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Pirate guide: the traffic reader

What a pirate does

Everyone else reads the map to avoid trouble. A pirate reads it to be the trouble. Pirates sit on busy water and tax what passes, stop individual ships for tribute, board them, and run contraband to havens where nobody asks questions. There is no real-time combat: every encounter is a card with its odds shown, rolled once by the server.

Piracy has firm limits. Ships under the rookie shield, relief cargo and ships of your own company are never your targets. Policed waters (the seas of the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Norway, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and a few others) show no pirate cards at all, and pirates cannot hold station inside them. Ships are never sunk or taken for good: the worst a victim suffers is a capped loss of money and time.

How Pirate earns

Toll shifts: sit on a heat zone for a shift (24 game hours at tier 1, up to 72 at tier 5) and tax the traffic that crosses it. Pay rises with the zone's traffic, your tribute nodes and your infamy, and falls when a Shepherd is suppressing the zone. Every shift warms the zone, which brings the Shepherds. Busy straits such as the Gulf of Aden, the Malacca Strait and the Rhodes Gap pay more.

Prey: ships at sea within reach, NPC traffic or other captains' ships, each shown with its odds and the tribute it would pay, 10% of its cargo value. A player's ship answers by its standing order: pay, refuse, or refuse only when your odds look poor. If she pays, you collect. If she refuses and you win, you take more. If she refuses and holds, you pay her a forfeit of a quarter of the tribute.

Seizure: click any ship at sea and choose what to take: tribute, ransom (12% of the cargo value, capped by what her owner has), part of her cargo, or her fuel. One boarding is one roll, and every take after the first lowers the odds and adds infamy and heat. Taking her fuel makes your way home free and leaves her drifting for 12 game hours with an SOS call. Stolen goods are damaged and sell at a discount, best at a haven.

Contraband (after Smuggler's Charter): tariff-free runs to a haven, or riskier gray runs to ordinary ports, with a customs roll (30% at a haven, 45% on a gray run, less with nodes) and a fine of 80% of the pay if caught. A haven that has received no legal cargo for two days pays 30% more.

Infamy and berths

A pirate's Elo is infamy, stored as a negative number: a toll shift, tribute or boarding pushes it further down. Infamy raises the tribute ships pay you, and it opens premium prey cards at 200, 400, 800 and 1,200, read on its size. It also closes doors. The sixteen havens (Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut, Lagos, Dakar, Mombasa, Djibouti, Jeddah, Colombo, Jakarta, Manila, Kingston, Cartagena, Santos, Port Blair and Malé) always take you. Below 300 infamy every port does. Above it, small and medium ports take you for a blind-eye fee ($500 or $1,500) and the big ports turn you away. Plan where you will berth before a raid.

The hulls

A Skiff costs about $50,000. Pirate earnings sit below Cargo at the low and middle tiers by design (piracy should not be the easy money) and rise sharply at tier 5. Range for a seizure counts both legs, out to the target and back to a berth that will take you.

The upgrade tree

The Pirate Bridge is reconnaissance: Traffic Telescope shows the cargo value behind each tribute, Spotter Network shows cargo and destination, Loiter Optimization burns 25% less fuel on station, Quick Anchor halves the sail to a toll station, and Fear Banner adds tribute. Each hull commits to one branch for good:

Risks and counters

A refusal you lose costs a forfeit, and the forfeit grows with every extra take on a seizure, so high-odds targets are worth more than rich but escorted ones. An escort adds 400 to a target's defense. Your own warming of a zone draws Shepherds, whose suppression cuts toll pay, and whose patrols cool the zone afterwards. Smuggling has a customs roll and a heavy fine. Above 300 infamy the big ports close to you, so keep a haven in range of every hunting ground.

How Pirate fits with the other callings

You are the reason Shepherds have work and traders post tenders. Draining a ship's fuel creates an SOS call that only Tankers can answer, and leaving a ship unrescued shows where the danger is. Legal cargo arriving at a haven keeps its fence prices normal. Starve a haven of legal trade for two days and contraband there pays 30% more. A Pirate surge or a flare-up on the news is a good time to hold station, but the Shepherds read the same news.

Your first hour

Your first ten landings are under the rookie shield like everyone else's. You are invisible to other pirates, and you can still work. Turn on the heat layer, open your Skiff's board and compare the toll shifts by what you keep per hour. Take one on a nearby zone outside policed water. Then look at the prey cards, pick one with good odds and a modest tribute, and learn how the roll and the forfeit feel. Buy Traffic Telescope and Loiter Optimization early, and note which havens lie within your range.

Tips

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