Picaroon Online Beginner’s Guide

Picaroon Online Beginner’s Guide by RaskVann

Introduction:
You’ll start the world with a single island under your control and minus a few tips not much in the way of how your supposed to go about ruling the known world. This guide is written in the hopes to speed up your knowledge of the game and how to ultimately get within the top ten players with the most points.

Getting Started:
You’ll want some resource buildings of each type, 6 each is a safe number until you have most of your major buildings up and running so go ahead and build 6 of fish huts, foresters, and mines.

Definition – “Free Space” – Building something in an area where no other building can be placed, or reliably placed.
i.e. Foresters in forests, Mines on rocks, and fish huts on small beaches

The Farm:
The foundation for all of the highest tier units you can build, due to its size however many islands won’t be able to support one, because of the limited areas on any given island you can place one I’d highly suggest placing a farm first (preferably only one)

Reasoning: So you don’t accidentally build something that blocks the ability for the farm to be built which will cause you to have to demolish potential hours of upgrades on a building you simply placed in a inopportune place.

Warnings/Tips:
-A secondary features of the farm is it is just as big as an air pad which means if your like me and can’t trust yourself to leave room for air pads later on you can simply plop as many level 1 farms as you can fit on an island and simply replace them with air pads when you have the capabilities.
-Just because you can build a farm doesn’t mean you always should. If a there isn’t room for a cotton mill at least in addition to your other buildings it is best if you put other buildings here, this will come with experience more then anything.
-Contrary to what you might think, farms don’t give you a tremendous amount of food, continue building sea fishing huts and fishing huts for food production.

Fish Huts:
Are only buildable along the shores of your island, mousing over flatland will show you where you can build these. Building fish huts near obstructions like forests or mountains will allow you to use up a space for food production where almost no other building would otherwise fit. Otherwise as long as you keep your fish huts as close together as possible they generally take up so little space that you usually won’t have a problem later on.

Foresters:
Are the only building that can be build inside or around trees and also due to the large amount of forests on most islands is a easy way to have a surplus of wood to start tributing without losing productivity elsewhere. The most you should ever build is 50 since as of right now you can’t tribute more then 50k of any given resource and 50 max level foresters will give you just over 50k input an hour.

Mines:
Are the only buildings that can be built on stone (gray rocks) or metal (black with horizontal stripe rocks). These rocks are usually in far less abundance then forests are which means “free space” mines that will be built on rocks that would otherwise be wasted can be hard to come by sometimes. If you find a new island or are wondering what to build on an island, start cutting back on mines first since you generally need less of them to keep you going as compared to what you need for wood. I generally try to keep 2-3 mines on my islands at a minimum and shoot for 5 that way I can build quickly if I have to. However some islands have an abundant amount of iron and rocks in which case build as many mines as you need to fill the “free space” and simply tribute your extra amount.

First Upgrades:
Congrats, in the time it took you to place all the buildings at least one of your foresters should be completed or near completed in which case the dockyard will be unlocked. You’ll want to build one immediately so you can start building scouts which will help you figure out where you’ll be expanding and later on light bombers so you can take islands for your own. If you’d like you can also place a second dock so when you start upgrading your docks to build later buildings you can continue to build out of one as well as build two different types of ships (or one type twice as fast) when your island is fully developed. Any more then this will hurt your initial resource production substantially so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Shipyards are best placed on either a mini island surrounding your main island or on an extensive beach, due to their bigger size it’s usually best to offset them to hug one side of the beach or the other instead of the dead center where more inland buildings are more likely to be placed.

Now when you decide where to place your shipyard you also want to upgrade two of all of your resource buildings (forester, fish hut and mines) to level two, do this by either clicking on your island and finding the buildings under the resource tab or right click (and hold) on the buildings in the 3D world in order to see the in-game menu.

These will take a little longer (about 3 minutes) but will unlock the next tier of buildings and give you a significant boost in resources/hour.

Your First Scouts:
Now while your waiting for your upgrades to finish you’ll want to find some islands so when you are able to build light bombers you can start colonizing new islands and upgrade your civilization much faster. Since scouts, while helpless, are dirt cheap you’ll want to build 4-9 scouts so you can scout in every direction for more islands. You’ll find the game was nice enough to generate a few islands in the next spaces over however you’ll have to be quick enough to grab them before someone else does and then send your scouts on as long of a trip as you can (hold and drag left mouse to move the 2D world without losing your movement selection on your scout and then left click down a column or row to get him moving on his several hour trip to hopefully discover 1/40th of the map (the map is separated into 40 columns and 40 rows).

Pro Tip: Islands don’t generate near the edges of the grid on each of these rows/columns, which means if you have your scouts hug the outer lines you’ll typically be able to scout many areas without running into islands or ships with defenses that would do your scouts harm. However many other players know this and sometimes will leave defensive ships in random corners throughout the map for there own scouting purposes in which case your scouts may be shot at by mistake or if you linger to long in a given area.

Second Tier:
Congrats you’ve reached your next milestone, you can now build a timberyard, smelter and stone mason (*). The all increase resource production and the stone mason repairs buildings as well however none of them do so efficiently so only build one for now (stone mason will be a special case we get into later). Pick a spot for each and make sure your cramming each as close together as possible either next to each other or next to another barrier so that other buildings can take up that extra space later. Level 1 of each of these buildings will unlock the interceptor (anti scout ship with level 1 smelter), house (increased population with level 1 stone mason) which both can be ignored for now (population doesn’t become a problem until later and anti-scouts much more expensive then scouts and are completely useless against anything other then scouts).

(*)and sea fishing hut, this can be ignored for now since it does less food production for the space it takes however is good due to its enhanced health to resisting sieges so will be good for later consideration

You’ll want to upgrade your timberyard to level 2 next (if you can upgrade all of your tier units to tier 2 to start unlocking most of the tier 3 buildings), your timberyard will allow you to build light bombers and light cutters which will enable you to take islands for yourself.

Third Tier:
-You almost have defenses and can start building up your economy, keep up the good work.

Fourth Tier:
-You have defenses and are working towards airships now (if your island can support one)

Food Warning:
The only resource that can ever achieve a negative value is your food. Every building constructed and upgraded will use up every more food and if food every reaches 0 your loyalty and resource production will drop tremendously and allow others to take your island a lot easier.

If you ever reach a point where you have -food/hour and 0 food stored, go ahead and either build more food resource buildings along your coast and upgrade all food resource buildings as much as you can. They will take just as much time to upgrade or build regardless of the amount you do so you mise as well do all you can. Until you fix this problem you’ll only be able to build food resource buildings anyway.

New Settlements:
When you scout for new islands you’ll come across three types of islands, small, medium and giant islands and each of these will have a chance of having a volcano or a mountain on it, due to the ability of most buildings only being able to be placed on large open area this means the largest, flattest islands are the rarest and most sought after.

Volcano Islands- Anyone can take these islands early on due to the constant state of depression citizens will be in while buildings get destroyed however once you get 2-3 stone massons and level 2-4 buildings on the island they should be as reliable as an other island with the exception of being of being slightly more vulnerable then usually when the volcano erupts. Makes small islands completely useless in some cases.

Small “I can’t build anything here” islands- Good for tributing, impossible to reliably defend.

Medium Islands- A place to station defenses for some ship building and tributing however don’t expect much else

Giant Islands- A rare sweet necture due to their ability to produce massive amounts of defenses, airships and resources and still have left over space

Specials:
-Your key to an easy flawless defense (and in some cases an easy victory).

Upgrade Plans:
-Getting to level 4 buildings without trying. (assuming it didn’t stall itself)

Settlement Summery Screen:
-Your world at a glance, very helpful for keeping an eye on your islands when you start getting a good amount of them

Alliances:
-Its good to have friends and stick together, however there is no penalty for leaving one and immediately betraying your once friends. Be careful.

Tribute:
-Gaining more points then everyone else without having to do anything.

Defenses:
-If you have enough, you’ll get more points then you could ever imagine by someone simply attacking you, however they won’t make that mistake twice.

Cannons: Early on this will be your most effective means of protecting yourself however these don’t specialize in killing anything and are unable to attack airships, build-able in relatively small areas anywhere on land.

Lens Defense: Specialize in attacking airships however can attack at the same range as Cannons and will hit air and land targets just as easily. Build-able on slightly larger areas of land that cannons use.

Fire Defense: Shoot torpedoes at ships, specialize in defense against ships and accordingly won’t attack airships. Can only be built on medium pieces of shoreline (less then docks but more then sea huts).

Airships:
-The ship that only has a light cutters or lens defenses to counter them. Also the key to destroying all the buildings on an island and racking up some insane points.