In Assassins Creed Black Flag, I ran into an optional encounter with a unique hostile ship that I was completely unprepared for, as I hadn’t spent any money on upgrades for my own ship. So I tried to quit and reload. Well, the game autosaves at the start of the encounter. So I turned around to leave - and I get desynchronized. Great. I love being locked into optional unbalanced content!

So I had no other choice than to try to play the encounter. Except even with good positioning it was unbeatable as they had mortars, and a single broadside would melt my ship. But… there’s one special cannon attack aimed straight ahead. It does almost no damage, but stuns the enemy ship for as long as it takes to reload. There’s no way to turn fast enough to use any other weapon though. So I just plonked behind him too close for the mortars, and kept stunning this huge ship with the same attack for about 15 minutes, so it was never able to hit me with anything. We just sat there, neither ship moving or using any significant attack, until the 890th small cannonball upon which it suddenly burst into flames and sank.