FoX's Newcomer's Guide

[Roileon]

The Fox guides are now open to the public. It is a collage of different guides obtained both legally and by spies for the stubborn ones who didn't like sharing XD

BTW, This is the unedited short version

(Section Donated by Captain D.)
As I understand it there are 4 ways to get gold as a new player:
(in order of how fast they could possibly make gold- no guarantees though)

1) The VOODOO way: Use credits to buy voodoo (or get daily voodoo presents) and you could get a "Booty Master" voodoo card and steal thousands or millions of gold from your rich guildmate (or enemy if you don't fear retaliation). There are other cards that help you get gold fast through patrolling or Buried Treasure or Hidden Treasure. This tacic requires you to get lucky and get the right card(s) but if you acquire enough voodoo cards it's almost guaranteed.

2) The PLUNDERING way: Find a helpless new player like yourself who shows up on the plunder screen and steal a fraction of his small amount of gold by attacking. You would probably need to have chosen the Sloop or Cutter for your first ship so you can beat the other player's Howker.

3a) The DANGEROUS TRADING way: Set up a trade route between to port that have a short travel time (eg. Tortuga - Tzogos) and have your single ship trade as fast as it can between these 2 ports. Use your turns to "instant travel" between ports to make gold faster. Your Danger WILL increase and you WILL get plundered and lose some of your gold (~1,000 each time).

3b) The SLOW TRADING way: Set up your trade route so it takes just over 1 hour to travel between each port. This way you will not gain danger and lose gold to plundering. The catch is you make gold slower than if you rush. Choosing a howker as your first ship is best for this. This is BY FAR the most reliable way to get gold after you have multiple fleets. Spend your turns "Working as a Porter" which gives you 10-25 gold/turn used. There is nothing else useful to spend your turns on.

4) The PATROLLING way: You MUST choose a sloop as your first ship and spend most (but NOT all) of your initial gold adding crew and cannons. Patrol for ships but only attack the Howkers and Fluyts. You can't succeed against any other ship type yet. It will take you multiple attacks so keep some gold for repairing your ship. After you spend all your turns, choose between 2) and 3) until you have more turns to patrol. Make sure to add more cannons.



The Enjoyment or lack thereof:

1) VOODOO: If you get lucky and get 1 million gold through "Booty Master" I would imagine you would love the game! I would want to buy more cards and try to get lucky again Also, 1,000 or 10,000 gold from Buried Treasure or Hidden Treasure is very helpful early on in building your fleets.

2) PLUNDERING: You will need to spend your money quickly on a new ship because you will gain danger and probably lose gold to other people using the same strategy. This is high-risk and high-reward. It's very enjoyable except when you lose a lot of battles and end up with little gold.

3a) DANGEROUS TRADE: You will need to restart your trade route again because it gets paused when you get plundered. I found my trade routes were always paused overnight and I barely made any gold. This was frustrating but understandable because I chose the dangerous way, not the slow way. If I didn't understand danger rating I might think it's impossible to trade safely and want to leave.

3b) SLOW TRADE: I recommend this WAY but it's VERY slow for the first week (until you have more ships) and there are not many interesting decisions. I got a little bored with this because I set up the trade route, spent all my turns on "working as a porter" and then all I could do was surf the forums and chat with the guild if I had one. It was exhilarating when I got my second howker though! Double the profit/hour! After about 2 weeks this would be WAY more fun. After 1 year of playing this is extremely rewarding.

4) PATROLLING: Because sloops are so weak you will most likely make less gold than trading, Sometimes you end up paying much more in repairs than you gained from conquering the ship. Pirate Hunters are like a brick wall and require you to "instant travel" to another port to continue playing the game. If a level 1 sloop was able to combat more than the weakest merchant fleets this would be less of an annoyance.


Wish List:

1) I could use more voodoo cards and I wish I was more lucky

2) I couldn't afford to fully equip my ship with cannons. After completing a tutorial on "How to Plunder" and "How to Patrol" I would like to be rewarded with some cannons or some gold for cannons.

3) It would be really exciting to complete a tutorial on "How to Trade" and get enough gold to construct a new ship! Then I could do the "How to Construct a Ship" tutorial and get even more cool rewards! Captain Jack already mentioned making a new player's warehouse fully stocked- that is also on the wish list so a new player doesn't need to figure out how to store resources before they even have a second ship.

4) Level 1 Sloops are very weak against the ships that you find patrolling. I would like to complete a tutorial that explains "How to Upgrade a Ship" and "How to Upgrade Ship Attributes". The reward for such a tutorial would make me strong enough to compete with some of those level 3 Cutters on the Patrol screen.



Conclusion:
The beginning of the game is a bit slow and I wish I would start with more resources and abilities to make more gold for myself.
More gold = more fun decisions!
The tutorials don't hold the player's hand through navigating the menus which can be intimidating.
The game doesn't reward new players enough for their good decisions or for their growing understanding of the game.

I hope that helps... but I already know a lot about the game. I would like to also know how it is for someone learning the game for the first time.
Please feel free to disagree with my summary. Do you see any other ways to make gold as a new player? Do you have more problems to add or ideas on your wish list?

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***If you are going to attack a strong player and expect him to retaliate this is how you can take the least damage.

1. Have as few active fleets as possible (3-10)
2. Put a lvl 10 cutter as the last ship in every active fleet
3. Don't have any strong ships that will be targets for leviathans (I use large frigates and don't mind if they are levi'd a bit)
4. Keep your gold between 1 - 2.5 mill
5. Do not have any valuable ships out of fleets

If you do this and store backup gold in warehouses you can pirate a ton without worry. However, we will need a player or two with Ship of the Lines to steal other sotls when players run out of gold. That player would not be able to do #3 and would be venerable to leviathans.




This is what each port has:

*Cotton: Seaglory, Caspian, Neapolis

*Iron: Gasp, Regis, Tzogos

*Tools: St. Martins, Tortuga, Vaasburg

*Wood: Aiora, Kanoni, Prote

*Food: Chalkos, Goroum, New Land

*Tobacco: Hannes, Psaral, Thorakas

*Rum: Akrotiri, Baramas, Pania


First of all, you need to know the basics of the game.
-Click on Help at bottom left of this page. Then found text and video tutorials. Have a look there.

For complete newcomers, follow this guide: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=500&p=3766#p3766


Second of all, you need to know how to properly setup trade routes. Tutorials show how to do it. What they do not tell though is that each route must take at least 1 hour to complete, in order to avoid danger penalties.


A good starting trade route is Tortuga Tzogos.

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General Starting plan:

A)Infrastructure
-Get 1 warehouse in each port
-Get your first ship building base in Aiora
This means you will need a large warehouse there which will be supplied with:
Wood from Aiora
Tools from Tortuga
Iron from Tzogos
Cotton from Seaglory
The bigger the stocks, the better. Once it gets large enough, get a second one in Prote.

B)Ships
The general idea is to get 1 attacking fleet as a start and many trade fleets. We will do the same as offensive strategies require extensive voodoo usage.

For merchant fleets:
-You get howkers, fluyts and large fluyts as a start. Once you reach about 100 captains. You can start upgrading these ships with large merchantment. You will realize these options more as time pass. As a start, pick Howkers.

For attacking fleets:
-Start with a Sloop level 10. First attacking fleet should have a Sloop lvl 2 as last ship always. Once all 4 above are better,then upgrade the last ship. Sloop of War is also good while the next best option is Brig of War which is a very good ship which is also expected to become better in the future.

C)Voodoo
-For voodoo, you need to do the following:
1.Get a presents partner. Check the relative topic in organization forums.
2.You need to get an Exqusitive wife (Check relative guide in forums)
3.You need to sell cards you will not be using in the Trade market. This way you will be able to get credits which you will use for cards you use. Good examples are East India Company, West India Company, Pacifism, Coastal Patrol and Coastal Piracy.

If you can afford to pay some $ for voodoo, then do it. The game needs funds to become better and whoever can assist, should do it. For me, Pirates Glory is cheap but quality entertainment. I understand some cannot pay. In this case you will need to play full defensively.

A good card to remember in the start, is Tidal Wave which returns you good, free ships.

Last but not least
Teamwork!
Without teamwork, your journeys in the game will be far far more difficult. Make sure you use our shoutbox and forums and communicate constantly with the rest. In this way we can create a close bond with each other and set sail for a more brighter future.

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captain blue trading ideas

1.)FREE SHIPS - New comers should be given or provided a Trade Fleet of Level 1 Howkers. They can maybe get this through a mission/tutorial they will undertake to not only get a TF to help them progress but also they can learn more about the game. Another way for this is that the Trade Fleet would only last a certain days/weeks after that it will disappear or something.
2.)FREE RESOURCES - Second option from above is that they get enough resources to build a Trade fleet themselves. Likewise they would gain this resources from doing a mission. As far as i know new comers get 400 turns 5k gold and some resources to build atleast 2ship. That 400turns is pretty much useless if they have nothing to spend it on. Most newbie would instant travel the fleet they created so that they can make more money however this causes them to appear on board and then get attacked by either new or older players.
3.)VODOOS - Have a voodoo card maybe Uncommon. That when a player use it on one of their fleet, it will provide them the best trade route to have for that Fleet. So if they upgrade the ship from lvl 1 to lvl 2 they might choose to recast another voodoo over that fleet to see whether there was any improvement on chosen Trade routes.
4.)OPTION BOX - I'm sure this has been said multiple times but having a tick box instead of that round thing. Or maybe just give an option to click more than one Trade Fleet or ship at the same time. For example when to stop all your trade fleet, you have to do it for each fleet. There should be an option to either stop all of them or allows you to click/tick on the ones you want to cancel. This also allows players to to re-set or change their trade fleet quicker.
5.)PORT CHANGE - Part 2 of above, in the editing section for trade route, only option is to either terminate or have it store resources in ports. Add an extra option which allows you to change the port where it is going. For example if Trade fleet 1 is going tortuga - tzogos and you want to change it to tortuga - seaglory or seaglory - newland. instead of terminating it you just simply change the port of that trade route. If the ship is currently travelling to a port and you cancel it normally it would stop however if you change the port, Trade fleet 1 would still carry on to its journey however it will go straight to whichever port you changed it to. Maybe it will sell the resources it got from previous port or it will do that when it actually got to the port which is part of the new trade route.
6.)MORE PORT - Having a trade route that goes into more than just two port. So instead of just a Trade fleet going to port a then to port b etc.
Have another option to add a Port C. Which enable us with more options such as Buys resources in port A then travel to port b to stock/sell them. then buy resources in Port B and sell/stock them to C. Buy resources in port C then either sell or stock them at port A.
7.)TIME TRAVEL - have either on list of trade fleet or on actual fleet page shows the time of long each travel is. i know it says that on fleet screen or when you create a trade fleet. However what if the ship is in the middle of a trip and you want to know how fast its going to compare it to the recently new found faster route.


Right now there seems to be about 3 systems for choosing trade routes:
1) Single Route: Choose one route and sit on it (like Tortuga-Tzogos)
2) Distributed: Spread all fleets across many ports to keep a good average
3) Daily Routes: Change the fleet every day to match the best prices.

I've only tried 1 & 3 but I've found changing my one daily route gives me at least 25% more profit per day if not 50% compared to what I was able to get from Tortuga-Tzogos on an average/good day. If you can calculate the best route for the day you can get much much bigger profits. The trick is calculating the best route and the boredom is canceling and starting every fleet. I'm happy to hear you are working on checkboxes etc so I will stop whining about the clicking

It seems like it should be difficult to figure out the fastest way to get profit as a trader. I like how the prices change so extremely. If you want to reduce the tedium then an improved trade route interface and longer price updates would work well. If the prices changed every 3 days or every 2 days it would still be a challenge but with less fiddling with fleets.

-Captain D

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