MC "Sailing Speed"

[Lauro]

Hello all this is just the simple question im playing 1st game Andrew but im curius does skilling up Sailing Control ? or only if they are assign to the Sails ? (medium/big ship ) ?

[Antiga]

As with all captains, only the cabin skill Leadership is used on the MC. There are a couple of other skills that can be of benefit, but those would be non-cabin skills such as shipbuilding, geography, biology, humanities, treasure and I am probably forgetting one or two.

[arcademan]

Overall, those job specific skills are only applicable in their specialized work area / cabins. Sail control, observation, Leadership etc.

[Mack]

I level every character up to 31, and invest the two skill points they get into their chosen role as well as unlocking any Level 30 Trait ability. I find land expeditions tedious and boring, and so anything relating to those I don't take into account for skills. The "Stats" I don't even look at most of the time, the only time I do is if I see a book in a store that I think might be able to get used by one of the higher importance skills.

Combat Preference, the only one I care about making Support Captain from is a Boarder, and only when you've got ships with high amounts of crew. Boarding makes combats take less time, they make it less likely to lose ships entirely rather than having them Surrender, and if you're Abdullah, if you find a better ship than what's in your fleet you can take it for yourself. Other types I'll only use after filling up all my other roles.

Tier Skills/Rooms & Role:

S Tier:
* Calculation - Accounting room, Accountant - You need this to make money. You can also get loads of items that improve Calculation. With a character like Nasser, at Level 31 + Abacus, Dice, Top Hat & Scale you can be at 7 + 4, giving you a 22% markup on goods. This is a room & skill you should get to use ASAP. It can become less useful the longer you play, especially if you aren't building a lot of guilds. If you are building guilds then this is vital because of how damn expensive guilds are to build up to the point they become useful for ship building materials.
* Mapping - Mapping Room, Surveyor - This is vital to use auto-map feature, which saves you loads of time and makes it easy to sail around. This also happens to be the one skill where the character I'm using I'd take beyond Level 31 and keep going until you get their next skill upgrade. Crossing large distances like going from the Carribean to Europe can be too far to use autosail if your characters mapping skill is too low.

A Tier:
* Selection - Studio room, Goods Sorter - Turns goods premium, making more cash and for customs goods quests. Keep eye out for Veil & Top Hat which combine for +2 in the stat.
* Repair & Shipbuilding - Maintenance room, Shipwright - Very useful for repairing your ships & stopping ageing, and for upgrading. Very easy to achieve +4 in both with items. Yoshitaka Shizuma one of the 4 main characters has this as his signature role/skills. Shipbuilding is less important if you aren't going to make ships yourself but still useful for higher tier modifications when you eventually get a high tech level guild with a shipyard port. Supposedly you can put this room on another ship in the fleet and still get the benefit from it.

B Tier:
* Leadership - Captain's Room, Captain - Player character in the Captain's room. It's the only skill worth giving to them because you can't move them.
* Firearms - Gunroom, Gunner - A decent character should be able to increase loading by 15%. It's only a minor amount when you consider how quickly the guns load in the first place, ie a few seconds per salvo. If you want to play a shooting focused ship then putting a gunner in every gunroom can make your ship reload exceptionally quickly, making it an A Tier skill but one that comes with the drawback of having to use a lot of characters in one part of the ship. Quite easy to find the Eyepatch Firearms +1 item.
* Sail Control - Mast, Sail Master - I feel the need, the need, for the speed! Speed is great, but it's not a necessary requirement to invest in this skill. Probably best used once you've filled up other rooms with characters. Combining multiple characters gives a decent benefit and it's easy to find the Bandana Sail Control +1 item.

C Tier:
* Steering - Pilothouse, Helmsman - This is a mandatory room, so might as well put someone in there.
* Observation - Crow's Nest, Lookout - Would be F tier if not for it's requirement to do certain quests via it's treasure finding ability. C tier because it is required for quests, so stick someone in there so you have it when you need it.

D & F Tier are slots where I think it's not worth using over adding a character as a Support Captain unless you've already filled out your whole fleet of ships and you're in a huge ship like a SOTL and even then you might be better off filling out Mast or Gunroom spots to make your ship faster to sail or shoot or making Captains for the rest of the ships in the fleet.

D Tier
* Culinary - Kitchen, Chef (?) - Supplies are so easy to come by and rarely a problem with correct route planning that this is a luxury.
* Brawling - Deck, Boatswain - Provides a minor boost to Sailor Dissatisfaction, but I never had a problem with that anyway. He takes over from the Captain in duels, but your Captain should have at least one top tier weapon and a HP boost item so shouldn't lose duels anyway, and duels are so rare to begin with. At least you aren't wasting a room slot with this.

F Tier
* Negotiation - Officer's Room, Officer - I forced myself to give this a try to see if I could find negotiating with other fleets to unlock things that the Chinese player community say are available, but I found it utterly pointless and never seen anything of value with a negotiation. You don't need one to start a battle with a roaming fleet, making it useless.
* Preparation Room - Organisation (I forget the name the character gets, maybe Organiser?) - It doesn't do enough to prevent your items degrading and it's not even worth caring about when you might be selling 80 items in a single trade. In the Chinese Captain story there is a quest that requires food a long range distance so you would want it there.
* Medicine - Medical Room, Doctor - If you're doing very long range sailing (basically into the Arctic or deep Pacific to unlock far flung ports and complete maps) this can be useful to keep your sailors healthy, but it's otherwise irrelevant and provides no other bonuses.
* Music - Music Room - I've never had a problem with Morale enough to think using a character & room here worthwhile.
* Lounge Room - ?? - I've only unlocked this once, and I think all it does is recover Stamina on expeditions. You need to sail 50 days in a row to get it. I didn't think it was useful.

Not Applicable Tier
* Geography - Biology - Humanities - Treasure: These are for books & expeditions. My main issue with them is that decoding books is too tedious and complex to actually care about upgrading these skills and there are more important things to spend skill points than events in expeditions. However, if you are going down the route of fully trying to decode every book & clue they become obviously important (as well as shuffling equipment around).

Two best characters for expeditions are Esmerelda and Andreas, and 3rd & 4th character should have high body stat.

[Hentaika]

That's one weird list.

I would say my tier would be something like this:

SSS: sailing speed

SS: steering, firearms

S: cooking, music - mostly a QoL ignore mechanic tier.

You need a bit mapping but not much, equipment is enough
Medicine is kinda okay'ish.

Everything else is mostly garbage tier.

You don't really need to do much beyond sailing in the game.
Firearms stacking to turn your cannons into machineguns is very powerful for the few moments when you DO need to combat.

Money and everything related is pretty pointless since there is nothing to do with how much you can get in minutes.

[Rock]

Yeah, I would say Calculation is pretty useless because money is so easy to get in this game.

Negotiation isn't bad. Mostly just gets you lots of free money, but I've also gotten things like sea charts, and items I didn't already have. So it can be handy.

Not sure why you would have Shipbuilding and Repair together. Those should be skills on two separate characters. No point in forcing one guy into that role.

Geography - Biology - Humanities - Treasure might be the most important if you want to read books (which opens up half of the game). If you aren't reading books, you are missing out on a huge part of the game.

[Kel Athos]

People tend to put negotiation lower probably because they do not realize that you can get ship blueprints through that system.

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by Rock:

Not sure why you would have Shipbuilding and Repair together. Those should be skills on two separate characters. No point in forcing one guy into that role.

Yoshi can TECHNICALLY max out both repair and shipbuilding with help of books.
He starts with 4 on both and can get +3 to both from levels and +2 to both from books pretty easily.

But there is not much reason to however. Although most repair/shipbuilding items have both stats so you wouldn't even have to swap much.

[Mack]

I just played through my entire Abdullah play through of about 30 hours with an officer and trying to negotiate with every fleet I saw and didn't see a single thing worth getting from it. A lot of the time the other fleets had nothing at all.

And yeah, if you don't have the japanese captain then you might need a shipbuilder and a repair guy different.

For abdullah you really only need repair guy since you can just steal big ships, in a few hours you probably have a fleet of galleons or those big arab boarding ships and later in the game you can find some SOTL's.

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by Mack:

I just played through my entire Abdullah play through of about 30 hours with an officer and trying to negotiate with every fleet I saw and didn't see a single thing worth getting from it. A lot of the time the other fleets had nothing at all.

And yeah, if you don't have the japanese captain then you might need a shipbuilder and a repair guy different.

For abdullah you really only need repair guy since you can just steal big ships, in a few hours you probably have a fleet of galleons or those big arab boarding ships and later in the game you can find some SOTL's.

Honestly for Abdullah you can kill ghost ship within ~2 hours into the game.

Do 3 bounties to unlock gun rooms > steal a armed privateer near ceylon > revamp it to have 4 gunrooms > go to africa and take down ghost shiip for 10 million + no aging armor.
Optionally you could take an extra hour to make 2nd stage of ghost ship fight a bit simpler.

With this armor you can kinda ignore the repairman entirely.


As for Negotiation - there is a mechanic called 'reputation' that fleets have.
I don't remember if it's displayed visually or not in some way... but basically you have to give stuff to enemy fleets for free and they will eventually sell you more things.
Destroying fleets also causes reputation loss.
I didn't test this much but those who did claim there is some fully unique stuff you can get this way.

[Rock]

That makes sense. In the beginning I was mostly just getting free trade goods. But I'm getting better stuff from negotiations now. I haven't pulled a blueprint yet, but I have gotten sea charts and hard to find equipment.