Booty ramp

Booty ramp is the increase in booty from each successive brigand/barbarian during pillaging.

Affecting factors
The factors known to affect how steep the booty ramp is are:
 * Puzzle standing in piracy puzzles of the crew aboard
 * The crew rank of the brigand/barbarian you fight (sailor -> imperial)
 * The route difficulty
 * Number of pirates aboard (note this does not signify those who hold the rank of pirate)
 * Crew changes
 * Amount of Pieces of Eight in the booty chest that has been won from brigands
 * How decisive the win was in the last battle
 * The vessel configuration and your duty report in Navigation
 * Luck
 * Size of the ship you are fighting

Note: duty reports have no effect on the booty payout. It is worthwhile to note that each of these factors have their own caveats.

Standing
Once again, this does not refer to your duty report. It refers to your skill in puzzling, specifically the piracy puzzles. Load up a sloop with a crew of six that are renowned in every piracy stat, and you will get less booty than if you load up a sloop with a crew of six that are grand-master or legendary in every piracy skill. It's also worth noting that this factor is weighted towards Swordfight and Rumble stats, meaning the ability of your crew in melee is more important individually than their ability to perform, say, Carpentry.

Enemy crew rank
Just as expected, the harder a brigand/barbarian is, the more money you'll make from them. This also accounts for the difficulty of the ship itself -- clearly a longship will net more booty (on average) than a cutter.

Route difficulty
Different routes spawn harder or easier brigands/barbarians naturally. These are shaded on Yer known world from light to dark. The darker the shade of the league points, the harder the spawned brigands will be. The lighter the shade of the league points, the easier they'll be. Take a look at some of the YPPedia maps below for route difficulty.


 * Cerulean Ocean Map
 * Emerald Ocean Map
 * Meridian Ocean Map

Number of crewmates
This does not mean that it accounts for how many people in your crew are aboard, but simply how many people are aboard your vessel. As one might assume, more is better in this case, which is Puzzle Pirates's way of counter-balancing the fact that you'll have to spread the booty more ways. Greenies are included, but swabbies are not.

Crew changes
The might of your vessel is recalculated each time a pirate hops on or off the vessel. A side effect of the recalculations is that the vessel loses part of the booty ramp gained in the earlier part of the voyage. OOO has confirmed that crew changes were not intended to have this effect on the booty ramp. Generally, a crew change of one on a sloop or two to three on a war brig will produce a noticeable effect on the booty ramp.

The effect of crew changes can be partly reduced by having the pirates on your ship for the last battle stay until you see your next target spawn, then switching out the leaving pirate for the one taking their place.

Amount of booty in chest
The more money you have in the chest already, the more you stand to lose should the brigand/barbarian defeat you. With that in mind, the higher the risk, the higher the reward, and the more money you have in the chest the higher the Booty Ramp will go. Worth noting is that you cannot merely dump a bunch of money into the chest to jump start your booty ramp -- it must be previously-won poe.

It is not known whether this factor survived the most recent iteration of game design changes.

Decisive victory
This is also fairly intuitive. If your last battle was a clear victory (losing only one or two crew members in the melee on a war brig or otherwise completely rolling over your opponents), then the next spawn will be tougher to try to gauge how powerful your crew is. Likewise, a resounding loss, such as losing all your crew without killing a bot, will drop the booty ramp significantly, and barely winning -- dropping to 2 or 3 pirates left by the time you beat them -- keeps the ramp roughly static.

Duty navigation
As explained on the Navigation page, when pillaging, the score you get for Duty Navigation hones your brigand spawn to closer to the range you selected in your Configure Voyage menu. The better you do, the closer to your selected spawn it will come. That said, it's in your best interest on a ship that has a talented dnavver to have them Navigate, so that not only will you get more spawns and thus more battles and thus more money, but also that your brigands will spawn to the right level of difficulty, hard enough for you to beat for maximum payout, but not so hard that you'll lose and drop your existing Booty Ramp. The voyage will have the highest income if you set the Configure Voyage slider to the hardest difficulty that your crew can reliably beat. Note that the Configure Voyage slider works best when the difficulty selected is similar to the difficulty of the route you are sailing. Selecting a very hard setting while sailing a very easy route has the unintended effect of reducing the number of spawns received.

Luck
Like it or not, this is all connected to the universal random number generator we call luck. There are some brigands that will net you far more than you think you'll get, and many (more) that will get you less than you feel you deserve. This is intended only to categorize the ways you can effect the booty ramp, but you must also understand that some things cannot be affected.

Size of the opponent's ship
With the release of new ship types of varying difficulties to fight, a modifier to payout was added to account for the added difficulty of fighting certain ship types. The full details of the modifier are not yet known.

Historical notes

 * Prior to March 30, 2006, greenies were not counted in how many crew members you had.
 * The old Sea Battle stat of each person aboard used to weigh in to booty ramp