise with my left guns showing.

Now today, I tried playing this ship again, in 2v2. And quite sadly, I had little success with it. After yelling at my crew several times for not doing their job and them yelling back that they can't go any faster, I even found myself overworked to keep the ship alive. It has gotten so bad to the point that I considered running 3 engineers or maybe even 4 instead of just two. The added agony was worse of course when my teammates decided to just fly in, die to 2 very experienced captains and then decided to blame me for not flying in to help them.

So now, the ship's weaknesses, repairtime is horrible. It is so bad that a goldfish can permanently disable you and all you can do is beg your teammate to get him off of you. To deal with this myself, I tried tar. But it doesn't seem to do a whole lot when the ship is too close. At the same time, using a carronade at the rear CAN disable the ship, but often only after you've taken too much damage where you're unable to turn your strong weapons to them. As engineers seem slow to respond, turning with the phoenix claw seems to just make sure you lie dead in the air.

So this has been my dilemma so far. I did do some research afterwards trying to make sure one gunner can operate all 4 guns. He can, but he cannot use any special clips as the abandoned reload causes a clip reset. Maybe it is possible with the hwacha due to its very slow reload speed. If I find gunners willing to execute this and it being successful, I will let you know. I don't know what the burst damage loss is however and whether it will matter.

So if anyone has tips or recommendations other than to what I just found, I would appreciate it.

[Captain Smollett]

The Lumberjack is amazing at long range, you just need to find someone who can shoot it.

When multiple systems get knocked out, the galleon is one of the ships that are greatly helped by the pilot assisting in repairs, both the balloon and hull are up top and should be handled by the captain and top deck engineer, everyone below deck should be focused on shooting or fixing turning engines so you can turn and do more shooting, very rarely should the two crew members below deck come up top.

It is extremely difficult for a hwacha fish to kill a well manned Galleon.  Lower deck crew can "peach" their guns and engines rebuilding them almost to the point of being fixed and then waiting for the next barrage.  After the barrage hits they can full restore all systems in a few moments and give the offending goldfish hell, as long as the top deck maintains the hull and no one else is shooting the galleon, you'll have no problem staying afloat and returning fire giving plenty of time for your ally to assist in case you don't kill the goldy first.

Finally no ship works if crew doesn't listen.  But the big thing about Galleons is that you really can't succeed without a good ship as a partner.  In a 2v2 your teammate shouldn't be charging while the Galleon provides fire support but rather the opposite.  The galleon should be sending in range fire while the teammate sticks by the Galleon waiting for the enemies to come to them.  Next time you take the Galleon tell your teammate to hold your wing and watch as the enemies crumble.

[QKO]

The lumberjack doesn't really work on longer rangers due to its arc however. Even with lesmok or heavy clip that thing has a very bad arc which makes it unsuitable for the ranges that the flak cannon can reach. Next to that of course is the fact that it happens, more often than it should, that you hear crewmates complaining they can't hit any targets because the ship is on the move. Lets ignore the fact that I've been a CPMA player and that I had to deal with stuff worse than a moving galleon, for arguments sake... When I get on any gun and I try to hit someone, I will use my first volley to get a firing vector. When that confirms me a hit, I know where to aim to hit the opposing ship. I do not explicitly use the crosshair, I'm not using any real form of math. I just guess. When you're doing this, it doesn't matter what your ship is doing given your captain is consistent; and circling the battlefield is by its definition a consistent motion. Now if these people cannot hit the flak at long range (and are unable to figure out how to with their own brainpower), how do you expect them to hit a lumberjack at the same range?

The lumberjack can of course be used to replace the carronade in case opponents don't come close enough to you. So if I were going to be using it, it would be on the right side of my ship to support the hwacha.

So with that out of the way, for me, flak on the left side is the way to go. The problem with the latest changes is however, that the fieldgun has become completely useless. That leaves me with no means to do piercing damage over long range. So I've put on replacements. I'm now using the artemis to aid the flaks, but I'm not yet sure about a good rear gun. As of now that means over long range I only do explosive damage and that means my ship has to land more hits to get a kill. However, I'm going to test with incendiary rounds tonight to see if that gives me means to disable armor(and get a faster kill).

As for what I previously stated, a gunner CAN and SHOULD solo the guns when the ship is in direct combat. The reload times are big enough for the gunner to run between guns and keep both of them firing a constant volley of rounds. This leaves you with two engineers(rather than just one) to repair the weaponry and ship functions. That in turn allows the pilot's perks to be  used such as phoenix claw and tar. When equipped with hwacha and carronade, you can fire the carronade, reload it with special rounds, fire it again, then switch to hwacha and select your special rounds right before it is reloaded. Then fire the special rounds and go back to the carronade. Even if the gunner cannot load the special ammo, it's not really a big deal as the benefits of having two active engineers outweighs the benefit of special ammo types.

When not in combat mode however, you're in long range mode, which means all left side guns should be manned allowing all guns to shoot special rounds. When this is executed successfully, you can snipe ships from outside the fights, which is great. And since you're outside fights, you don't have to worry about any unrepairable damage either.

[Captain Smollett]

@QKO

I hate to say it but you need to find gunners that perform better. A LJ has twice the effective range of a heavy flak.  A good gunner can hit consistently at 2km and beyond.  The new mercury is not useless, it just needs a better gunner to shoot than it did before.

Also the Artemis really won't work on a double flak galleon and unless your opponent is a muppet incendiary rounds won't do much to help you break armor.

So, find some people to play with regularly and have them train on the long range weaponry.  Also it doesn't hurt to park the galleon in a long range fight, there's no reason to keep the throttle on when the enemy is far away and no one needs those shots to be made any harder than they already are.

[QKO]

The fieldgun has such little rotation that I have to adjust the ship almost every 2 shots.  And it's nice that some people can consistently hit the LJ at 2km and beyond. Yet, I haven't been able to do so and the repercussions of misjudging distance are far worse than the flak cannons. The weapons are just not feasible for this.

Artemis doesn't work, I've switched left side to chaingun to combine with the heavy flak/hwacha at close range. The Artemis' reach was nice though...

And parking the Galleon isn't something you really want to do. Because after your teammate dies, they will be heading straight for you. And the acceleration on the Galleon is very poor.

[Captain Smollett]

And parking the Galleon isn't something you really want to do. Because after your teammate dies, they will be heading straight for you. And the acceleration on the Galleon is very poor.

Found your problem.  The second ship should be flying with the Galleon, not the other way around.  I agree it's pretty difficult to line up good shots for your gunners if your ally is just going to go ahead and fly off. 

Anyways you should go check out Squash, who's in the Paddling, fly his Galleon in the Cogs matches.  He's one of the best galleon captains in the game and a great example of what a Galleon equipped with a Lumberjack is capable of.

edit - http://www.twitch.tv/qwerty2jam/profile here's a link to some past cogs matches

[Pickle]

QKO, have you tried flying a Junker instead of a Galleon?  It could just be you're flying the wrong ship for your style of play.

[HamsterIV]

And parking the Galleon isn't something you really want to do. Because after your teammate dies, they will be heading straight for you. And the acceleration on the Galleon is very poor.

Parking your Galleon is something you really want to do. It increases the chances your gunners will hit. Which in turn decreases the chances that your ally will die. I have flown with countless Newbie Galleon pilots who fly off and leave me to die in a 2v1 even though the engagement was happening right underneath their guns. I have also flown with an experienced galleon pilot with all AI crew (on both ships) and we wiped the floor with the other team because we kept a tight formation and covered for each others weaknesses.