Battle Pirates General Tips

Battle Pirates General Tips by Kevin Kilfoil

This may seem obvious, but maybe not to all:

If you analyze this game, you should quickly realize the (likely deliberate) developmental bottleneck:
THERE IS ONLY ONE WORKER.

The worker can only upgrade or build one thing at a time. Every upgrade requires a finite amount of time.

Therefore, EVERYTHING you do in this game should be geared towards keeping this worker upgrading, upgrading, upgrading 24/7/365.

Furthermore, the worker should only upgrade critical infrastructure. It might be nifty to have four level 9 storage silos, but if that means you are woefully behind in say, hull unlocking, because you did not upgrade your naval lab in the meantime, then it was a poor choice of priorities for your worker.

This leads us to some general observations:

1) Time is critical. The only thing that you cannot acquire through game-play is TIME. An hour wasted NOT upgrading something important is an hour gone forever.

2) Plan your upgrades such that upgrades are timed to happen while you are off-line (eating, exercising, working, etc). If you are going to sleep, maybe the 45 minute resource gatherer upgrade should be deferred, and the 6 hour silo upgrade (even if I do not need it right away) should be started now instead.

3) Only use gold to save upgrade time. At the moment, there is no way to ‘shortcut’ upgrading time other than ‘5 minute speedup’ and spending gold (shiny). There is at present no way to get more gold. Therefore, if you spend gold on ANYTHING other than a build/upgrade speedup, you have wasted irretrievable time.

4) Have resources ‘Just-In-Time’: If you find yourself with insufficient resources to upgrade something, then you did not plan correctly. If you have, say, 5 hours remaining on your current upgrade and the next thing you want needs 5m more of each resource than you have on-hand right now, work out how much your harvesters will earn in the meantime, and then go mine the rest. Once you have ‘enough’ oil , say, go get some other resource even if your ship at the oil well is not full.

5) Upgrades trump research. Remember that, in addition to upgrading, you will be spending resources on ships and research. Ensure that you allow for this in your planning for (4) above. At any given moment, if you have to choose between research and upgrading, ALWAYS choose upgrading (see point (1) ).

6) Mining quickly outperforms resource gathering. Once your fleets are of decent size, then upgrading resource gathers in your base has relatively little value. The 48 minutes (and 1.8m resources!) upgrading an oil rig from level 6 to 7 might not seem like much, but the gains will take a LOOOONG time to pay for themselves. Meanwhile a new ship ‘pays’ for itself after about 5 full cargoes and does NOT siphon away any upgrade time once the naval lab reaches the right level.

7) Long term planning Have a plan. Upgrades drive upgrades. If you will need a larger dock to handle the larger fleets that you someday will make, you should not upgrade the dock until you have upgraded the naval lab to be able to research the larger hull, etc. Think about the sequence you need. But remember the true and only goal: Keep your worker performing useful upgrades all the time.