The first and most important tip is to avoid naval combat at all costs early in the game. Every time you destroy a pirate ship at sea, you’ll add more ships to the pirate fleet, meaning that the next encounter will be against at least one more ship. Wounding a pirate ship doesn’t count as destroying it, but it’s generally better to run anyway. When you’ve built a fortune, you can sail around with twenty five heavily armed ships blasting away to your heart’s content.
Midway through the game, you’ll need to earn large sums of money to get to get further along in your career. Pay attention to the inn, and pay for people’s drinks. You’ll hear tips that will help you make financially good decisions, such as buying cheap dream dust, or selling arms at a high price. These ‘tips’ change randomly each time you leave the game and come back to it (that includes saving and loading your game), but they stay the same as long as you keep playing, so use that to your advantage.
Once you’ve accumulated a large fortune, you won’t want to haul cargo around to your various ports to make money. Instead, purchase the warehouses in each port, hire guards, and then start buying bulk amounts of the products you’ll be selling. By tracking the tips from the inn, you’ll be able to stockpile the precious resources in each port, selling them only when a really good deal comes along. This is far quicker than transporting cargo by ship, saves you tremendous space; you can use that space to arm your fleet with more cannon, keeping it safer. Plus, the tougher your fleet, the easier it’ll be to take on the pirate captains that offer small bounties and big status rewards.
Each ship comes with a certain number of cannons on board, normally one. The total cost of the ship is always increased by 3000 for each cannon it has. For example, this means if you purchase a Brigandine with a single cannon on board, you'll pay around 230000
Cargo: 25
Maximum Cannons: 2
Cost: ~1000
Cargo: 150
Maximum Cannons: 15
Cost: ~7500
Cargo: 200
Maximum Cannons: 20
Cost: ~10000
Cargo: 300
Maximum Cannons: 30
Cost: ~20000
Combat has 3 options, Fight, Flee, and Dump Cargo. Fleeing should be your main option until you can build up a sizable fleet. Once you have got your fleet built up, you should fight to earn the rewards. The only thing you should never do is dump cargo, it does exactly what it sounds; dumps all of the items you just purchased.
When fighting: Follow the advice of the AI, always take down the largest ships first. You can select which ships to fire on by clicking on the Crossed Sword Icon on the enemy ships, when it is not shown, your fleet will not fire on those ships. Destroying the largest ships first will mean that they have less guns, and that the guns they have will be focused over more of your ships. The AI will almost always shoot at your largest ship first. Having two or three of the same and largest size ship means they will spread out the fire power evenly over all of the ships so that you have more time to sink them all. A good technique is to uncheck all of the Junks since they can only hold 2 guns per ship, where as the one masted sloop can hold up to 10.
Once you have gotten a sizeable fleet, you can start hunting notorious pirates for bounties. Each bounty isn’t worth all too much, but it seems to be greatly multiplied when you collect multiple bounties all at once. 4-5 bounties can be upwards of 150,000 gold, where as each bounty individually might be worth 10,000. 7 bounties can be up to 1,000,000, 9 bounties up to almost 2,000,000.
Each character has different advantages and disadvantages.
Petra starts with a well armed two masted sloop and quite a bit of debt, the first goal is to pay that off as soon as possible as it gains 10% interest per month! She has the benefit of knowing where Shangri La is at anytime from her Pirate heritage. As a Pirate ship, Her starting ship can only be repaired at Shangri La. Any other ship she buys can be repaired normally at regular shipyards. As always, flee until you can build your fleet up to a respectable size.
Madame Tso starts with a ware house in Jia-Ching, but only starts with a few Junks, which are the smallest ship available. This means that you can not go to Edamame because your ships are too small and you will have to purchase a larger ship before you will be able to go to that city. Make lots of small runs, and be sure to run away from pirates because your ships are so weak.
Gossamer starts with one Juggernaut, the largest ship available, and its bristling with guns. There’s only one problem, he has NO cash. So the only way to make money when you have none; is to fight pirates. Avoid the random pirates, but keep going to the Port Authority to find news of where the named pirates are so that you can defeat them and collect the bounty.
Gossamer also happens to know the location of Shangri La at all times, he is the pirate king after all. Also, since he is a pirate, he can only repair his pirate ships at Shangri La, though you can buy ships and repair legitimately bought ships from any ship yard.
