1) Accessing Naval Fleet Missions
You can access Naval Fleet missions via 3 places:
1) Your home in New York
2) Any of the Gang Hideouts you’ve liberated (they’ll be on a desk next to the bank)
3) Inside the Captains Quarter’s of your ship The Morrigan
2) The Structure of the Naval Missions
As with previous ‘meta games’ within the AC franchise, you need to send ships off to buy and sell supplies throughout the world to make money and discover special items. There are 33 world locations that you can send ships to and there is one repeatable mission at each location.
Repeating the same mission does not count as progress for this achievement. You will therefore have to complete 17 different missions out of the 33 in the campaign.
The missions also unlock in order i.e. completing mission 1 unlocks mission 2; completing mission 2 unlocks mission 3 etc.
Each mission is named after a geographic location, which is where you’ll be sending the ship (for example Stockholm, Liverpool, Malta etc).
3) Getting Ships
In order to get ships to start sending out on the Naval Campaigns, you have to capture some. While in the open world areas of the River Valley or the North Atlantic you need to:
• Attack other ships and deplete their health enough that ‘Boarding’ becomes an option.
• Board and capture the ship.
• When prompted to decide the ships fate, select ‘Send to Shay’s fleet).
This will now make that ship available for use in the naval Campaign. I’d recommend that you try to get 6 to 7 good quality Brigs in your Naval Fleet and, later in the game, a Man O’ War too.
4) Completing the Missions
Once you’re on the Naval Campaign menu, completing a mission involves 4 steps:
Step 1: Select the mission from the world map and pressing ‘A’
Step 2: Choose a ship that stands the best chance of completing the mission. The game will tell you the % likelihood of the mission succeeding (between 1% and 100%). You’re goal is to be as close to 100% as possible. I have lost ships that I sent with 93%, however I have yet to lose a ship that had 95% or greater.
Step 3: Wait. Each mission is timed and will last for a set duration, ranging between 7 minutes and 50 minutes most times. Just play the game while this is happening and you’ll get notified when the mission is finished.
Step 4: Return to the Naval Campaign once notified and you’ll see a ‘mission report’. If it was successful you will be able to progress to the next mission, which will be revealed on your world map.
5) A few extra considerations…
Securing Trade Routes
When you select an area you’ll see an option to ‘secure trade route’. The game suggests that, the riskier the trade route the risker the mission. I never found this to be the case at all and completely ignored the ‘secure trade route’ battles after the first few times. If you’re ships chance of success is 100% it will complete the mission, even if the trade route was labelled as ‘dangerous.’
Ship Requirements
Some missions require ships to meet certain requirements to be selecting for a mission, such as having a certain sized cargo. If you find that you have no ships that qualify for a certain mission you will have to go back to the open world River Valley or North Atlantic and capture a bigger, higher level ship. You can see the level and type of a ship by looking at it with the spyglass while at the wheel of The Morrigan (hold UP on the d-pad an use RT to zoom in).
6) Monitoring Progress
You can see how many missions you have done in the top left hand corner of the naval Campaign screen. For reference, the first 17 missions are:
• Louisiana
• Florida
• Savannah
• Barbados Mission
• Cap–Français
• Le Havre
• Brest
• Havana
• Carrickfergus
• Lagos
• Gibraltar
• Belem
• Rio de Janeiro
• Cartagena
• Buenos Aires
• Goree Island
• Saint-Louis
As always, if anyone has any queries please do not hesitate to let me know.