[1239][Guide] Shiprekt Tips and Tricks

Edit: Forgot search function was a thing. Here's another guide topic. https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/shiprekt-begginer-tips.19665/

So I was playing shiprekt and thinking "Man, nobody knows what they're doing" and so I decided "Hey, let's make a community input page for tips on how to win!" I won't have pictures in the OP, for now, but eventually I'll add them.



1. Getting booty
To start off with, the team as a whole regenerates 5 booty every couple of seconds. (Possibly per person, I haven't played enough to figure that out yet)

To get booty faster, drive your ship over top of one of the big X's in the water, or the small ones, and wait about 6-10 seconds and your cash will jump. This uses up that X, and (I think) another one regenerates elsewhere. The amount gained varies, but generally the big X's seem to give twice as much booty as the small ones.


2. Building a ship.
There are many ship types you can build, and exactly what type you build depends on how many players/teams, and what yo want the ship to accomplish.

First, you'll need propellers. Then you'll want to put down a seat. The first person to place a seat (I think) becomes the "captain", meaning only they control the boat (To prevent stupidity). The seat controls all propellers on the boat, and, most importantly, when you place the seat down, rotate it to face the correct direction. If you don't, your viewpoint will be facing a completely wrong direction, and the directional keys will not operate the boat correctly. This is a very critical first step when making a boat.

There are many different ship designs you can build. For example, some people (Terrible people, mind you) will put a single seat out in the water, some propellers on each side, and blaze off to harass the enemy and zoom around. If, by chance, you are the guy who does this, be useful! Go quickly find the big X's, sit on them, and get the team money to improve the main boat. If you take the team's LIMITED resources in the beginning and make a small boat, but don't do this, you're just dooming your entire team.

Another boat design for the main craft is the ramming boat. Only personal money gained by the captain when driving over X's can be used to purchase guns, but regular money regenerates anyway. By placing a bunch of solid blocks up front, and then ramming enemy craft (From behind where their propellers are facing if you're smart) you can disable them, and you can even turn the game around. Of course, ramming too quickly will also disable you, so use this technique with caution.

You can also try the guns-a-blazing design, where you put a lot of guns in the front, back, or side, and then shoot the enemy to death. However, guns are tough to purchase (At least in the games I've played with so few players) and they tend to shoot slowly and be easily destroyed by a quick ram from a smart enemy.

Bombs are also an underutilized weapon. They're cheaper than guns, and if you put them at the end of couplings behind your ship, when an enemy pursues you, the captain can quickly detach them to let them float like mines where the enemy will ram them. I think they also destroy enemy footman if they touch them, so they might be useful for boarders too, but I haven't tested this much.


3. Using your character effectively.

Right click to shoot your gun. It takes two shots to kill an enemy and three to kill a shark. If you place a block wrong, your gun, after many shots, can destroy the block and allow you to fix your error.

Left click to punch. This is the best way to deal with enemy boarders, and it doesn't have a slow reload time either. I am not sure how much damage a punch deals, but I know it doesn't affect blocks at all.





That's all I got. Anyone else got tips to add here?

 

Some tips for Shiprekt+ (not all may apply to Shiprekt 1.0)

General:

• Press M twice. You can now see everything on the entire map. If you're captain, you can put the cursor over this map to make it transparent, which will allow you to pilot like a boss.
• Scroll/zoom all the way out. Get used to it, this is better for steering around debris. You can zoom in to build of course (assuming there's a giant chat bubble in the way)
• Have patience. Make sure you're lined up to place a block before you click. While it does happen a lot, you can rarefy the chances that your placed block will be in an incorrect position if you just calm down a bit.
• Understand the weight of blocks. Cannons are quite heavy and can be the difference between escaping with your core in tact or losing an engine causing a chain reaction where you keep slowing down until the enemy cannon balls you to death.
• Don't bother shooting an enemy core with your pistol unless you have 5+ people also shooting it. I shot a core once 80 times and it didn't blow up, so I imagine the core's HP is 100 and each pistol shot does about 1hp dmg.
• If you pick up a piece that doesn't really have a place on the ship you can run to the back of the ship, make sure there's water between your placement and your ship, and if you click you will drop the piece off the back of the ship. This is a lot better than having a useless tile that impedes your captain's design plan.
• (Shiprekt+, not sure if this applies to the base mod) Couplings can be driven through without taking damage

Booty:
Decide whether or not your mothership is going to be a runner or a fighter based on what your captain is putting onto it. If the mothership is loading up with cannons and the like, you may want to consider making a small ship* and collecting red X's so you can return to your mother ship and add more cannons where your captain wants. In this scenario you'll want to be building up the mother ship to sideline the other cores on the map with immense firepower. On the other hand, if your ship is a 'runner' (low amount of wall pieces, large amount of engines, to escape danger easily). Chances are your captain will be collecting many gold X's, allowing you to make mini ships with a couple cannons or kamikaze ships loaded with bombs (essentially human guided torpedoes). In this case, just ask for cannons on your small ship and a captain will usually give you some. If he doesn't however, you can just go collect your own booty and eventually make it back to your core and attach them for yourself.

Building small ships:


(Legend at bottom)

*Most common small ship, a seat and 2 engines. Allows for steering and fast forward movement. Mainly used to collect booty. Try to at least make the booty you spent on it back when you launch, so if you happen to die or crash you can build another one. The idea though is to eventually make it back to your core and arm it with auto cannons (usually pointed to the side, forward pointing cannons are kind of useless unless you're facing a ship that has no rear protection and no turning capabilities). I wont get into advanced small ships, so just observe what people build, and ALWAYS PUT DOWN COUPLINGS BEFORE MAKING A SMALL SHIP Even if there's already a single coupling, put down 2 more. You want to be as clear from the ship as possible... there's no point in making a 120+ cost ship that crashes into the main ship causing 200+ booty in repairs, and time spent repairing.

Building a ship:
Starting off, there's a trick to make your ship much faster at the cost of being less armored. Consider the following:









Place 2 engines and a seat, and then 2 walls in front of your ship and then drive forwards. The idea here is to purposely break off your 'front' walls allowing you to place rotated engines for a simple steering mechanism and a weight reduction that will start the base for a "runner" ship. The idea for a runner ship is to stay out of conflict, allowing the heavier fighter ships to destroy eachother as much as possible, and then swoop in to destroy the final core while they're making repairs. Some people even go as far as breaking the entire deck and walls passed the core (leaving only 4 walls, 4 decks and the core, or even less) - this allows their ship to be insanely fast near the end-game, and also improve turning capabilities when equipped with torpedoes.

I wont go too much into how to build a ship, because that's pretty much the entire game... but basically you want to aim for the following:

• Good turning
• Keep at least one lane of deck flooring that leads to water so that people can build small ships
• A place for torpedoes eventually, including decking that will let people rebuild them easily
• Some way to prevent attacks from assault mini ships (I find 3 rear-facing auto cannons works well enough - usually causes them to attempt to crash into your ship causing minor damage)

Torpedoes:
Speaking of torpedoes, the basic torp looks like this:





I've also seen torpdoes made like this, that were quite effective







To launch torpedoes, as captain in the captain seat, hold space and click the decoupling while driving in such a way that the engine is activated.

Be aware when people are making torpedoes. Too many times I've seen people attach a torpedo to the ship, basically embedding a bomb/useless weight into your ship.

Torps in my opinion are the most efficient way to break an opponent's core, but they're heavy and expensive so they require some strategy to set up and fire. Adding another wall to the first torpedo design will make it penetrate farther before detonating. It also provides some defence making it harder to blow up before reaching it's target (which can be done with a ship armed with a lot of auto cannons).

Last note on torps, making them symmetrical will allow the captain to pilot easier, so try really hard to get them symmetrical (one on either side).

Legend:
= core
= wall
= deck
= engine
= seat
= bomb
= coupling

And some examples of elite ships:

Spoiler

A light fighter core (torps were eventually equipped and fired off the sides).

A runner core, take note of the lack of wall pieces. You see those lines on the map? Those were rows of team cannons. Basically the idea with this one was to retreat into those areas. I think we lucked out on this one and the other team destroyed themselves somehow. Otherwise this was practically a stalemate, and it was actually caused because someone added that rear engine. Without the rear engine, the captain had been putting couplings down which he could attach cannons to and place rows of them on the map like this. Some noob put the engine on the back. In fact, without teammates I'm pretty sure Wargod-Loki would've covered the entire map with cannon rows (as we obtained more and more teammates, they all wanted their own small ship and all of our incoming booty was completely devoted to noobs building small ships. Sadly this happens a lot).

Both ships were <Wargod-Loki>'s

Guns:I'm actually not that effective with gun placement, so I'll only touch on this
Cannons:
Cannons are powerful but heavy. They're only really useful once you've disabled another ship, or on certain miniship designs like a quad engine ship, where you can dip in and fire a shot and retreat very easily. I would avoid using them on the mother ship because they will make you heavy and, ironically, more susceptible to cannon shots. If you have the engines to support a ship with many cannons though, it's possible to have a cannon-based mother core. Just make sure that your captain wants them though. There's nothing worse than adding a cannon unnecessarily - because it slows down the rate that you obtain booty for everything.

Auto cannons:
These are lighter and better/best for the mother ship. I'm not entirely sure of the best way to place them, but stacking a lot of them in close groupings (this was removed*) seems to be the most effective. Usually placed on every side of the ship, or if your turning is good enough, you can get away with placing them only on the front and sides. With enough of them you can melt ships like they're nothing but individually they're fairly weak. In fact just a singular autocannon will take probably 15 minutes to destroy a core - 9 of them on the other hand, and you're talking less than 2 minutes! If you can cripple a ship though and have the choice, regular cannons are more effective, and even more than that, torpedoes. However, they also have the added benefit of weakening/stopping incoming torpedoes - which regular cannons do not. Also they're extremely useful for stopping miniships and hijackers. *Stacking cannons has been removed, so they have to be spaced out a little bit, which makes them more powerful if placed on a larger surface. If it is your intention to have them, make sure that you have the engines to support their weight! By that I mean there's no point in having auto cannons if you can't actually get to your opponent.

Advanced tips:

• If you can't run quickly make sure your butt is covered with some rear facing auto cannons, otherwise you'll just get picked off by small ships.
• Ramming small ships with your mother ship may be worth it, if they're especially annoying. Try to break off your engines and walls, because those can be replaced easily.
• If you see an opportunity to take an enemy ship's command, you can do hilarious things like drive them into another core or debris, or nearer to your team's ship if they have a lot of cannons. Always hold buttons if you know you're going to die, because the engines will lock until the original captain hops back into the seat. Essentially this will cause chaos and break the enemy's morale (not to mention, if overly successful, can eliminate 2 opponents at the same time - I've done it before)
• As a non-captain pirate, you can almost always build a simple ship and the captain wont generally mind. Try to build one when you're stopped though, and make sure that repairs aren't needed first. Repairing the main ship, or improving it's mobility should come before small ships (especially end-game, where torpedoes are extremely useful for crippling the opponent - and usually you'll want to have a fully repaired and functional ship before you attach torpedoes).
  
• Sometimes ramming is really efficient. The best way to ram imo is to 1) Make sure you can outrun the ship you're going to ram by a large margin then 2) add pillars of walls to the front of your ship. Walls break through to their core really effectively and at little cost if you do it right. You can also attempt to snap off a couple of their engines in this process to make outrunning them easier (to make sure they don't just flee and leave you with broken walls on the front of your ship). It's rare that this is used because you can build torps that will catch up to them easier and deal the same damage - but it is quite effective. Sadly it's often more effective with less people in the server. I find that when I have teammates they can spend the booty needed to sustain a ship thats only purpose is to ram.
• You obtain a large amount of booty for breaking an enemy core (not entirely sure how it works, but it can range from 500~1000 booty). So if you know you can break a ship with less than or equal to 750 booty in repairs, you might as well.
• If you incorrectly place a piece, you can shoot it off really slowly with the pistol, or if possible, attempt to find some way you can add another engine to break off the unwanted piece AND give you an engine at the same time.

Most people wont need any of this, but meh.

TL;DR summary: Torpedoes are super effective.

 

whats this booty business? i dont remember any currency system

 

It's Shiprekt+, that's why. I actually just played the original Shiprekt, and I have to say I vastly prefer the frantic randomized triple block action to the current setup.

 

In that case... for 1.0 I can give a tip;

Set symmetrical engines to move you forward. Continue to grab pieces from the middle and throw them off the back of your ship until you get the piece(s) you want, occasionally changing your trajectory every so often so you don't crash into your debris pile.

I liked the randomized version too, but I actually prefer the booty system now. You have a lot more control over your final design.

 

I like how u took as elite ships mine as example (and not even have told me about it )

Good help for beginners here (may gone add some "elite" tipps tomorow, for example, the big torpedo lacks of a bomb in the middle)

PS : Screen 2 is btw the "Wall of Loki™" technique

 

@Wargod-Loki
I probably should've pm'd you, you're right. I just want people to see a shining example of what to do... it's hard to get screenshots of nice crafts because getting to that point takes time to build up the layers and after a war there's not much left of them. I just took some prime examples from what was in my screenshots folder, both of which happened to be yours because I had the time as a crewmate to take them. In fact, for the Wall of Loki™ screenshot, I was particularly upset because I had 500 personal booty to spend on a row of cannons and that darn noob blocked the path to create a cannon row (a good example of what not to do on a ship that's a good example of what to do). Seriously though, for EVERY game I can't stress enough to new players - MAP. AWARENESS. (Not directed at you, Loki ). I often include this as my first rule to any guide that I write, and you can actually see that here (First written words: Press M twice).

Take it as a compliment - because I wish more players were as elite as you are, I'm sharing some examples of possible strategies that have been proven to work. Of course these aren't the only strats that work, but this will encourage people to think outside of the box, and see examples of a craft that follows all of the build points I've listed. I could have provided my own examples but because the game has updated so many times, a lot of them are outdated.

 

@Corpsey A pm wasnt needed, i liked the surprise to find some ships i made here

Also by reading the guide, i can see you know how Shiprekt (+) works and there's not much a beginner needs to know at first.

Thank you for the compliment, i wishd other "beginners" would learn as fast as you tho, i havent seen you alot and for that, you have written a very good guide.

(also ingame i cant remember u doing any incredible stupid things, so that speaks also for you )

 

@Wargod-Loki My in-game tag is moomooaloomoo, because steam. And I tend to keep a low profile because I skipped the whole voxel-building-games generation so I wanted to observe what kind of designs people made, thus I often don't take captain, but stay as a loyal crewmate. I think this game is extremely underrated (both KAG and shiprekt).