We have covered a several Tips and Tricks to help you compete a little better when playing Age of Booty online.  Some of these ideas have been complicated; this one isn’t.  This is simple and intuitive, but you may not have realized it, so let’s take a moment and discuss whether you want to “Go Down with the Ship.”

For argument sake, let’s assume your in a battle, you might not win, and the idea of escape crosses your mind.  Do you flee now, or fight to the end and see who gets lucky?  The answer to that question might be “What do your resources tell you to do?”   So let’s look at the resource tracking in Age of Booty.

This graphic below shows the resource counter.  If you don’t start with upgrades, or if you spent them all, this is what you will see; a bunch of zero’s and some sketch looking icons on the left and right that track your requirements for Town and Ship upgrades.  It shows symbols for Gold, Wood, and Rum. Notice that you have zero resources, and there are no dials active showing those resources being generated.

To execute this Tip you need to know how the interface works.  Once you get a sense of the timing involved with gaining resources, you can anticipate when the next Ship or Town upgrade is going to occur. 

You can then move your Ship, or Pointer (that sword in the first picture, with blue “X” underneath), ahead of time to where you will be upgrading your Ship or Town.  When the upgrade is available, your ready, and bam!  You pick an upgrade quickly without delay.

Now compare that previous resource counter graphic to the below graphic taken mid-gameplay.  Can you see the dials?

You can clearly see that you have dials moving on Wood and Rum, and you have the total resource count of 1 Gold, 2 Wood, and 3 Rum.  This means you have 2 Wood needed for either a Town or a Ship upgrade (tree sketch is colored on left and right side).  But you have only 1 Gold, and 3 Rum, which can’t buy you anything right now.  You need 3 more Gold to upgrade a captured Town, but there is no dial, so that means you are not generating that resource.  You may be able to find and get Gold, but it will not be generating over time.  However, the 3 Rum is looking promising, the dial generating, and it’s about 3/4th of the way around to generate 1 more Rum.

The dials show how much time it will take until your towns generate another Wood or Rum.  Given the position of the moving dials (the Rum approaching 9 o’clock) it is safe to say that you will be able to upgrade your ship soon. When that Rum dial gets to the 12 o’clock position, and you have 4 Rum, it would be best if you were ready for it. 

You need to send your ship back to your Pirate Lair for an upgrade.  That could be a long journey, so head back and get that critical upgrade now, before more time passes.   If too much time passes, not only are you delaying improving your pirate ship, but you then give the enemy team a longer window to use a Pilfer Curse that could steal up to 2 of your needed Wood or Rum resources.

Now there are times when anticipating your upgrade is important during a battle.  In the below graphic you can see two forces (a Town and a Ship) battling it out.  [By the way - That green glow is from the Ghost Ship curse wearing off.  Captain Smack was trying to be sneaky.] 

Yet, the question remains: What do you do?  Do you retreat and sail back to your pirate Lair, or risk getting sunk and instantly transported back to your pirate Lair?  

If you notice the resource counter has 5’s across the board.  In this situation, no matter what happens (win or lose), you will still be able to upgrade your ship.  In this case, you might as well go down with the ship (take the battle to the end) without any fear. The consequences for the Town are all bad, but for you … it’s all good.

If your ship sinks, you will loose one resource randomly, and still be able to upgrade your new ship the second you respawn at your Pirate Lair. 

If you win the battle and capture the Town, you won’t lose any resources, and can even upgrade the Town, and upgrade your pirate Ship when you sail back to your Lair. A win-win situation, with very little downside.

So the tip here is hopefully pretty clear:

If you know how many resources you have and need for an upgrade, you can choose to go down with the ship with a smile.

If, on the other hand, loosing a ship in battle (and a random resource) would be detrimental to your upgrades, then you might want to flee.

Therefore, you should anticipate your upgrades so you can decide if  “going down with the ship” is a good or bad thing. 

And remember when you say “Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” ... use pirate speak.  That will really drive them nuts.