Tip #1:  Blocking the weak town with a whirlpool

As you might guess capturing towns is pretty important (since it is how you win).  But what may not be immediately obvious is there are ways to block the town (especially in multiplayer) so enemies cannot attack those ports and retake the town.

[Generally you want to keep towns because while in port they repair your ship (healing) and if you are interrupted while re-capturing a town you could loose your town to a superior or lucky enemy.  So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume your trying to keep your town.]  

The key to blocking is to either have a team mate available by your side at all times, or have the Whirlpool Curse card ready.  The easiest method is to simply have two ships in port blocking the town from being attacked.  Neither ships move, both are being repaired while in port next to the town.  All is good. 

But what if you are alone?  Let’s just say your “pirate teammate” is busy on the other side of the map. You have almost no health left on your town, and the enemy is coming.

It is a lot easier to block an enemy attack with a whirlpool curse card.  You get curse cards randomly by sinking frigates, and your odds of getting a whirlpool is only about 1 in 6.  So you will have to sink several ships to get one.  But you might consider the Whirlpool curse a very important tactical card, and worth finding and saving for special moments like capturing or defending towns.

In this picture you can see that the town has almost no health at all left.  (I was attacked, and barely fought off the enemy).  The next cannon shot by any ship (enemy pirate ship, neutral frigate) will drop this town back to the uncaptured state, and then I would have to recapture it. 

So, when you see the enemy coming place the whirlpool next to you in the only other open space available for someone to dock into port. 

Keep in mind it doesn’t last a long time, but hopefully if the enemy does sail into it they will only get 1 or two shots at your town before being flushed away, and randomly relocated on the map away from your town.  Your town will also slowly regenerate health, so if you can simply delay them by a few seconds you might regain some of that needed health bar.

Lastly, this situation shows a town with only 1 cannon defending.  It might be argued by some that this is a waste of a good Curse Card defening a 1 canon town with no health bar.  Well, they could be right.  If you let them shoot the town once, and you recapture quickly with the Whirlpool preventing any interruption by the enemy, then the town will return with 1/2 health (which is way better than waiting for it to regenerate back from zero).  

The problem remains, if that town is critical to what you need to win (you have 5 towns you need to win, and that is number 4), then holding onto it may be better than giving it up.  No single tactic will always work, so you have to think about the goals in play (how many towns the other team has, who is in the lead, how much time is left.)  Age of Booty may be easy to learn, but the result of any tactic like this one depends on the situation and a tiny bit of luck.