by decatur
Hello everyone, thanks in advance for your help.NPC spotting/scouting - If a player moves through an NPC sea zone on his turn does that trigger a scouting roll? To elaborate if I a merchant with no bounties move from territory A into territory B (which contains an NPC Pirate) and then to territory C. Do I trigger a scout in territory B before moving to territory C? The same goes for naval NPCs and players with bounties.
Rumors - on the player card it states that discovering rumors to be true grants a glory point and therefore a glory card. However some of the rumors make a mention of the glory point and others do not. My question is do all rumor cards grant a glory point or just specifically the ones that state so on the cards? I am inclined to believe whatever the cards say, however the majority of my opponents made the point that the rule book does not include the phrase "when applicable" when describing the glory points from rumors.
NPC movement - I understand that the event cards trigger the NPCs to move and I understand the selecting and alternate territory via clockwise rotation, however my question concerns NPC ships that are not activated by an event card but are in a territory containing another ship that meets its hunt criteria or is in a territory adjacent to a territory containing a player ship that meets hunt criteria. Do these NPC ships still take action even though they are not triggered by the event card?
Ship to Ship combat - My question is regarding the number of cannon shots fired when failing a the Seamanship comparison. A Galleon and a small pirate sloop are in combat. The captains both have a seamanship skill of 3 and therefore roll three dice. If the captain piloting the sloop wins the seamanship roll they fire their single cannon causing one damage regardless of the number of successes rolled. and the Galleon looks at the dice rolled on the seamanship contest to see how many successes there were to determine how many cannons fire and hit their target. Is this correct, and if so, if a large ship with many cannons loses the seamanship role they can never fire to their full potential of five cannons because none of the captains have a seamanship characteristic that high correct? In order to fire five cannons you must have won the seamanship contest and then you automatically hit. I'm assuming this makes it possible for a smaller ship to take down a larger in what would be potentially a very long combat.
Port action sequence – it is obvious that selling must be the first port action however after that it does not describe a proper sequence, does this mean that a player may go to the shipyard and if available purchase the cargo upgrade before purchasing cargo. It seems foolish not to check if you don’t already have that upgrade.
Death and Retirement - my understanding is you must start in a port, use your first action to “retire” and forfeit the remainder of that turn. The next turn you start of as if you had died. The rules mention that if you have a badly damaged ship and are broke then this is a sensible option. However I fail to see the benefit of it over attacking a NPC ship instead of retiring. If you win against the NPC hurray you get a glory point, if you lose, which is arguably likely since you were considering retiring what is lost is the same as what you would already loose by retiring. You are not able to stash gold when you retire because you must do it before any other action. I just fail to see the benefit of retiring instead of attacking a man’o war or frigate or Galleon with your damaged ship. Again if you lose the combat and die you don’t lose anything you wouldn’t have already. And as long as you’re not engaging another player nobody benefits from your demise either way.
Thanks again everyone, these are just the questions that I can remember off of the top of my head that my group came up with last night while playing for the first time.