We continue with Age of Booty Tips & Tricks.

Team Gambit 1:  Speed Ship, Siege Ship

Waiting in the lobby, before the game starts, you can see a mini-map.  Looking at the below mini-map you can see there is a 3 hex wide choke point, and all of the towns you need to capture are on the other side. From your volcano lair you have to sail around a cape to reach the towns (all of which generate gold resources only).  Since you will need Rum and Wood to upgrade ships, it may be difficult in general to gain these resources on this particular map. 

It’s a big map, and will take a long time to traverse.  When you are far away attacking the towns, or other pirates, and your ship sinks, you will be forced to re-spawn back at the lair a long ways away from the action.  This is pretty inconvenient.

Loosing ships uses time, resources, and takes you away from your victory conditions (capturing towns).  When you get to the towns in the south, you need to establish a foothold town to keep attacking from that side of the map and be able to repair at a friendly port.  The speed ship, siege ship gambit could help a team dominate this kind of map.

In a situation like this one below, you might start with a single mast pirate ship and only one cannon (marked by the dot under your alias (Gamertag/GameSpyID)).  See below picture.

At this point, if you have enough resources to spend, the world is your oyster.  You can choose to buy upgrades for your ship in any order you want. There are strong advantages to having a balanced ship; this gambit uses none of them.  The point of this gambit is to specialize one ship speed, and the other ship cannons.   

Begin the gambit by telling your team mate about this plan.  Have one team member buy all canons, while the other goes all speed.  Remember you have to share resources when upgrading the ships, so you might need to withhold upgrading to maximum immediately.

In the case where there are important resources like Rum and Wood not being generated at towns, it is important to attack small coastal villages, and also collect the random crates that appear.

These crates randomly give you 1 gold, wood, or rum.  Not taking these crates leaves them for the enemy to retrieve.

You must still capture towns to win the game.  And since ship upgrade resources may be slim pickings (very little Rum or Wood) then the only way to stay competitive might be to use a mixed team strategy like this gambit and rely on grabbing crates, and coordinating attacks with your unbalanced fleet.

As you upgrade make sure you stay focused on your specialty, and you will start to notice the results.  The speed ship collects needed resources easier, can perform feint attacks or harasses the enemy, and get away.  Then the siege ship arrives to reinforce any attack on a town, and soon you will be taking over.

One person keeps buying cannons every upgrade chance they get, and the other player buys up speed at every chance.  This allows the successful team to upgrade their ships, and concentrate their powerful attacks on towns.

Think of it as a strategy where one player does some finesse hit and run & stealing crates under the other team’s nose, while the other ship with all cannons plods along, sinking frigates, and lays siege to any close towns. 

The speed ship is vulnerable if trapped, mainly because it has one canon and usually very little armor.  It is also incapable of taking anything but the weakest towns by itself.  (This three mast yellow speedster above has no chance of taking Aberdeen by itself).

His partner can eventually show up to assist on this attack on Aberdeen.  As a seige ship bristling with cannons, he is slow, but dangerous.  So you really need to coordinate the hammer and anvil for attacks on towns.  And once the town is taken it can begin repairing the battle damage.  The siege ship can defend from a friendly town port much easier than sailing back to its lair to heal. The automatic repair heals the ship while at port, and also helps make up the deficit of Armor. 

 

Lastly, it’s good to know the speedy ship that retrieves crates is also often cruising around the far side of the map.  This ship can take advantage of “targets of opportunity” the slower siege ship cannot get to in time.  A speed ship is often a good candidate to cherry pick a town (like the above image). 

Eventually, as the battle moves on, you will continue to gain resource crates and capture towns.  You can then consider balancing your ships with speed and cannons, and adding needed armor, to create a more powerful well rounded force.

Of course there is a counter to this gambit.  That is to concentrate on the slow gunship and prevent it from winning any battles over towns.  The other team may not be able to catch the speed ship, but the siege ship will need help from the speed ship if outnumbered.  A balanced enemy team of ships could double team a siege ship by itself, and drive it into the icy depths.