Best ship to roll with at start of adventure? (Caravel?)

[LevelSix_SYSTEM]

Wondering if anyone knows if the Caravel, with its single point of speed gained across the board, makes up for the loss of cargo?
I'm under the impression that faster ship speed would not only be better for exploration just starting out, but also likely save money spent on rations seeing as I should get where I'm going 'faster'

Thinking the Cog would be better once I've mapped out some good routes & ready to do trading runs, but unsure just 'how much' faster the single point of speed nets, let alone if it would waste less rations at sea?

[McFrugal]

It's higher base speed, and also higher wind speed. It's significantly faster than a Cog!

[LevelSix_SYSTEM]

Originally posted by McFrugal:

It's higher base speed, and also higher wind speed. It's significantly faster than a Cog!

Ok cool, thanks!

[Almost Last Place]

So after playing a bunch of this game, the real advice i'd have for a new player is that the Cog is the way to go and it's for a simple reason, storage.

Storage space is one of the biggest limiting factors to everything in this game.

Food is required in this game and it takes up 1 storage capacity for each piece in your ship. You need 1 food per character per day. It easily takes a day or two to go between many close ports so even with a starting size of 5 units you can easily burn through 20-30 food going from place to place and think double if you're going round trip. When you're exploring it can take 5-10 days to find something especially on the outer edges of the map.

Trading is huge to profit making in this game. The amount a good sells for depends on how far away you are from where you bought it. Some goods have huge bonuses to this profit distance despite low purchase prices and you earn the profit per good sold so... more space = more profits.

As you expand your fleet you will feel more and more pressure to get some big capacity ships, and the moment you add a single slow ship to a fleet it matches that speed, so your fast ships are no longer very important.

The more space you have the further you can travel which is critical to the early game as we all need to explore, and it also sets you up to quickly expand and progress economically. Sea Combat isn't much of a factor in this game.