Sea Battle

Sea Battles can be divided into two disciplines: Cannon and Melee. Both have a variety of skills which can help with your chosen discipline. Cannon, as it sounds, is bombarding your opponent with cannon, while melee uses your sailors to crush and destroy your opponents sailors. Both are powerful when used by a skilled player.

Cannon Battles

Cannoning is the typical choice for the beginner Maritimer. Cannon have a variety of shot and skills which can allow you to customize your own style. Your number of cannon is your main Battle strength.

The skills for cannoning are:

1. Gunnery : Your basic gun skill. It is passive, so it costs no Vigour and lets you reload faster and gives more accuracy.
2. Accuracy : Costs Vigour (20) and targets are easier to hit and you can fire your cannons at point blank range (no minimum range).
3. Ballistics : Costs Vigour(20) and extends cannon range.
4. Penetration : Costs Vigour(25) and does more damage.
5. Reloading : Costs Vigour and lets your guns reload faster.

Important notes:

• Hitting the back or front of an enemy ship causes a critical hit against the enemy for massive damage.
• Important - Every time an enemy scores a critical hit on your ship or you lose a battle, the durability of your ship will be lowered. This cannot lower your durability under 50% of your initial ship durability. There are two ways to fix the maximum durability:
  • Drawing "Judgement" from Tarot Cards.
  • Using Master- or Legendary craftsman's carpentry tools.
• Penetration (not the skill) is what determines the damage of your shots. The more penetration, the more damage you deal.

Tips:

• When facing Galleys there is an 'S' bombardment technique in which you move in an 's' shape to continually face your opponent's front and critically hit it. Use this to easily beat NPC galleys.
• Cannon (double shot) are considered the best for PVP, while Carronades (normal shot) are considered better for grinding.
• You can improve the shots also by some certain skills from Aide.

Melee Battles

Melee is the other way of sea battling. Typically, it is the chosen manner for pirates to use as you gain more goods and can steal money with this technique.

Your amount of crew, equipment (attack and defense), and swordplay skill determines attack and defense strength. To board a ship you have to get very close. At that point, melee battle will start automatically.
You have a defending and an attacking side. Attacker begins to strike and then defender strikes.
Attack is compared against defense and crew loss will be calculated.

Attack formula:

$\tfrac{C}{2} + Swms^* 5 + \tfrac{BtLv}{2} + SwR^* 3 + \tfrac{At}{4} + \tfrac{SlAb - 2}{10} - \tfrac{F + 5 - \alpha}{10}$

C = Crew
Swms = Special Weapon Melee Support
BtLv = Battle Level
SwR = Swordplay Rank
At = Equipment's Attack Stat
SlAb = Sailor's Ability
F = Fatigue
α = unknown

Defense formula:

$\tfrac{C}{4} + \tfrac{BtLv}{2} + 1stAR^* 3 + \tfrac{def}{3} + \tfrac{L - 1}{10}$

C = Crew
Swms = Special Weapon Melee Support
BtLv = Battle Level
1stAR = First Aid Rank
def = Equipment's Defense Stat
SlAb = Sailor's Ability
L = Fatigue
α = unknown

Besides swordplay, you have 4 other skills as well as items to help you in combat.

1. Assault : Raises user's own attack and kills more crew.
2. Guard : Raises user's own defense and lowers amount of wounded sailors.
3. Tactics : Raises user's defense and attack.
4. Gunfire : Lowers enemy attack and defense.

counters
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counters

Other useful skills for melee:

1. Rowing : If you have a boat with oars, it will dramatically increase your speed.
2. Aboardage : Gives you almost double the range in which it takes to start a melee battle.
3. Evasion : This skill is used to lessen hits from opponents.
4. Plunder : Passive. Allows one to gain more of the enemies trade goods from melee.
5. First Aid : This is useful to lessen the damage done to Sailors and increases the defense power slightly during melee battle.
6. Surgery : Recover crew who were killed in melee combat between fights (water is required). This skill can only be used in sea battle, but not when engaged in a melee fight. Best used between melee fights to recover your lost crew before your next fight (This skill is fleet wide. Very useful in big team fights, just like Repair).
7. Leadership : Is useful to stop disorder. If you are in disorder before you enter melee battle, you will lose 50% of your attack / defense, and the other person will gain 50-100% more attack/defense power.
8. Rescue : This skill recovers sailors lost by "Rough sea" when in battle. Not usable when in melee combat.

Final Notes:

• Occasionally when you are hit by cannon, you will become disordered. When this occurs, the attack of the disordered party will be dramatically reduced while in melee. The attack of the opposing party will be increased as well. Do not engage in melee while disordered. 
• If you get disordered during melee battle, then it won't apply the current melee battle you do.
• If you want to withdraw from melee battle, then it is strongly recommend to use "Bell of Withdrawal" instead the retreat button. Otherwise you may lose more sailors than usual, when it fails.
• Storage opposes Plunder. An equal storage rank may prevent plunder.
• Those, who are in melee battles, won't receive any critical hits from others. However it can hit your own ally as well.

What if I lost?

If you lose from either lack of sailors or lack of durability, you will become incapacitated. A white flag will show beside your name to represent a sunk ship. Often you may lose goods or money due to sinking.

You can:
A. Shipwreck: If total level < 20 you revive with full health & sailors on the spot. If not, you appear at the nearest port and you will lose all trade goods, some money, and some items.

B. Use Rescue skill: You or a fleet member can use Rescue to make your ship moveable again. It will revive sailors according to your rank or half your durability as needed when sunk. Lifesavers also have this effect.

C. Let your ship be hauled to the next port. Other player uses Haul or hauling rope to haul your ship to a port.

Caution: When using rescue skill, if all sailors are lost, it only revives a single sailor. It also makes you more susceptible to pirate attacks and ambushes.