These are useful whenever your cargo gets inspected. Yet another advantage of pirates is that they have an increased chance of buying smuggler ships. That said, Shangri-La isn't all that useful to anyone other than Gossamer anyway, so this isn't too much of a disadvantage. And you can lessen the damage by storing gold you don't need in the bank.įurthermore, pirates always have access to the fifth city, Shangri-La, whereas merchants can only gain access for six months by either defeating ten pirate fleets or spending enough gold at the alehouse. As for getting robbed yourself, that doesn't happen very often. This will slow your progress down significantly, but it seems to be the only way to win the game as a merchant. Instead, you should focus on making your fleet as big as possible (I'm pretty sure the cap is 25 ships) and using it to store all your goods. The only way to avoid warehouse robberies is to simply not use them at all. Finally, you will sometimes get robbed yourself and be forced to pay some of the gold you're currently carrying with yourself. Unlike normal warehouse robberies, hiring guards won't prevent these from happening. What is significant however is that they'll also start robbing your warehouses. Since you can still refuse them, this is of no real significance. The least important one is that Gossamer's henchmen will annoy you with further tribute demands almost every single month from now on. Instead, I'd advise ignoring tribute demands altogether. Fail to pay it back within the next few months and it will spiral out of control and become completely impossible to ever repay. Furthermore, if you're ever unlucky enough to get hit with a tribute demand at a point where you don't have nearly enough gold, it will result in a huge debt. You may be able to slowly get richer at first, but once you reach about 250.000.000 gold, the tribute demands will eat up your entire income and you'll never be able to hold onto any more gold for long. If you agree to pay, but don't have enough gold, the moneylender will pay the rest for you and add it to your debt.įrom my experience, paying tribute makes the game basically unwinnable. The precise amount of tribute seems to be random, but it generally scales with how rich you are. The biggest disadvantage of merchants is that they're occasionally asked to pay tribute to Gossamer. Due to poor game design, pirates have almost nothing but advantages over merchants. Douglas McGowan and Madame Tso are merchants, whereas Petra Gale and Gossamer are pirates. The four starting characters are divided into two groups. On the other hand, not fighting pirates allows you to sell all your cannons for extra cargo space. Defeating pirates makes future encounters increasingly stronger, forcing you to pay lots of gold for repairs. Like I said in my previous post, don't ever defeat pirates. The game is won when you have 1.000.000.000 gold. Okay, having played the game a bit more, I can now give you better tips.