Tips for the first few hours (Check comments)

Tips for the first few hours of your free-play mode run. Maybe isn't the best way but works on difficult and doesn't require a lot of time.

The very start

Start on difficult, and choose gold (pinnace + doubloons) and trading experience. Check the picture if needed. I usually choose the Dutch as the starting town of Turk Islands is fairly wealthy and well positioned. If you want an easier endgame as far as conquering other nations goes, go for the English for their strong military convoys or the Spanish for a lot of starting territory and second strongest convoys.

First few trades

Change the game speed to 0.1 right away (top left) and use spacebar to speed things up if needed. From there I would buy one residential area in your starting town, and some goods: don't waste time on the first two cargo 'groups': go straight to meat/rope/rum/garments. Load as much as you can at a price of 350 to 450 gold per unit and don't forget to mark your ship as military. Otherwise when someone attacks you, which won't happen early on if you're not attacking others, your ship will surrender automatically. To mark it as military find the button with a cannon next to it in your ship/fleet menu. Don't take any crewmen as your balance will be going down fast in the beginning. Remember to use spacebar all the time when you're sailing but don't overdo it (holding while you're in a port and nothing is going on for example).

I'd keep trading in the triangle of towns between Port Royale, Turk Islands and San Juan. In Port Royale you can usually get cheap meat and rope, sell it in Tortuga/Isabela/Turk Islands but space the cargo out so you make the most per unit (between 550 and 600+), load rum in San Juan and go back to Port Royale etc. If you did this before it shouldn't take you more than 10-15 min to get enough to buy another residential area and get 20-30k more for the next step.

Here comes the money

If you followed the earlier steps, go to Guadeloupe (it is on a small island southeast of San Juan). Do not enter the town, wait right outside, preferably on the right of it. Keep the spacebar pressed until you see an english convoy with a white icon. That is a transport convoy delivering wine/spices/tools from Europe. Follow it right into Guadeloupe and carefully tap the spacebar a bit while being in the 'docks' tab. You should see the docks received a large shipment of the goods mentioned above, making them very cheap. Buy 20 of each and sell to small towns which lack them (usually the Spanish towns on the coast of South America, just keep an eye on the cargo icons by the town name, if they miss one of the three they usually need all of them). Don't sell under 900 doubloons per unit and you should make a LOT of money very quickly. Rinse and repeat and maybe check your Pinnace for repairs by now :) If the Pinnace is too small for your taste, the quests from governors more often than not reward you with a barque. Otherwise, do a "find drunkard" inn mission and keep the ship you board instead of turning it in or steal a pirate/trading ship. Make sure to buy more residential areas with all the money you earn on top of the 20-30k you need to resupply. If you bought a couple by now your doubloons should start slowly but steadily going up.

Treasure maps?

Sometimes a guy in an inn will offer you a piece of a treasure map in exchange for a couple thousand gold. This, as all inn missions, will become more frequent as you level up. DO NOT buy any additional parts if you received even one containing land. It is very easy to track it down and since treasure is always located on the coast you never need additional parts to figure out its position. Look at the picture to see an example. Just hold the treasure map tab open (press N and go to the last section there) and keep searching for a match (drag the mouse over the minimap).

Your first war

Now for wars/town capturing. Get a fast ship (my fav choice would be military corvette but a pirate barque or else 13 speed + works) and get a letter of marque from your governor. Then fight some weaker traders (flute ships and worse) to get your reputation with that nation down to hostile. This will cause their military convoys to target you, which is exactly what you want. Lure them to the waters of your nation and let your allied military convoys pick them apart. They might end up with one or several ships you should be able to finish off. If they're still too strong (say an english military convoy fought a dutch one) they will likely keep following you so just repeat the procedure by leading them to another one of yours.
Your goal is to get their faction strength down to 'weak' by defeating enough of their military convoys. It usually means they have at least 3 convoys less than their town count. Keep checking it by pressing C and finding the 'nations' section. Once you got them down to 'weak' and your nations strength is 'strong' (if your strength is 'normal' the viceroy won't give you a town capturing mission until you're strong again, or if you give him a convoy of yours (at least 5 ships, 150 cannons). I'd like to emphasize you should get a building permit + warehouse in your viceroys town which will enable you to 'enter' towns without having any convoys in them. This will greatly help you as a nation can sometimes recover from its 'weak' status very quickly and you might not be able to receive the viceroys town annexing mission in time without one. Another possible issue I'd like to point out is that they could, at any time, go to war with another nation which will instantly replenish some of their military convoys. Don't let this dishearten you: load a previous save and try to be faster or simply eliminate the new ones as well. Anyways, back to the task at hand: if they're 'weak' and you're 'strong' you will be able to capture a town for your faction.

Load up a couple ships with sailors, get a plethora of cutlasses and muskets and head to the town you wish to capture (also make sure you have equal or more troops than the defending town has soldiers, check it by right clicking the towns name). If they have a military convoy in harbor, wait for them to leave. Make sure your convoy is set to 'attack towns' (look for it in the convoy options) and enter it. This kind of thing should pop up:



Choose land battle and do as follows: take half or less than half of your troops and carefully go around the town to a safe distance outside one entrance and leave the rest of them in front of the other. All towns have two gates, with no exceptions to my knowledge. Then send in one group to one gate and after a couple seconds the second group to the other. Their whole army should rush to whichever group attacked first leaving one of the gates exposed. Target the gates - they are your only goal. When the gates are down you will probably have to duel the commander.



Duels are very easy and I don't see a need to explain them. Left click to hit the guy and make quick attacks one after the other and he won't be able to block them most of the time. When your stamina is nearly depleted stop attacking, right click to block his strikes, let it regen and repeat. Once all is done choose 'annex'. After a couple captured towns you will get your own from the viceroy and with time unlock all the land in its district and eventually - more of them.

Final words (for now)

This is the strat I've been using for the last 10+ years with the least manual trading possible I could think of and I hope it helps. If you know what you're doing you can gain a steady trickle of gold in as little as 5-6 minutes. The game manual is pretty extensive as well so look for it in your game folder.
If something is still confusing feel free to ask, I can try to answer. I might add sections for specific inn missions or other stuff I may have left out (buccaneers, wife, bonus ship/artifacts etc.).

Of course, check out other guides for info that is more general since this one is basically a blueprint I usually follow when starting out.

[Soldulo]

yeah you're probably right about going straight for import goods. I'm used to buying a residential area as soon as I start so I usually don't have enough money to buy enough import goods for a decent trade run. I think just avoiding the first two cargo groups and the second last is solid to start with. even today I forget where to buy and sell dye and tobacco. also thanks for adding the tip to avoid captain training missions. I think I repressed that memory cos I only tried to do it twice and it wasn't worth it.

[CT]

Also, the captain training missions have multiple steps before they are completed, which means your commitment to them is more than you first realise. Generally I don't think they are worthwhile as you can pick up good captains if you check ever inn in every town you enter. It is worth realising too that with some good captains, they are stacked in an inn and if if you detach a ship from you convoy and add the new captain, the inn now has another good captain and you can detach another ship and add him. Then, you can see yet another good captain and keep going. I have collected 5 or more good captains in this way. If you replace your first captain it terminates the other captains you might have found if you had detached the ship instead.

[CT]

Good tips, thanks for putting this together. The tip about treasure maps is especially helpful to new players. There are more tips along these lines that can be added such as best to pick up flotsam with a large, empty convoy for sometimes you don't have enough room for all the goods available. I use my warehouse to buy small amounts of imported goods in my home town to give me a steady supply of imported goods at low price (set at 600, giving an average even lower). Buying only small qty first is impt as it quickly uses your cash.

[Talezteller]

Once you hit 100k every treasurer in the entire caribbean will go broke and beg you for loans at extorsionate rates. Become the entire caribbean's loan shark by lending money to every treasurer in every town you have a permit in. By far the fastest way to advance in trade experience in the early levels. They should have implemented at least a small chance that the guy goes bankrupt and you get nothing back but they didn't bother, so it's literally free money.

[Talezteller]

As soon as you have a little capital (~20k), shouldn't take more than a couple of trade runs, you can set your warehouse to automatically buy the stuff when it's below a certain price (600 is good). Once you have that going you can start buying up residential areas too and your capital will start to tick up steadily.

[Talezteller]

Some more tips:
Don't bother starting with rope or rum, go straight to buying the 3 import goods, wine spices and tools, in any governor or viceroy town, and sell them in the nearby minor villages. ~500 in profit per item if you're lucky against the refined goods' 300 tops

[Soldulo]

thanks for adding tips I never thought of! I'll leave the guide as is but I updated the name to draw attention to comments.

[Chymmi]

At start simply the best is to pick the middle ship and capture two random trading ships, the first one game doesnt count for reputation and after 2. you will still be neutral. You will make fortune that way

[Ghostkeeper]

The first ranks you can easily get by gambling ;-) Higher ranks are difficult, for these you must invest what you get from you gambling-savescum-savings, if you didn't drink it all !

[Soldulo]

good tips. it's been a while since I played properly but iirc you need higher ranks in order to gamble high amounts to make that method viable so it takes some work beforehand.