Hit Leave Port! (you may need to hit skip on your tutorials if you haven’t already done that, but surely you have, haven’t you?) Now you’re ready set sail and rake in dat $$$. I recommend Double Charge to give you an edge in combat, but Fleet Control is also very useful once you’re ready to start capturing new ships to take for yourself. These are semi-permanent upgrades for you, so pick something juicy that will help you advance. Most of them are locked, but you should have 1 point to spend. One more thing before you leave: Check out the Perks window. I hope you know your Caribbean geography. Take the Rank 7 Kill mission – it should give you a target for a single enemy Rank 7 ship, and place a swords marker on your map somewhere sorta-kinda near your home port. But garbage with potential, and I’m going to help you realize that potential. That’s you, you and your basic ♥♥♥♥♥ boat are Rank 7 garbage. Open the Quest window, and look for a Kill mission at Rank 7. So how do you get that sweet cash and start moving up in the world? The easiest way I’ve found is to take a Quest. Speaking of $0, that’s what you start with. It will serve its purpose, however, and better yet, it’s free! You can get sunk again and again and again if that’s your style, because you can always buy a new Basic Cutter for $0 at your home port’s Ship Auction screen. Once you’re done with the tutorials for the time being, you’ll be in your nation’s capital with a Basic Cutter. That’s the spirit! (no, but seriously, at least do the first four)
When you do come back to them, completing the regular exams nets you an important promotion and a free corvette, and completing the final exam gives you another big promotion and a respectable frigate. Just hit SKIP, and you can come back and do them later. You can and probably should skip them for now until you’ve played around with the basics for a few hours. Attempting them is free, however, and you do not need to do them right away if they’re a little overwhelming. If you’re struggling with the game, do yourself a favor and learn the ropes in PvE first.Īfter the first four tutorials are four exams followed by a final exam. Many of the basics covered here are applicable to PvP to various extents, but the PvP ruleset introduces extra complexities, difficulties, and about seven different strains of virulent cancer which are beyond the scope of this guide. First, it should be noted that this guide assumes you are playing on the PvE (Peace) server. That’s a thing you can actually do in this game, but we’ll cover that later. Everything in here is stuff I’ve either figured out myself using mystical clairvoyance, or things I’ve divined from peering into ancient star charts written years ago by overzealous 18th century naval enthusiasts posting cryptic gobbledeguk (Steam censors that when spelled properly hilarious) on wikis. This makes an otherwise excellent game pretty brutal on new players ergo, this guide, written in the hopes of helping new players figure out WTactualF is going on. Looking around, most of the information about this game is either hopelessly out of date, or requires Bletchley Park to decipher. Naval Action is a fascinating game – unfortunately, it’s also a very obtuse, opaque, and sometimes downright byzantine game with a grueling learning curve.