A collection of important things for new players to understand early on.
Tips and Tricks for New Players
All credit goes to Quizzical!
Simple Things
Every admiral has a court rank, which starts at rank 1 for most, but 3 for a few. You can increase it by completing a title gain quest at the palace. So long as your court rank is 3 or lower, pirates will not attack you. If your current admiral’s court rank is 4 or higher, then they commonly will attack, unless your own level is much higher than the zone requirement. Don’t increase your court rank above level 3 (Cavaliero) until you have additional admirals that you can switch to when you want to sail around safely.
You should join a guild almost immediately, even if you later decide to leave for a different guild. Even being the only active player in a dead guild is far better than being unguilded. Being in a guild gives you access to crafting, parts combine, and the contribution store. You won’t need combine until you’re higher level, but you want access to the contribution store immediately, as explained in the next item.
Every week, you can get some rewards from the guild contribution store and from the palace. Always get the novice training manuals from both sources. Everything else is optional, but the novice training manuals are scarce and important–as well as very cheap to buy. You won’t need them for months, but when you do, you’ll be very glad to have several hundred sitting around.
Always have an aide’s cabin in your flagship of fleet 1. Other ships don’t need it, but the flagship does. This allows an aide to automatically respond to disasters. That makes it safe to sail for 20 or 30 minutes without having to watch the screen. Without an aide, disasters could destroy cargo or even sink ships.
Always carry around an ample supply of disaster relief items. Your starting capital will sell nearly all of them in the item shop. You don’t need them until company level 20, but after that, disasters will strike regularly, and being able to immediately cure the disaster is hugely important. You’ll eventually want a stack of 1000 of each item, but if that’s too expensive early on, buying 50 is fine. Different disasters are associated with different areas of the game, and some won’t strike until you’re very high level. But be sure to check your stocks periodically and replenish the ones that get used.
You should do land training every day. The usual 3/day goes very fast, and the mostly C-grade astrolabes that you get from it will be useful forever. They also sell well on the auction house, as high level players may do their land training in higher level areas that give higher grade astrolabes, but they’ll still need more C-grade astrolabes forever.
Your profits per unit from selling trade goods are roughly proportional to the base price of the item times the distance from the nearest port that sells the item. Distance calculated is by sea, so it’s quite far from Portobelo to Panama, even though they’re quite close as the crow flies. High profits thus require long trade routes, but make sure that you don’t ship goods to an area that has a nearby port that sells the goods that you’re shipping.
You should start dispatch as soon as you can. Even a poorly optimized dispatch is better than no dispatch. Trade dispatch gives you free ducats, while adventuring and combat dispatches cost ducats, but give you ship parts and personal gear. Dispatch also levels whatever mates you put on the dispatch fleet. When to start paying blue gems for fleet 3 is debateable, but fleet 2 is free, so you should start dispatch on fleet 2 as soon as you can.
Be sure to level up your shipbuilding. Even though you can buy high grade ships on the auction house, they come with bad cabins by default, and you can’t change the cabins on a ship until you’ve built a ship of that type yourself. Keep building ships just for the sake of leveling shipbuilding until your shipbuilding rank is high enough to build the ships you want.
If you’re wiling to spend money on the game, most of the packages for sale are red gems a rate of about 91 gems per dollar (or some other mostly fixed rate if you pay in a different currency), plus something else. The most efficient things to buy generally have more red gems as the “something else”. These are available as the red gem fixed-term item (which can be repurchased every 28 days) and the double gems initial purchase in the currency section of the store. It rarely makes sense to buy anything else besides these unless you have already bought them and are willing to spend more money.
How to Approach the Game
This is a sandbox game in which you will make progress toward a lot of long-term goals in parallel. The game will not tell you what to do next every step of the way. It might look like it does initially with the admiral’s chronicle, and you should play through the tutorial part of that, but you’ll eventually hit a wall and be unable to progress the chronicle for a while, but have to do something else instead.
Don’t focus exclusively on one thing for very long. Trying to do too much of the same thing all at once is inefficient, and in some cases, the game will force you to stop. At best, focusing on just one thing will make the game feel painfully grindy. Do some combat, do some trading, do some land exploration, and swap between your activities. You can often multitask by doing a trade run or grabbing a union quest that takes you in the same direction as you were traveling for some other reason.
This is a semi-idle game, and you’ll need to embrace that to play the game well. Some things require your active attention, but there are also a lot of things that you shouldn’t actively pay attention to. If you’re sailing to a distant port that will take 20 minutes to reach, then don’t just stare at the screen in that time. Tab out of the game and do something else: read a book, go eat dinner, play a different game, or whatever.
You can also do consecutive combat or land exploration where you start it and let the game run, sometimes for hours at a time. It will take you some time to get the hang of when this is possible and how long it will take, but it’s totally legitimate to start the game on doing something, then leave it running while you go to school or work or sleep or whatever. When it reaches a stopping condition, the game will effectively pause for you, so you won’t die if you’re not watching when it finishes. Being able to make ten hours of progress in a day while only actively playing the game for two is how to progress quickly.
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