Best Defense is Give No Resources

Arr pirates!! Have ye had the problem of a stronger pirate attacking you and wonder what ye can do about it? Well anyone can be a pain in the Rum barrel no matter how strong an opponent it is.

First of all, the reason for this post, is the main and best defense against anyone, especially a stronger attacker is to give them nothing. Hide all the troops, use all the resources on buildings, discoveries and training or send them over to Brotherhood members or Shipmates or, if it comes to that, throw them away completely (send to nearest inactive haven) - everything is better than to give anything to the pirate raiding ye.

Ye see below an example from my own Haven where I put out the Dark Corsairs together with my static "free" defense and actually got 2 out of the 300 Juggernauts destroyed while he got practically nothing. A couple of such attacks and they will stop very quickly because nobody wants to waste their raid attempts and, moreover, nobody be wanting to lose their expensive units for nothing.

Other than this ye can always be a major annoyance if ye liberate the blockades of yer enemy. This is extra annoying because he would have to re-blockade them, but, more than that, he might lose those blockades completely if either allied or enemy Brotherhood members blockade them before he manages to re-block.

Offensive vs. Defensive Strategies

Arr pirates!! I be telling ye 'bout offense or defense strategies in Pirates Tides of Fortune. Ye see once ye got the ROYAL Cannon built ye have a choice and that is to play nice and go more into defense and level up yer Royal Cannon to level 6 and get +25% to yer gold and lumber production or ye can go into offense and raid enemy Havens and make enemies in which case most probably someone will raid ye and break yer Cannon.

On the defensive strategy in 5 days ye can get yer Royal cannon giving ye the 25% boost to yer gold and lumber production. Sometimes ye will still be raided and lose the cannon, but most of the time if ye got strong defense and Flying Dutchmen blocking scouting only stupid pirates will attack ye without scouting.

On the offense strategy ye can't hold the Royal Cannon most likely since ye will  p i s s  someone off but then ye better be making real good raids which will give ye at least the same benefit as a 25% boost from the Cannon.

Time for an example. Say ye be producing 1000 gold and 1000 lumber. If ye get the cannon to level 6 then ye be making 1250 gold and lumber which means extra 6000 gold and extra 6000 lumber per day just from the cannon and that means that if you are on the offense strategy then ye better be bringing home minimum that much extra otherwise it be better going in a more peaceful way.

The "Peaceful" pirate will be raiding say 10 times 1000 x 3 resources, so that's roughly 10,000 gold, lumber and rum + the 1250 gold/lumber production.

So the "Offensive" pirate must raid for minimum 16,000 gold/lumber and 10,000 rum to be equal to the "Peace" pirate.

For newer pirates I be recommending to go and grow the peaceful way.

Understanding Defense Values in Pirates

Arrr pirates!! As with me some of ye are probably wondering what are all those defense values in the statistics of the different units. I picked here the example of the TURTLE SHIP from our beloved Pirates Tides of Fortune because you can see it has 40 defense on all stats except Fleet Defense it has 120.

So how does this defense work? 

For example, if you have on defense only 100 x Turtle Ships and someone attacks you only with 100 x Marauders then the battle calculation is going to use the "Pirate Defense: 40" for the battle result so you will have 100 x 40 = 4000 defense and he will have 100 x 60 = 6000 attack so both sides will lose units but he will be more of the winner.

Now, on the other hand, imagine you have the same defense but he is attacking you with 10 x Frigates then your defense calculation will use the "Fleet Defense: 120" and so instead of 4000 defense you will have 100 x 120 = 12000 defense which is 3 times more!! and so against his 10 Frigates (900 x 10 = 9000) you will be the on the top side!

So I hope that was clear to you. You can actually use that in your advantage when you scout other pirates and see maybe a defense of a certain type of a unit much more than other types then maybe you can use specific offense units to get an advantage.

Note: when things are mixed up this still works, but the game will make a complex calculation of what is defending against what and I don't know the formula, but the logic is working.

Heaven Skins in Pirates Tides of Fortune

Arrr pirates!! We be havin' choices for skins fer the Havens in Pirates Tides of Fortune. They be making ours Havens look amazing plus they be giving us more defense bonuses! On the bad side they be costing rubies and lots of them, so not for the poor pirates out there. Yer can find the Haven skins in the Smuggler's Den!

Tortuga and Lighthouse which were added end of September 2013:

Here below the choices and costs of all the current Haven skins and also examples from the game's pirates:

And below the costs and choices:

Lighthouse Rock - 4000 rubies fer +800 defense
New Tortuga - 4000 rubies fer +800 defense
Isle of Ages - 3000 rubies fer +600 defense
Barbary Bay - 3000 rubies fer +600 defense
Kau Yi Island - 1000 rubies fer +200 defense
Mangrove Mooring - 1000 rubies fer +200 defense
Laputa - 1500 rubies fer +300 defense
Kraken's Prize - 1500 rubies fer +300 defense

That's always 5 rubies per defense point!