Guide on How Scouting Works?

Arr pirates!! We be doing some learning on scouting, going from A to Z just making sure all pirates benefit 100% from full understanding.

So first up, to do scouting in Pirates Tides of Fortune ye need to have at least one Flying Dutchman. This be yer flying units who can go and scout enemy Havens fer ye!

If ye don't have one or the ones ye had died ye can train more of them in the Dutchman's Hangar:

Now before ye raid or blockade an enemy pirate's Haven it be a really good idea that you Scout with your Flying Dutchmen:

Ye can send 1 if ye think there is no defenders. This be a good idea just for checking resource levels fer the Haven's which you regularly Raid. Now if ye wanna get information on some new Haven that ye don't know nothing about then ye might want to send many, like 10 or 20 or 30, because ye be assuming that they have defending Flying Dutchmen there so ye will lose some of yer Dutchmen but ye will get the info.

When ye send the scout it be going to the enemy Haven fer information:

And when it arrives to the enemy there are 3 possibilities:

1) The enemy will have a lot more Flying Dutchmen so yer scouts will die and you get no information.
2) The enemy will have some defense so some of your people will die but you will get information.
3) There is no defense - you lose nothing and get the scouting information.

Here be an example of one of my scouting reports:

Very often ye will see that ye lose Flying Dutchmen so ye have to keep buying more every day if ye want to keep scouting.

Don't fall into the danger of "not scouting" because ye can have a big problem if ye send attack blindly not knowing what there be waiting fer ye.

Ye can buy more Flying Dutchmen in the Dutchman's Hangar - they be especially expensive in the beginning:

Last 2 things to point out:

1) Ye can and should send many scouting missions at the same time, so you quickly collect information of what is going on and the resource levels of all the Havens that you normally like to raid.

2) The Veteran Flying Dutchman has exactly the same stats as the Regular Veteran Flying Dutchman, only it costs much less resources to buy it because it also costs Rubies, so this is fer pirates who put real money into the game. The appearance is also different but the use of them is exactly the same as the regular units.

Finding Relics by Scouting

Arrr pirates!! Did ye know that ye can even find nice RELICS from just scouting?? Well have a look at the picture I prepared for ye all below - I sent 15 Flying Dutchmen on a scouting mission totally not expecting anything special and "boom" I see the message "Ye've found a powerful Relic!" so I be like "Oh Yea!" :)

As a matter of fact ye can find relics also when raiding. So when ye do different things there is a chance of finding a Relic and then ye can move it to yer Chamber or ye can SELL it for ~1300 gold, lumber and rum, which is very nice especially in the lower levels.

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Strategy to Grow and Profit Smartly

(Posted/Edited by LAVASH; Thanks to KDH)

Keeping Track of the Enemy

It is a good idea to "set sail" to the "potential enemy" Haven so ye can view it from the inside. Record the captain's level and current experience points in yer logbook. After 3-7 days start goin' back and checkin' on them. Those that do not move in experience points are usually inactive and safe to raid without retaliation.

Noting down the Harbor Level

The other part once ye found it then send a Flyin' Dutchman to scout it right before your raid hits. Take the booty and subtract it from the totals - this will tell ye the harbor protection value. Make a note of this amount so in the future a scout will tell ye how profitable the raid will be. Also keep a scout or a blockade in/on the Haven which can let ye know if others have raided it and when so ye can track their patterns and get there first.

Identifying Yer Regular Targets and Inactive Pirates vs. Active Pirates

There are many inactive Havens level 17-25 that will give ye 3k lumber and 3k gold. I even found a level 9 that nets 2.5k of each and less than 1k of rum. Me find the lower level ones to be less competition from other captains for the resource and ye can raid them all week rather than gettin' say 10k of resource and 40k of rum then waitin' a week fightin' off other cap'ns to keep it.

I prefer inactives to actives...there be more profit. You don't have to worry about them hittin' yer ransom 'cades, lighthouse targets, or returnin' the favor in ye sleep. I have not lost troops raidin' dead havens either. I know some cap'ns see the experience points as a win but I can raid inactive low levels all day long to gain experience without losin' a man.

Good luck findin' the profit sometimes ye have to travel a bit as well.

Understanding Underway Raids

Arrr pirates!! As ye play ye will be raided so it's good to know for that to understand the UNDERWAY RAIDS and use it as much as possible.

When ye be raided ye be getting a small red box on the bottom left of yer game showing that in so much time (see picture example 1 hour and 40 minutes) ye will be hit. Now there are 2 types of these: RAID and BLOCKADE.

During a RAID they be coming, smashing, grabbing stuff and leaving.
During a BLOCKADE they be coming and staying!! (and giving you a chance to smash them and liberate yer Haven)

Now the UNDERWAY tab can help you not only with the time. Unfortunately there is no way of seeing what kind of army is attacking, but here it be showing the army SPEED. In the picture you can see that the speed of the raid that is coming to me Haven is 6.2 mph and this is telling me 2 things:

1) For sure this army be coming with MARAUDERS because they are slow with that kinda speed.

2a) It could be just 1 Marauder.

2b) But since this guy also sent me an angry message saying he is going to destroy me then it is telling me that he sent his entire offense because nobody likes to send the slow Marauders except when you are doing an all out full force attack.

With this information I can choose to stand and defend or just hide away in my Harbor :)




Otherwise, if ye see speed of say 18 mph then ye know this be fast things like fast ships - this one ye should be more careful with. If this be coming from a higher level pirate then he might just want to slap you with a portion of his army - just the fast units - for a quick slap and back home. But ye know this is not all his ships because a lot of ships also have speed of 12 mph.

If this info was useful for ye then please click Google + to say thanks and/or leave comments. Thanks mate!

Stupid Raid Decisions

Arr pirates!! Today I had a very unfortunate, stupid, a few levels higher, pirate who scouted my New Tortuga skin Haven with full ground defenses (="look it's a heavy casher") with 28 Flying Dutchmen and failed miserably:

... and if that was not enough clue for him that there is a large defense force sitting there he decided to launch a blind attack anyways... "look at me, I gotz no brainz"...

so as you can see on the below picture he raided my Haven with a much stronger force but since i had very good defense for my level + the fact that I am a strong casher Haven he lost tons of his offensive power. Sure, he completely destroyed my defense (which by the way i immediately bought back with rubies) but what a stupid decision to blindly raid a heavily defended and super active casher gaining just a couple of thousand of resources and losing a massive amount of yer army.

So the lesson here is - always scout and do intelligent attacks whereby you can gain more than you lose, so that you can grow.

By the way I was online during this attack and i hit away my Flying Dutchmen and my offense but I left my defense there on purpose (could have easily hid it) to smash down his army since i have tons of rubies and i just buy them all back. But this really annoyed me because it was just a waste of rubies, even if i have a lot of them.

Cost Comparison Grenadier vs Bonnie's Beauties

Arrr pirates!! Here is another cost comparison analysis keeping our brains fresh and sharp for best spending yer hard earned gold coin, lumber and rum.

This time we have the cost comparison of yer Grenadier vs our darling Bonnie's Beauties. Below I be putting 2 pictures. On the top one we see them side by side and we see that the Grenadier is much more powerful as a single unit. He is almost as strong as 20 of our Bonnies. But then we look at the cost as wow, he is seriously more expensive than Bonnie's Beauties - actually by about 70%.

I be also counting that if ye would train 5,000 Bonnies then yer would have a defense power of roughly 95,000 points while for the same cost ye be able to train only 376 Grenadiers which give ye defense power of roughly 56,000 (taking average between their defense high and low figures), so this is a lot less.

But OK ye need only 752 rum for the Grenadiers while 5,000 fer the Bonnies so that's one big positive for the Mercenary man. Otherwise everything is in the favor of our darling Bonnie's Beauties.

I also want to highlight that the Grenadiers are especially good defending versus Mercenaries and Fleet, but ye never know what enemy be sending on you. Bonnies give a more balanced defense, but they be drinking a lot of rum.

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.