Uncharted Waters Origin – Useful Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

All credit goes to hokie1joe!

1. Five admirals are available for selection. The admiral you select determines origin country – notice the flag above the portrait – Joao (explore) for Purtugal, Catalina (pirate) for Spain, Ali (trade) for Ottoman, Otto (pirate) for England, Ernst (explore) for Netherlands. So if you choose trading admiral, you will be Ottoman, but if you have to be England, you must choose Otto, etc. Note: you can focus on exploring, trading, or pirating with any admiral, so there is not a bad choice. Typically peace (PvE) servers have high Ottoman population where normal (PvP) servers have high Spain or England (or other) populations. Later in the game you can hire other admirals – even more than the original five.
2. Some admirals might offer blue gems at character selection as an incentive to distribute players to different choices. You don’t have to take the blue gems, you will get a slow trickle of them as you complete accomplishments.
3. After following the tutorial, go to the harbor > supply > manage hold > set load ratio, then make water, food 10%, material and ammo 0%, trade goods 80%. Maximize your cargo hold! Trading from port to port is extremely important regardless of your focus.
4. Learn how to melee fight with all ships, challenge 1-3 will teach you how. That way you don’t have to carry ammo, increasing cargo hold. Also there is a chance to win ships if you don’t sink them – odds are super slim but possible. Feels like you get better loot? I dunno.
5. Follow the main quest line, lots of xp, money, and fun.
6. When you run out of quests, run union quests. You can also do sudden missions gained by using letters found in message bottles, but don’t do ones that are too far away. Especially important on PvP servers.
7. Do your daily, weekly and monthly quests. Daily tasks can be done in minutes but aren’t worth much. Weekly tasks are worth 330k ducats each, pay attention to reset to get as many done before reset as possible. Monthly tasks are worth 1.3M ducats each which is huge for starting admirals, get ’em done before reset – consider prioritizing them early?
8. Spend your ducats on mates – fill the cabins on all ships with mates of your focus. Get the D mates and work your way up as you gain money.
9. Also check the item store black market for B, A, and S items. Many times it’s the only way to get those items. Especially important on PvE servers.
10. Everything sold on the auction house costs red gems (real $).
11. Spend blue gems on an additional shipyard build space or two and union quest space if you end up doing those activities often – they are good for 5 or 7 days.
12. You get more ducats from longer hauls. Here’s my advice, stick around in a small area for a while to get a feel for trading. Purchasing goods in certain ports might cost 100k ducats, but in another port might cost 250k ducats. When you get an expensive load, that’s the load you take on a nice long voyage. For instance, Alexandria seems to have higher than normal loads – instead of taking it to Athens, take it to Constantiople, Odessa or Taganrog for a larger gain, then port-to-port trading on the way back. Consider increasing food and water when undergoing longer voyages.
13. Deal in specialities as much as possible – you get fame when trading them, and fame is the ultimate goal in UWO.
14. Do the challenges as they open up for you. Lots of learning and rewards.

RG Ship

If this is pay to win type game, where you spend real money and buy the best ships in game?

You can buy ships with RG in the auction house, but if you haven’t built that ship yourself you won’t gain understanding for it. Plus if you don’t build the ship yourself you won’t increase ship building for that specific ship… so unless you by an r20 ship with great stats it is honestly kind of a waste of RG.

I understand the frustration people have with ‘pay to win’ — but it really is ‘pay to keep the server / game running’ in a case like this. It would have been great if it was just cosmetics, or if they had simply made a solo game — but they didn’t. But you really don’t have to spend anything to enjoy the game. The people who put in work and max shipbuilding, then keep building to get great rolls, are going to come out on top compared to someone who only buys a ship with RG ever so often.

You’ll see a lot of cash shop mates added and it kind of sucks that you can’t get them without spending RG — but you don’t really need them either. Some of the C mates you can get just by players are just as good if not better than S shop mates. And with shop mates you are really only paying for a chance to get them anyway.

You can still make RG in this game too. I’ve earned over 6,000 RG in the last two weeks just from selling improved ships that I didn’t need as I work on maxing ship building for those specific ships. One ship alone sold for 3,000. It had decent stats, but not perfect. You see a lot of really high stuff in the auction house and all I can say to that is people probably wouldn’t have an RG shortage at all if they priced realistic. Case in point: no one is going to pay 6,000 for a S part that you can build with about 2,000 in auction house mats — but you see stuff like that all the time.

One final thing — I know I’m just kind of rambling here. lol…. My advice is to ignore nation power and various rankings as well. No all of the features have been added yet and right now trade is King. You aren’t going to keep up with people who play 12 hours per day trading non-stop. Don’t even try. Just pace yourself and make your own goals.

As for people who try to buy their way to the top. I’ve found that most of them go heavy until they hit around company level 40 or so… they they just vanish. Because that’s about the point where they find out that leveling can be a grind and those top tier ships you bought don’t exactly make it any easier unless they have good storage.