Take the helm!

Sea Battle and Battle Navigation.

Contents:

*Introduction to Take the Helm.

- Message from the author

*Introduction to Sea Battle

1- Familiarisation with the interface.

2- About the Brigands.

3- Sea Battle Boards – Rocks, Winds and Whirlpools!

4- Maintaining a ship in battle.

5- The Swordfight and Rumbling. Barbarians and Brigands!

*Engage the Computer

6- Beginners Brigand fighting.

7- Tips, Tricks and Rules for harder brigands.

8- Intermediate Difficulty Brigands.

9- Imperial Advanced Brigand fighting.

10- Bizarre Brigand behaviour.

**Super Size Me! From War Brigs to Big Ass Grand Frigs

- Notes on how larger ships interact, play against brigands and how to maintain them.

*Player vs. Player battle

11- Different Ship setup and finding battle.

12- Know your opponent.

13- Think ahead, Think quick.

14- Going it alone, the Solo PvP.

15- The Objectives - The Brawl- and the Aftermath.

*Putting together your pillage

16- Other players advice

**Extra-Puzzle-Piratey Curricular Learning

- The Sea battle simulator!

*Bibliography

*Introduction to Take the Helm.

- Message from the author

Hello, thanks for taking the time to read this guide. Firstly, I do hope it will help with you the reader improving your sea battle awareness and ability for the reason that then you can take out your own pillages with increased success and end the reliance on the same navigators who make all the big PoE in the ocean.

Oh Noes! Hypocrisy! Well yes. Actually that's not the only motivation for this guide, its some but not all. I too can fill a sloop and bask in the restocking fee at the end. There's a little to making a really sexy guide that beats all others. Whether I succeed to that aim time may tell, but I do hope so, I'm really pleased with it.

The Guide is written with the intention to give the reader the basics and build on them throughout, so skipping to the end if your poo at battle nav will just make your head spin. A lot in this guide may look like others, even the Three Rings Sea battle page, but most is original except where stated. Some information is taken from the Puzzle Pirates Wiki also, but as reference material I'm purely Referencing relevant parts to this guide. All Wiki Extracts are stated.

Some other battle navigators have their own writings, forum content and even their own battle nav guides included and edited to fit into this guide. The reason? It made sense to me that existing writings might as well be just included rather than recreated by me with no mention of the original work. Permission has been gained by the authors which pleases me greatly, not just to have good navigators input but also to have multiple sources for the material, backing up the claims of how battle navigation works and increasing the credibility of this guide - hopefully.

So enough of me! On with the guide!

*Introduction to Sea Battle

1- Familiarisation with the interface

When you enter a Sea Battle you notice a change in environment. No longer are you sailing along from league point to league point but you are placed within a Sea battle Board. [Figure 1.1]

There are a few reasons why you may find yourself in a sea battle. Either the brigand ship engaged you, or an officer on your ship engaged the brigand ship. Also another Pirate player could have engaged you.

A Sea battle can be fun and a pain, but it’s highly advantageous to get good at taking part in sea battles. Puzzle Pirates is greatly based around the sea and sailing from one place to another. Some of the Main sources of getting Pieces of Eight (PoE) are from trading, running a stall and from Pillaging! All three of these activities require different levels of sailing a ship, so being good in sea battles helps you win the battles you will most definitely face at some time.

First things first, Sea battle is not that hard. Imperials are yes! Well. Blaggards to Imperials are fairly hard. But defeatable! If you are new to sea battle don’t worry if you lose a few, you will get better, everyone does with a bit of confidence and practice. We will get onto the navigation bit later though!

If you are moving slowly outside of battle you can find yourself engaged often, if you wish to avoid being engaged sail faster! It helps much more. If a Brigand wants to engage you they often do and ye have little choice. Do keep your eye out for any ships nearby on your little view of the ocean for any ships ahead trying to engage you. You can turn about if you do it in time and avoid them.

You can also use the ‘Radar’! If you use your ‘view your known World’ chart from your booty screen you can see the map and where you are charted without going to the chart from the helm. This way you could be in the crows nest, view your known world and if you Zoom in so you can see your ships ‘radar’ area in white. You can see the might of any ships within the close area and any green ships or ships with a similar might you could guess you may be engaged or want to engage them. You can then leave the chart view and in the nest get ready to intercept or avoid these ships. It’s an early warning system in a way. It can help a great deal. [Figure 1.3]

You will always be engaged by a brigand in the same ship size as your own or larger if you are on a harder route or have more people onboard. If you puzzle well you are more likely to be engaged by a harder brigand also. Don’t worry if you are.

To Actually Engage a Ship You must click on the ship sailing around, the ship will highlight in yellow on your ship info screen. Then you can have the option to ‘’, and once engaged to disengage if you have time. This process will show yellow circles around both ships, then both ships have to come together to finally engage. This can be tricky, some tips are to try to have some speed when engaging, you can’t catch a ship moving quickly if you are moving slowly, and if you are moving too fast then you may have to slow down if you pass a ship you are engaging.

Sometimes the other ships turn about when you try to engage them so be careful not to turn about too early if they are heading towards you!

If you want to engage a brigand ship there are a few rules for you to know about:

*You must not engage blue ships! These ships are less ‘mighty’ than your ship. The result is that you can be ‘Black Shipped’. If this happens the ‘El Pollo Diablo’ will come and beat you up, Take all your ships hold and booty chest and leave you with a fully damaged ship and 5 units of rum. (You cannot hit ‘El Pollo Diablo’ or win the ship (ever)). [Figure 1.4]

* You must look at what difficulty of ship you are facing; Green ships are most closely match in numbers to your own based on difficulty and numbers. [Figure 1.5]

The Rating of a ship is important as it tells you how good a ship is in battle Such as Imperial being hardest and Sailors the Easiest. [Figure 1.6]

The Sea battle interface looks as follows [Figure 1.7]

For ships larger than a Cutter you will notice a diamond in the 4th move slot. This is because a ship any larger than a cutter can only move 3 places. Don’t worry about this yet. If you are new to sea battle or battle navigation this will get covered a little later on. Right now let’s focus on the basics. If you need the basics avoid anything much larger than a sloop to practice in.

You will be able to see this from all the puzzle views, You cant see this if you are not in a puzzle or if you are in the crows nest, however you will be able to see a larger view of the battle board.

If you have the helm the interface will be coloured yellow/orange rather than grey. [Figure 1.8]

To look around the Sea battle board you can use either the left or right click of a mouse to drag around the screen. A left clicked-drag will center the board on your ship when released while a right clicked drag will leave the board viewing where you left it.

When you enter the Sea battle you will get 2 left moves, 4 forwards, and 2 right moves. After 5 sequences pass move tokens decay so be aware that tokens that are not placed will disappear.

You can view the life left in tokens by hovering the mouse over the tokens to show how long until tokens are lost. [Figure 1.9]

The Auto sails Toggle button will place tokens in the order, forward, left and right. Turning off the auto sails button can be helpful if you don’t generate too many tokens and you want to make a specific move but! If you don’t keep and eye on the button and forget about it you can end up with 9 lefts and nothing else which is barely any use. [Figure 1.10]