2. Sid Meier's Pirates! (WP) General hints and tips

Save Scumming

Easily the most effective and most important strategy, used correctly. Treasure, lost relative locations, lost city locations, all of these are only generated once you obtain a fragment of the map. Therefore, the strategy is as follows:

1. Obtain a fragment of map.
2. Immediately save the game in a secondary file.
3. Continue playing the game, obtaining the rest of the map.
4. Find the treasure on the map and note exactly where it is.
5. Reload the alternate save file and make a beeline!

While this has limited use with the lost cities, given how infrequent they are found until the Path of Revenge is complete, this saves typically six months to a year or more of game time when hunting down pirate treasure or lost relatives. In order to get to Marquis de la Montalban as quickly as possible, using this strategy is a necessity!

Map

The following is a map for an earlier, more expansive port of the game. While there are extra cities, I took the liberty of highlighting two key areas. The coastlines in purple are the likely culprits for Lost Cities. Lost Cities are the only treasure maps that don't spawn nearby. If you can make out part of the coastline, save your game and try to match it up to these areas.

The waters highlighted in red are the most frequent areas to find named pirates. If you're having trouble finding one in the beginning of the game or Henry Morgan later on, sail to these areas and you'll likely find them.

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Special Items

First and foremost: Even if you aren't planning on seducing the ladies any time soon, always carry a Ruby Ring on your person! When the mysterious stranger shows up and starts selling items, he will only sell you an item that you don't currently have. If you don't have a Ruby Ring, the game all but defaults to it. This keeps you from getting the nicer and rarer items.

There are three ways to get items. The most common is to pay the mysterious traveler when he has a useful item. The two rarer circumstances are dancing and fugitive criminals. When completing a dance with a near perfect rating, the daughter will sometimes offer a choice of items. Alternately, if you have a quest to track down a fugitive criminal, he may offer a special item to let him go free instead of the gold reward.

Here's a list of special items, with the more useful items at the top.

• Set of Balanced Swords / Set of Perfectly Balanced Swords - Crucial item, these increase your attack speed in a duel. Get them as soon as you can.
• Three-Stringed Fiddle / Concertina - Crucial item, this improves crew morale.
• Medicinal Herbs / Incan Mystic Salve - Crucial item, this improves your lifespan.
• One Shot Pistol / Brace of Pistols - Highly recommended, this gives you an advantage at the beginning of a duel by adding one fewer successful hit needed per item to win.
• Leather Vest / Metal Cuirass - Recommended, this gives a percentage chance to have an enemy thrust deflect away from you, essentially saving from the hit.
• Weather Glass / Precision Barometer - Nice to have, this item reduces the damage you take from sailing in a storm. On lower difficulty levels, this is pretty minimal damage to begin with.
• French Chapeau / Ostrich Feather Hat - Take it or leave it, this lowers the requirement for being invited to the ball. A French Chapeau means you do not need to be a Colonel to dance with an attractive daughter, and an Ostrich Feather Hat means you don't have to be a Baron for a beauty. Potentially useful from as Ostrich Feather Hat, but the French Chapeau is all but useless.
• Fencing Shirt / Silk Fencing Shirt - Take it or leave it, this improves defensive speed in a duel. Potentially useful against Marquis de la Montalban on Rogue, but otherwise useless.
• Calfskin Boots / Dancing Slippers - Take it or leave it, this affects stumbling in a dance and lowers the penalty for bad steps. Useful if you have trouble with the dancing minigame, completely irrelevant otherwise.
• Dutch Rutter / Spanish Rutter - Take it or leave it, this item reveals more settlements and villages on the map without sailing by them. Generally not needed and particularly expensive anyway.
• False Mustache / Theatrical Disguise - All but useless, this item helps trade with Spanish ports who otherwise wouldn't trade with you. This is easily solved by getting on Spain's good side and does nothing to help you get into the port in the first place if there's a price on your head.
• Signalling Mirror / Signal Flare - Useless, these items reduce the amount of time it takes to rescue you when you're marooned. If that happens, reload your save. Done.
• Golden Cross / Sacred Relic - Useless, these items improve Jesuit relations. I have never seen the Jesuits refuse to talk to me.
• Shrunken Head / Carved Shaman Staff - Useless, these items improve Indian relations. Like above, I have never seen the Indians refuse to talk to me.

Aging

Your pirate starts as a spry young 19 years old, but over time ages and slows down. This shows itself in fencing duels, as each year you get slower and slower. Once you hit your 50s, duels may become too fast to keep up with. This is the main reason why it's crucial to beat the main storyline as fast as possible, as it leaves you in a better position to tackle the final boss.

Without the lifespan-increasing items, retirement is forced at age 42, ending the game. With both items, retirement is forced at 50. However, you can continue on without retirement and no ill effects by not dividing the plunder, which will be covered in the next section.

Divide and Plunder

Forget about Marquis de la Montalban, dividing the plunder is the real enemy of the game. Only under very specific circumstances do you ever want to divide the plunder, and that is because having enough gold to do it gives you the option of raising the difficulty level. It takes away your gold, spends precious months not doing anything, and you need to find a new crew once you start.

Mutinous crews begin calling for you to divide the plunder before too long. However, there is a magic number regarding mutiny. If you can keep roughly 1000 gold per crew member, they will never mutiny and remain permanently in the Unhappy state. To keep them as happy as possible, you'll need roughly 3000 gold per crew member. Once you've hit an effective crew size as detailed below and have the money to keep them from dropping into the mutiny section, the game becomes much less stressful.

Fleets and Crews

While you can hold a giant crew of pirates and terrorize the seas with your fleet, this is generally the last thing you want to do. You'll obtain a flagship before rescuing your lost sister, so there's no need to blindly attack whatever ship appears to be better.

Your fleet should only be a single ship, barring a few circumstances. When you begin hunting down Baron Raymondo for map fragments for your lost relatives, you should always attempt to attack him at sea. By doing this and beating him there, you get to keep his ship, which is always a fully upgraded War Galleon, which is more than sufficient for the entire game.

The only other reason to have a fleet of ships is after you've attacked pirates or another target. Keep the ship, but sell it as soon as you get to the next major town. The extra gold is handy, and only having one ship prevents mutinous crew members from taking it and leaving. As a Count, you can repair a ship for 1 gold and sell it at full cost, and at Duke, you can upgrade it for 1 gold and sell it for even higher. It's those little bits of extra gold that help pay for some of the special items.

Your crew should also be kept as small as possible to prevent possible mutinies. As mentioned above, you'll need 1000 gold per crew member to keep them from mutiny. However, the maximum size crew you should ever need is 100 members. This puts you at just enough to keep them from mutiny while only needing 100000 gold, and still makes you a formidable opponent to all but the toughest pirates. It's still recommended you save before going up against someone like Henry Morgan or Baron Raymondo.

Ship Battles

Don't let the game fool you, more often than not you want to simply ram your opponent and force a duel. However, if you have the option to broadside your opponent, take it. Generally, you want to use grape shot and target their crew, the other options are more for prolonged battles that you don't want to engage in.

Fencing

Rapier. Rapier, rapier, rapier. That's really all there is to say on the matter. The quicker your attack, the faster you finish the duel. For the vast majority of duels within this guide, a simple tip is all you need: Wait for their attack animation, then swipe left to thrust. Continue until victory! The only thing to watch for is your crew size. If you engage in a duel at sea, your crew fights your opponent's crew, and if you lose all background support, you instantly lose.

Treasure Maps

There are three reasons you'll have a part of a treasure map on your person. You're either looking for buried treasure, a lost relative, or a lost city. You'll need four pieces to complete the map, but it's entirely possible to find it beforehand!

First of all, the landmarks are absolutely useless. They were kept in due to PC versions having them but never ported to the WP. The only way you'll be finding someone based on one or two map pieces is by recognizing the coast on the map. While this sounds like an exercise in futility, treasure and relatives only spawn on the map once you have a piece of the map. Furthermore, they spawn nearby, at most a few months of sailing away. Therefore, if you start looking for parts of the coast that roughly match what you have on a map, you can try to find your target by trial and error!

Naturally, you'll want to save your game before trying this; no need to waste so many months and food just searching randomly.

Dancing

There's unfortunately not a lot I can say about the dancing minigame. At its core, it really comes down to whether you're already good at rhythm games or not. I ran into some issues with lag during the songs that caused the music to play out of time with the minigame, so if you notice you're doing badly, try to play visually instead of matching the beat. It's still difficult, but still possible to get a good dance rating out of it. As mentioned in the special item section, if you have trouble with the minigame, get the calfskin boots or dancing slippers to reduce the penalty.

There are two successful endings to a dance. If you've done alright, the player will kiss her hand. If you've done excellently, they will embrace in a final flourish. Ending with one of these two scenes will earn you something extra, based on their looks and your current possessions and progress:

If you already have all the items a plain daughter can provide, she'll give criminal fugitive information for a perfect dance. If you've found all your family members, an attractive daughter will instead offer an item. Beautiful daughters used to offer pieces of a map to Marquis de la Montalban, but as that does not exist in this version, she only delivers Lost City maps once you've located your family.