Pirate Safari Guide

This guide was developed to explain the PvP aspects, areas and tips in detail. PvP stands for player vs player (or hot pirate on pirate action!) and represents one of the exciting fun and potentially lucrative profitable aspects of the game if yer blade and yerself is sharp!

= Basic guide to PvP = For simplicity sake for beginners, you are going to be solo while hunting ships. So you will need:
 * A Sloop
 * 10 Fine Rum or equivalent
 * 50 Small Cannon Balls
 * Officer badge at least
 * Officer rank in a crew at least

Station guide
In the Battle Brigand with the Navy mission, you are provided four swabbies, all who can gun and perform differently on the Duty report. However, outside of the navy mission, solo voyages when putting up and down a job notice will give you three swabbies, none will gun or do Duty navigation and all will only provide a fine for Sailing, Carpentry and Bilging. This section will explain why each station may be used in a PvP.

Sailing
On the voyage, your swabbies won't provide much sailing power to effectively multiple with duty navigation when sailing with yourself and the swabbies will be much better. However, at full speed, even one swabbie alone can keep the speed at full so you can put the extra swabbies on maintenance.

In the battle, a lone swabbie will barely provide a sail token per turn on no damage or bilge. Two may give roughly two per turn. Sailing by yourself is recommended only when trying to chase pirates who try to disengage.

Carpentry
A lone swabbie can single-handly repair the whole ship as well keep damage clear en route or in battle. It's better to abandon damaged ships at league points rather than attacking pirates since you risk being intercepted.

Depending on the battle, it's usually best to have no damage since bilge will creep or flood the ship. Carping by yourself will work much better than swabbies but you should only do this when there's damage to repair.

Bilging
A lone swabbie can clear the entire ship of bilge provided there's little or no damage. However if the damage is even a 1/4, the swabbie won't be able to prevent the bilge from creeping up. Usually you shouldn't bother with this station unless you believe it may give you a technical advantage by keeping bilge down while letting the swabbies sail and carp.

Gunnery
Expect to use this station a lot while solo hunting. When leaving port, get full speed before attempting to fill all four cannons. This way you don't have pesky Brigands attacking.

Duty Navigation
Duty Navigation (or DNav) is only seen outside of battle. Depending on how well the duty navigation performance goes, it will multiple the sailing performance. As noted above, sailling is preferred at start to get ship up to full speed. However very good skill is needed in this to attack traders who DNav in trade mode.

Battle Navigation
The trickiest thing to note is that while soloing, you will need to multi-task of Battle Navigation (BNav) with any of the stations above. With Gunnery, you need to actively fill cannons while plotting the best moves to prevent them from getting their advantage over yourself.

Some tips are:
 * Practice beforehand with the navy with no Gunner or DNaver. It's cheaper and you can easily leave when you like.
 * Pressing esc to pause the current station puzzle. (Your puzzle performance will decay and still be counted for the Duty Report though)
 * Plotting moves beforehand. It's much easier to guess certain few moves, so avoid placing few moves whenever possible.

Where are the pirates?
Where are the pirates? On some oceans these pirates plunder near heavily populated islands such as in Viridian. You will have to do some research beforehand to find some popular routes. Try:
 * View the map from your booty panel
 * Sailing to each colonised island
 * Spy from the navy crow's nest
 * De-porting at colonised islands

Hunting guide
Now lets get down to hunting pirates for their yummy booty! You should be prepared and hopefully not engaged by brigands or players. Lets look for some ships: Keep an eye out for any light green or below might ring of ships. Since you're solo, you shouldn't get a black ship for attacking weak ships. Do note the plunder isn't usually nice unless the opponent is using an alt to get a very low might ring.
 * Place two swabbies on sails as well as yourself.
 * Swabbie on bilge.
 * Set sail
 * Fill all four cannons when you reach full speed
 * Go to the crow's nest
 * View the chart from your booty panel

Battle guide
There are several variations of what the opponent may do when attacked. Another guide lists some PvP methods. Here's some explained below:

Cowardly
Best station: Sails. The cowardly pirate ship has no honour and tries to run away from you as much as possible! You will need to try to get into close quarter battles and either shoot or grapple to prevent them from escaping. Usually they might quickly run out of moves and may begin to shoot back.

Tips:
 * Don't play conservative or long distance. You might find it hard to land a shot.
 * Play aggressive.
 * Try for grapple instead of shooting.

Aggressive
Best station: Guns. The aggressive pirate ship turns to fight us to protect their hoard! Some pirates don't have very good sailors or prefer to fight back. Expect to do a mix of gunning and some conservative shooting.

Tips:
 * Play a mix of aggression and conservative.
 * Don't get shot up too much.

Overall
Ultimately, you should grapple them as soon ass possible. They have not much incentive to grapple you first unless you're all shot up and easy to beat in a boarding battle. Here are some battle navigation tips:
 * Be the one to grapple.
 * Don't forget to grapple before they can disengage.
 * Learn to do well in board fights even if they have an advantage.
 * Use random moves. Depending on the battle, do you usually go right? Try left instead of right.
 * Take risks, you might get shot once but you might be able to hit them back twice.

Other PvP tips

 * Use the old salt at the inn. I believe the old salt only considers adjacent routes to the present island.
 * Who's on that pirate ship? You can get a list of pirates aboard with /vw
 * What is your opponent puzzling? You can find out with /w
 * Want to stalk a flag? You can find out with /fw

= Sinking battles = Yar, you be wanting to hunt sinking battles! = Hunting big pillagers = Targetting the big booty = Hunting hard sloop pillagers = Plundering some big booty from some of the hard pirates = Hunting atlantis ships = Grabbing chests and more from plunderin' them! = Hunting merchants = Stealing their worldly goods and putting the pirate in pirate world