HOW TO COMBAT (The Basics)

This guide will give you a basic tutorial on how to handle ship combat in SEABLIP.

Before We Begin - Some Claims

I personally think this game offers a pretty interesting combat system, but with quite a bit of learning curves and poor instructions for beginners. I myself failed almost every battle in the first hour or two of the game, and couldn't find much guide on how the system work. As I finally start to understand how things work, I want to offer some of my experiences so that beginners can get to the fun part of the game quicker.

I do want to claim that this guide will only cover the basics, including mechanics and some basic strategies. This is not about how to defeat certain bounty boss, and I may not be 100% correct. I would appreciate any feedback on anything about combats in this game, and also please point out any mistake I made and forgive me for any ignorant comment I may make. Thank you!

Before the Battle - About Ship Combat

This part of the guide will tell you about Ship Combat in general, including the encounter, how do you win one and what is the profit, etc.

What is Ship Combat?

The major part of the game, if not the most important, is ship combat. Once you leave any land and start traveling in the ocean, you are subject to start a ship combat with any ship you clash into.

The ship combat is a death match, mainly for you. You might be able to capture your enemies, but you always die if you lose. Dying means you lose all your crew members, and the rest of the day. You do get to keep the ship, and losing crew members doesn't necessarily mean losing them forever. (Might be slight spoilers, so the guide will not cover this part at all)

How Do I Win a Ship Combat?

There are three ways you can win/lose a ship combat:

• Killing all the enemy crew members / All members got killed (Your character will only get stunned and lose the ability to participate the rest of the combat);
  
• Destroy the ship by reducing its health to zero / Having your hull health reduced to zero;
  
• Destroy the ship by sinking it / having the sink level bar filled.

You can find the corresponding parts from the UI image below:


We will get into how to achieve each of those conditions in detail in later stage of the guide.

What do I get by winning a battle?

Winning the combat not only keeps you alive, but also offers a few loot options for you.

Once you win the combat via the above three conditions, you either get to examine the ship right away (killing all the members), have a chance to repair it (if it was destroyed) or you will lose the ship (if you sunk it). Either way, it breaks into two general conditions:

1. Having the ship remain intact / patched

You may have to spent a bunch of wood to get into this condition.

At this stage, you will be able to examine the ship (w/ or w/o upgrades on them, depending on if it was left intact or patched), and you have an option to keep it (swap with your ship / added to your ship magic bottle) or give up on it.

Please note that ship magic bottle is a different thing from magic bottle, which is for storing crew members!

Either ways, you will get the loot from the ship.

2. Having the ship sunk, leaving only debris

In this case, you either enter this stage right away or you have to give up on repairing it. Anyways, in this stage you will get three options:


Repair Parts: You can restore hull health by a huge amount (usually 8), this is good if you are far from home;

Ship Upgrades: You can randomly obtain one upgrade on the sunk ship, you can also get nothing by chance.

Item and Gold: You can get a bunch of gold and potentially items. You will get them anyways if the ship remained intact or gets repaired.

However, you only get one of the above in this case.

You may also get a few wood after exiting and battle and start navigating again. (As floating woods around the location of combat)

I'm Losing! What do I do?

When you knew that you are losing the combat / bumped into a very powerful ship, you still have a chance to not lose it all.

There is an escape button at left bottom of the screen, once it is fully charged, you can hit it and escape without losing anything really. (You do lose the enemy ship for the rest of the day, even if it's a bounty boss)


As far as I know, the button charges depending on how strong your enemy is. To hit it, you need to have it fully charged. It also requires you to have one crew member that operates the helm, and the helm must remain intact.

Your enemy could also escape. The game will send you a warning a couple seconds before they do so. You can stop them by either destroy their helm or destroy them.

On another note, enemy can also ask to surrender by paying a little bit of gold or items. Usually it is much less than destroying them, so I personally just keep going with no mercy.

Basic SC Guide: Damages

This section will teach you the basics about damage types.

Damage Types

It is very important that you identify and distinguish the type of damages in order to make sure that you understand what each perks are referring to.

When you inspect an upgrade, especially cannons, you will probably realize three types of damages: ship damage, crew damage and upgrade damage. This was a little counter-intuitive to me at first: Why do we talk about upgrade damage again when you already have ship and crew damage? Well, these three each means the damage you deal to the subject. For example, upgrade damage here means "The damage you deal to upgrades", instead of the damage of this upgrade.


Now let's look at each type of damages individually:

1. Ship Damage

This is the damage done to the health of your hull on the very top. Your ship would be destroyed once you lose all hull health. There are also various environmental damage that could affect your ship hull health, but we will get to that later.

2. Crew Damage

This is the damage done to the crew member. When a crew member lose all their health, they die (except you, but it's the same effect), meaning that they can no longer participate in the rest of the combat (unless you revive them via certain upgrades under certain conditions)

Without additional perks, crew members when boarding enemy ship will only seek to combat with enemy members, and the damage they do are crew damages.

3. Upgrade Damage

This is the damage done to other upgrades. Instead of numbers, you get a few categorical labels: Weak, Average, Great and Powerful. They correspond to the health level of each upgrade: Weak, Average and Strong (I don't recall having a powerful-corresponding health level, but in case there is, you can easily tell by the color code)

Only when you have equal or higher upgrade damage to enemy upgrade's health level, your attack would be able to destroy that upgrade. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AS IT WILL HEAVILY AFFECT YOUR COMBAT STRATEGIES!!!

Environmental Damage

In this game, there is also a type of damage that will be convert to ship, crew or upgrade damage, which is the environmental damage. This include iceberg / sharks, and various elemental damages.

• Iceberg: occasionally occurs, it will do damage the ship / upgrade at the bottom floor (near surface of the water)
  
• Shark: Occasionally occurs, it will do a huge amount of damage to crew members hit. As far as I know it will only be crew members at the bottom floor.
  
• Electric Damage: damages upgrade and crew members, usually an instant damage upon certain upgrade or lightning strikes. it deals double the damage the area of impact has water and it will propagate to everything in the water.
  
• Toxic Damage: continuously damages crew members. Cannot be extinguished if it is mean to be lasting certain amount of seconds. AFAIK it does not stay on crew members for long if they exit the area of impact, maybe like one additional time but that's it. If ignited, will cause an explosion.
  
• Fire Damage: damages upgrade and crew members, and also ship if there is an explosion or it is not extinguished. Fire will propagate to the entire area if not extinguished, and upgrades cannot be repaired while fire is in the area. Crew members will automatically try to extinguish fire before repairing the upgrade.

Basic SC Guide: Ship

It is very important to know about ships before we dive into various upgrades this game has to offer. There are a lot of properties attached to a ship, some of which are actually somewhat hidden and may not be as obvious upon inspection.


Let's look at the top left corner line by line.

Ship Health

Ship health indicates how much ship damage you can still take before your ship get destroyed. You can upgrade those with golds and ironbars via upgrade shops or merchant ships.

Evasion Maneuvers

Evasion Maneuvers indicates the maximum evasion bar and the amount of time it takes to charge each bar. Higher evasion charges means higher chance of dodging cannon attacks. In general, the smaller the ship is, the faster it charges up the maneuvers.

Room Sizes

This indicates the size of areas which you can install upgrades. Each square represents a unit of size, so a 3-square area can fit anything under 3 squares. It is worth noting that a 4-square area CANNOT fit two 2-square upgrades as of yet.

In addition, this did not count the wheelhouse or any ship-specific upgrades this ship may have.

Door Strength and Max Crew Size

Door Strength: at the time of this guide, this feature is not released yet.

Max Crew Size: indicates the amount of crews (excluding yourself) you can have on the ship. This also impacts the amount of crew members you can hold at hand. For example, when switching to a ship of smaller crew size, you will have to kick extra crew members in order to fit.

Ship-specific Upgrades

Better ships usually have featured upgrades that is unique to the ship itself. You can usually obtain ships of these from ship merchants or bounty ships.

For example, this ship of mine has "magic shield", which automatically shields me occasionally. It is self-operating so no crew members are needed / can be assigned to this upgrade. It is also not loot-able, meaning that I could not move it or remove it from the ship.

These upgrades are usually not select-able, since no crew members can repair them if they break. However, they are usually attached to the wheelhouse, which is where the helm lies within. Destroying the wheelhouse will usually also destroy the upgrades, although repairing the wheelhouse also repairs the upgrade.

Ships may have more than one ship-specific upgrade, usually the more the better.

Hidden Features

Like I said earlier, there are also some hidden features about each ship that you might want to consider when choosing your ship. These are passive fact about the ship that is not quantifiable, but it's important when orienting your attack strategy.

Hidden Feature: Indoor Area and Outdoor Area

Areas are not simply defined by their size. Depending on the ship orientation, an area can be either indoor or outdoor. This will impact installable upgrades (e.g. certain cannons cannot be installed indoor) and damage types (e.g. Lightning from the sky only strikes outdoor area) Certain ships although lacking areas in general, but may offer better oriented areas.

Hidden Feature: Floor Area and Top Area

This is similar to the above, except this one tells you the spatial orientation of areas. Floor areas are close to the surface level of the sea, and is subject to hull breaches (water leaks), icebergs and shark attacks (anything from under the water really). Top areas are usually outdoor, meaning that they are vulnerable to lightning strikes and any dropping attacks such as parrot or squids.

Hull breach is a serious hazard in this game. Not only do you lose upon sinking if it keeps leaking, it
also slows down crew members of the entire floor and leaves you vulnerable to lightnings. A long ship usually leave quite a few floor areas, which really makes the ship vulnerable to hull attacks

This is also tied to the next point of distances, because usually top areas are harder to navigate to in battle.

Hidden Feature: Distance between areas

During the battle, it is quite normal for you to re-orient your crews. In these cases, distance for them to navigate would be an important feature. For example, certain rooms are accessible from near all directions, meaning that you can quickly send crew members for repairs. However, certain areas like the top ones requires you to climb tall ladders and is usually only have one direction of access. This puts you in great disadvantage if the attack of your opponent is rapid and destructive.

It is also worth noting that when two areas are adjacent to one another, you are under the risk of having them get both destroyed by a single carefully aimed cannon.

Hidden Feature: Wheelhouse Location

Wheelhouse is actually if not the most important area of your ship. You need it to increase evasion maneuvers, you need it to escape, and you need it to support all your attached ship-specific upgrades. It is important to recognize among what of the above areas does your helm lies in. Making it either easily accessible and repairable, or vulnerable to all kinds of attacks.

Basic SC Guide: Upgrade

I personally would like to put upgrades into four general categories: Cannons, Environmental, Boarding and Support. There are also three types of piloting of these upgrades: Crew-operate, Monkey-operate and self-operate. I will discuss those individually in detail.

Cannons

Probably the most common and crucial type of upgrade. Upon Reload-Aim-Fire cycle, it deals ship, crew and upgrade damage on impact. It is worth noting that not all cannons do all three types of damages, but most of them do. You can find these via their description:


The Reload-Aim-Fire cycle describes how a cannon ball is fired. First, the operating crew member will reload the cannon, then they will aim at the previously selected target, and then fire the cannon ball. After that, a new cycle starts.

If you haven't previously aimed at any spot, the cannons will not fire; if you select a crew member and not click anywhere, it will also hold its fire until you fire the shot. This is very important as you deal with complicated opponents that potentially rocks a shield. If you do not time the cannons right, you will not be able to hit them at all.

The aiming system is not very intuitive, here is a diagram of how do you it step by step:


You can also click crew members on ship to do it. However, I will not recommend because it sometimes triggers other events such as swapping positions or boarding. I will recommend do so via the little menu at the bottom.

I want to distinguish this from other environmental weapons because a very very crucial and important aspect in later stage of the game is SHIELD. Almost all higher level ships in later stage of the game rocks a shield, and you will also likely gonna have a shield one way or another. Specifically, shield blocks ALL CANNONBALLS' DAMAGE AND EFFECT!

This is why it is always important for you to develop some sort of anti-shield strategies sooner or later. Thankfully, other types of upgrades can somewhat handle that.

Environmental

In contrast to cannons, environmental upgrades refers to upgrades that attacks your opponents through the environment. Whether it is dropping bombs from the sky, or water grenade from underneath the water, they will not be blocked by shield!

I think environmental upgrades can also generally be divided into two types: Sky type and Water type. It basically indicates where the attack will be performed from. Currently in this game, I believe there are only these two.

Sky type environmental upgrade would attempt to drop stuff from the sky. Whether it's parrot carrying bombs, or flying squids, or slimes. Anyways, it will come from the top and it will first impact your top areas (see hidden features in ship section).

Water type environmental upgrade, in contrast, comes from underneath the water and will first impact your floor areas.

Both of them will usually inflict a large amount of ship damage, minor crew and upgrade damage. Many of them are combo-ed with elemental damages and hull breaches, making them quite annoying to deal with.

Although these seems to make up the cannon's weakness perfectly, these are not perfect type of upgrades. First of all, many of them have some sort of direct counter that would neutralize their effect. For example, monkey watchtower can prevent any parrot from coming near; lightning poles can redirect lightning damages away and use that to attack sky type environmental upgrades. If your ship has no way to disable those counters, these upgrades becomes essentially useless.

Another important disadvantage of these weapons are, they are usually monkey-operate or self-operate, and their cooldown is way too long compared to cannons. Most of them will likely get destroyed one or two attacks in maximum. They are way less effective in many occasions, sometimes even when there is shields.

As you can see from the image I shared, I have no environmental upgrades installed on my primary ship. Mostly because of powerful cannon and boarding/support upgrade combos. They are definitely good to have though, just don't let them be the dominant damage source of your ship!

Boarding

Boarding is another effect way of getting around shields. It is also very effective to capture the ship because killing all enemies before you destroy the ship will leave you with a fully intact ship to loot. Boarding upgrades are used to send your crews to the enemy ship. they often need a bit to time to charge before use, kind of like reload. An they will be disabled upon destruction.

Boarding is a viable strategy in this game, but it will conflict heavily with other upgrades, mostly because cannon balls will damage both your enemy and your crew. Moreover, if you destroy the enemy ship while your crews are on board, they will also get flushed away by the ocean.

In strategy section, I will write about how to build a ship centered around boarding. For now I will stop here.

Support

At last, support upgrades are basically everything else. Usually they are meant to help you recover from certain loss. For example, water pumps can slowly remove the water from hull breaches; healing station can recover crew's health, soul altars can revive crew members died in this specific battle. They usually do not require an operator, but they will need repairs as they also take upgrade damages.

It is worth mentioning that shields are also support upgrades. Although shields from upgrades are generally weaker than ship shields, but they are something, and can potentially be a very important part of your strategy.

Depending on your strategy, I will heavily recommend having one of those that suits your style. They sometimes offers you big advantages when encountering the right type of enemies.

Operator: Crew, Monkey or Self

Each upgrades requires an operator. Those that don't are considered as self-operated, meaning that they triggers automatically. You usually need to assign a crew member to non-self-operating upgrades, unless they are monkey-operated. The difference between the three can be summarized as follows:

• Crew-operate: You need to assign a crew member to operate the upgrade. In addition, you will need a crew member to repair it in case it got destroyed. This is the most common one for most cannons.
  
• Self-operate: You do not need and cannot have a crew member to operate the upgrade. However, they need to be fixed by a crew member when destroyed. For those that comes with a ship, it is usually attached to the wheelhouse, meaning that repairing wheelhouse will repair them.
  
• Monkey-operate: You do not need and cannot have a crew member to operate the upgrade, monkeys will do it for you. In addition, sending a crew to repair it would significantly boost the recovery time of the upgrade.

It is worth noting that when you don't need a crew, sometimes you also cannot have a crew, meaning that the upgrade won't get benefit from reload reduction from your crew. This is a really important distinction to make.

Basic SC Guide: Crew Basics

Crew members are the organs of your ship. They are responsible for navigating the ship, operate the upgrades and do various repairs. As a result, having the right set of crew members are key to being king of the pirates!

Let's understand a crew member through the following example:

On the left you have:

• Class: a general modifier for crew members. AFAIK there are Pirate, Whales Company and Pocket Crews. Pirates are slightly faster doing their attacks when boarding or boarded, but slower in repairs; whales company are better at navigating and repairing the ships in contrast; Pocket Crews are from chest you open and doesn't seem to do anything just from the description. Class will also affect what gift they would prefer.
  
• Health: Hit Points of this crew member. If it goes to zero, they die.
  
• Exp: Experience required to level up.
  
• Mood: Mood status of the crew member. Higher mood gives various bonus, whereas bad mood would do so in the opposite way; You can boost their mood via gifts or weekly payroll.

On the right you have:

• Available Points: points left for distribution;
  
• Crew Level: levels of your crew member
  
• Stats: various attributes. I will discuss this in detail later. The green value in the brackets is what you start with.
  
• Skill(s): skills you obtain as you level up your crew member. You will unlock the first one at level 2 and second one at level 5. I will also discuss this in detail later.

Stats / Attributes

The most important part of a crew member. These attributes are:

• Health Points: how much extra maximum health your crew member will have. This is in my opinion one of the most important and universal stats, because any crew member build could use more health. Notice that the points does not mean a uniform increase in health, it will usually bring up the health by 4/5 ish, I don't remember the exact number but any crew members of the same amount of health points will have the same amount of health.
  
• Walk Speed: affects the amount of time you crew member navigate from one point to another. It is worth noting that from reloading to firing a cannon, the crew member also has to walk that distance.
  
• Reload Speed: affects the amount of time it takes to reload an upgrade. I think it is more of a modifier to the OG reload time of specific upgrades. Notice that this only affects upgrade that has a reload time attribute (certain upgrades that takes time to charge are not necessarily reload)
  
• Repair Speed: affects the amount of time it takes to repair an upgrade. Works in similar ways to reload speed.
  
• Attack Damage: affects the damage a crew member does in close combat. (Beware, it's close combat, not ship combat! This means they deal more damage when fighting with enemy crew members, but it does not impact the upgrade they operate!)
  
• Intelligence: affects the chance of breaking the upgrade upon firing. This can potentially be very deadly in intense scenarios, so please don't give up on this when you level up your crew!
  
• Luck Points: affects the chance of dodging attacks in close combat, as well as cannons or environmental damage. This is probably the second most important stat one can have!

Choosing those attributes to match the role of crew members you have can be extra essential in ship combat!

Skills

In general, skills can be categorized as active skills and passive skills. I think I don't have to spend too much time on these two, they are pretty straightforward.

I don't think I've exhausted the list of skills yet, so I am not going to list them all here. But to give you a taste of those skills, their effect could be (and not limited to):

• (Passive) Fireballs: Cannon balls create fire on impact;
  
• (Passive) XXX Immune: Immune to Fire / Electricity / Toxic Damage
  
• (Passive) Untasty: Your smell repels sharks, keeping this sailor safe from attacks
  
• (Passive) Potion Lover: When this sailor has less than 5 health and is not dead, they are instantly restored to full health (1 potion per battle)
  
• (Passive) Waterbucket: Splash water at your current location
  
• (Passive) Lucky Sea Dog: Occasionally shield the ship from damage (increases with crew level)
  
• (Passive) Reliable Crew Mate: Mood never drops below "Good"
  
• (Passive) Fast Reloader: Cannons reload much faster
  
• (Passive) Double Vision: 8% Chance to fire an additional cannonball. Increased by 1% per sailor level.
  
• (Active) Technician: Instantly repairs all damaged upgrades during battle
  
• (Active) Repair Master Restore 1 point to the ship's hull during battle
  
• (Active) Heal All Crew: Restore 2 health to all sailors (multiple charges)
  
• (Active) Immunity Boost: Lasts 25 seconds. Grants Immunity to fire, poison and electricity
  
• (Active) Water Expert: Instantly repairs all water breaches
  
• ...

There are definitely more but I either haven't seen them or I forgot to list them here. But you probably can see how it goes.

Basic SC Guide: Crew Builds

Well, now we know about crew members, how do we use them in optimized ways? My personal experience is, you need to be clear on what role does each crew member possess. I think in general, they can be broken down to:

The Helmsman (Required)

The one responsible for the helm, the wheelhouse. Although usually being the captain in films and manga, it doesn't have to be you! In fact, I think it is better that you are not the one who does this, because you usually have the most attributes, and it's better for you to put them in better usages.

The Helmsman is usually not responsible for any upgrades, but wheelhouse is an easy target and vulnerable location. Hence you would want them to have fast repair speed. In addition, wheelhouse is usually the target of boarding, so you want the person to be able to fight them off quickly and safely. This not only requires high attack damage, but also good luck and health points.

In terms of skills, instant repair might not be too bad, but I personally like to have something more supportive; and also, you probably want to support your other crew mates as much as you can!

Recommended Attributes: Health Points, Luck Points, Repair Speed, Attack Damage
Recommended Skills: Lucky Sea Dog, Heal All Crew, Technician, XXX Immune, Water Expert, etc

Cannon Operator(s) (Required)

The key attacker, the one that operates cannons. To make the best of it, I recommend putting these guys as stationary as possible, meaning that you only leave them with their cannon duty.

When the fire power are roughly equal, it is crucial that you can keep enemy cannons destroyed. The best way to do so is to boost up your reload speed and repair speed, so that your opponents are always repairing their cannons when you fire first, or you can recover quickly if you it get broken somehow.

Also, please make sure they are not too dumb! You are going to have a lot of ship combat in this game, and you want the best statistical outcomes out of it!

There are many cannon specific skills for cannon operators, such as fire balls. When combined with toxic cannon, you can trigger explosion right away. Technician is also specifically a powerful one because it allows you to quickly recover when your upgrades are destroyed.

Recommended Attributes: Health Points, Reload Speed, Repair Speed, Intelligence
Recommended Skills: Technician, Fast Loader, Double Vision, Fire Ball, XXX immune etc

Repair Person (Optional)

I actually don't think repair person is a good role to have in general, because this game does not allow duo operation. When an upgrade is destroyed, you can't really have two person operating on the same upgrades together, meaning that you can't really have one that helps repairing without kicking the operators away. This just creates too many transitions, wasting a lot of times.

However, in boarding oriented strategies, it might be a must for you to have a repair guy to prevent the ship from sinking to the bottom of the floor. Hence this role is viable in special occasions.

Recommended Attributes: Health Points, Walk Speed, Repair Speed, Luck Points
Recommended Skills: Water Expert, Lucky Sea Dog, Technician, Waterbucket, XXX immune, untasty etc

Fighter (Optional)

Again, not a popular role on a ship, mainly because cannons also hurt crew mates, so you either have no fighters, or no/minimum cannons.

Attribute and skills then become very straightforward: More damage on them, less damage on you, and also support the ship as much as possible.

Recommended Attributes: Health Points, Attack Damage, Walk Speed, Luck Points
Recommended Skills: Lucky Sea Dog, XXX immune, Heal All Crew, untasty etc

Basic SC Guide: Enemies

This guide will not discuss bounty enemies as they are quite unique in mechanics. Other than those, you will encounter quite a few "common" enemies of different factions. Each of those enemies are categorized as easy, medium, hard and very hard. AFAIK the ship models are the same, meaning that of the same faction and same difficulty, the feature of the ship is the same, it's just the crew and the upgrades are different.

Pirate

The ships with black sail. What's unique about this type of enemy is that they are often mounted with upgrades that allows their crew to board your ship. So get prepared for close combat when you deal with them.

What's worse is that even if you sink their ship, if any of their crew is already in the middle of boarding action (on their way), you will have to kill them before you can sail away.

As difficulty gets higher, pirate ships are often mounted with cannons at the forehead. You can destroy those by destroying the wheelhouse.

Octopus Outlaw

The ships with magenta/crimson ish sail. Those are the ones who killed your grandpa, bad!!

Surprisingly, these enemies are probably the easier ones to deal with. High difficulty ones only rocks ship with fancier layouts.

Redcoat/Bluecoat

Ships rocking red/white or blue sail. Seems to be in war of each other. Those people actually looks like marines, and redcoat will not attack you upon contact, you have to initiate the attacks.

Both of them will focus on cannons. Most of the ships are filled with cannons, and that actually makes them quite easy as well because you don't have to worry about boarding or shields.

Higher level ships are often mounted with autopumps, so sinking is usually not the first choice. Bluecoat ships will also rock a smoke cannon on the forehead, causing smokes which delays your operation in certain area, beware!

Dead Ships

Ships in gray sail. Probably the most annoying ones to deal with because they always have a shield.

Thankfully, at this point we know that aiming at the wheelhouse is the best way to deal with them in general, as constantly putting them in repairs will permanently disable the shield.

Thanks to @Skeleton on discord that boarding dead ships is usually not a good idea because the ghost crew could revive themselves, making them hard to deal with in close combat.

Basic SC Guide: Strategies

In general, with all the knowledge from previous sections, we really only should aim for three general strategies: Cannon Spam, Environmental Stronghold and Board Rush!

Cannon Spam

This is probably the most common strategy, and my personal favourite as well. All you have to do is to make sure that you have faster and more rapid firepower than your opponent. You can put their entire crew to a constant repair mess and eventually sink their ship!

One important aspect of this strategy is that you probably want to make sure you have some sort of shield in the beginning that helps you survive the first burst from your enemy. This is extremely important when you are fighting with ships with shield, because you need to time the shoot for it to be able to land shoot on wheelhouse / shield upgrades!

Once you have a powerful ship with shield, you can pretty much beat all the common enemies, and bounty enemies if you have the right counters!

Environmental Stronghold

This is actually similar to the second bounty hunt you would encounter (The parrot guy), and the general strategy is to install a bunch of environmental upgrades and having a crew dedicated to repairs and maintaining shields.

The benefit of this strategy is, you pretty much don't have to worry about shields. Also, if you install enough counter, nothing can hit you really. Even if they do, you can have you crew quickly repair all of them.

The drawback of this is, even with the weakest enemy, the fight can potentially last forever.

Board Rush!

Probably the strategy of the most fun. Your crew should be dedicated to boarding and fighting enemies in close combat, with one or two repair guy(s) on your ship to ensure that you are not sinking before you kill them all.

This is surprisingly an effective way to get around shields, although it makes cannon a double edge sword to run with. In this setup I would recommend having no cannons, a bunch of supports and counters, and one teleportation.

Ending

This game is still in development so I can foresee that many things could change as the game develops.

I hope this guide is a good starting point for those who thinks they struggle with ship combat initially. I've been there!

If you have any suggestions/questions, please leave a comment to this guide and I will be happy to address them!

Thanks again, wish you have a safe and fun sailing journey!

[TyTheGuy]

This guide is awesome! One question i have is how do you arrange the items on your ship? For more clarification, I mean like when I go to put the items from the post office on my ship I can move everything around, but if im not there idk how to. Any help would be great

[MissesFox]

Great Guide!

[Warkrunner]

More examples of strong upgrade + sailor combos (v0.7.0201):
[Passive + Active (role)]
-master of the wheel/lucky seadog/untasty + technician/heal all crew (helmsman)
-fireballs + technician/water expert/repair master (squid cannons for explosions)
-sharpshooter + technician/water expert/repair master (grenada)
-solid rock + repair master/water expert (lemoner)
-hullbreaker + drake cannon (crowd control via rapid breaches)
-potion lover + heal all crew (player boarder)
-potion lover + barrel boarding (Balder Bruce)

[Warkrunner]

For enemy shields, any rapid attacking cannon can disable them. 1 hit it turns red, another hit breaks through. For example:
1) Lemoner or Drake Cannon + Solid Rock sailor. Rapid fire cannons that tear down shields, creating an opening for your other cannons.
2) Parrots, floating bombs + Fast Reload sailor. These seem to ignore shields. Fast Reload with barrel bombs is recommended, since they take a long time to send.
3) Boarding via 1-way barrel or teleporter. Player character and/or Balder Bruce (Barrel Bay hire) recommended. Even if the ship sinks, the player character just comes right back. Balder Bruce can use his Barrel Boarding ability to retreat.

[Sishiya]

The Granada gun also works very well against shields; or use two of the same cannon but with sailors with slightly different reload stats. Not sure if the Granada can cause status effects when a sailor with Fireball or Hullbreacher is using it though.

[BlackForrestGuy]

@ken_888 With my upraded 15k ship and a lev 6 crew i am fast enough so destroy the shield and then freez the weelhouse. Then i let the shells rain, easy.
Boarding is a little bit of a hassle, but i will train some pirats to be my elite and wreck havoc.
Luckily I got one with the potion trait, he is a cc-monster.
So, thank you for your suggestion, it works splendidly.

[ken_888]

@BlackForrestGuy yeah I will get to that point soon, but long story short, aim at their wheelhouse first during the cooldown spare or send your crew members to kill them.

[BlackForrestGuy]

If you would be so kind and give some advice how to battle the ghost ships, espacially how to deal with their shield, thank you.