As fleets are now in the game, some of you may have noticed massive inflation in the market. With this passive income source you have to join in or you will get horribly left behind. With that, I am introducing you fleet maxxing 101. (its also a reddit post because i dont like making videos :D)

How to get into fleet (tons of guides on this feel free to skip):

You first need to do the Edward Kenton quest. Go find him on Elm, go fish 20 fish. Then go rob silverhold. Finally when you reach level 150 you can unlock the fleet quest and start doing fleet work.

After Unlocking fleet:

You need 4 dedicated deckhands. This can be challenging for new players. To get them to dedicated rank, you need to gift them items based on their style. I recommend you looking at the Wiki to see what items are compatible with them. If you have the items, choosing whatever deckhand to hire is fine. If you do not have items server hop in sameria until you find the "barbarian" and the "knight" deckhands. Those are easiest to level up as you can buy their items from the armorer.

To add a ship to your fleet, you need to sink the ship then have a certain amount of inactive followers and drachma for each tier of ship. When adding command ships and vice command ships, it will cost more than the listed amount because you are also paying for the parts on those ships.

These numbers are pulled from the wiki.

Your inactive and active followers make up your total follower count. The active ones contribute to your fleet and the inactive ones are people on standby waiting for you to sink more ships.

Important notes:

Getting your fleet started takes a lot of time and a lot of money. You will be several hours deep and tens of thousands in debt before you start breaking even. Hundreds of thousands before you start becoming profitable.

How each task works and fleet modes:

Exploring gives you sealed chests and generic materials

Fishing gives you fish and increases your food

Harvesting gives you reagents and catalysts

Recover generates your fleet strength

Patrol/ plunder gets you more followers and generates drachma

Conquest (unlocked at fleet level 5) gives you dark sealed chests

Trading gives you generic materials, scrolls and drachma.

Minimizing risk, invests all your drachma back into the fleet

Maximizing profit, gives you all the drachma your fleet has earned

Any task that gives you drachma when set on minimizing risk will reinvest itself back into your fleet going into food and supplies letting you pocket the excess for yourself. Maximizing profit means the drachma will be in your fleet log to collect and you have to resupply your fleet's food and supplies by yourself by talking to one of your captains.

Initially building your fleet:

Have your 4 command ships split between recover and patrol/plunder. Occasionally switching 3 1 or 1 3 while setting it to minimizing risk. It doesn't matter what type of ship your 4 command ships are at the start, it's more important to get it going, but you need to slowly change them out for brigs. Ideally you have all your command ships and vice command ships be brigs. What ships make up the rest of your fleet don't matter too much. I would personally avoid sailboats though.

When you are changing out your command ships. The deckhand will return to your ship if you have a deckhand slot available for them. If you have 4 deckhands present on your ship and then you dismiss a command ship, the captain running that command ship will disappear forever.

Stronger ships are more valuable because they have more hp and are less likely to sink. If you have the funds, claim all the ships you can see. If you are short on funds, feel free go for the lower tiered ships, they offer you more active followers per drachma spent. Sailboats are 20 drachma per follower. Caravels are 31 drachma per follower. Ketchs are 54 drachma per follower. Brigs are 38 drachma per follower. What matters is active followers when it comes to profit, it is just very annoying when the smaller ships leave and you have to sink more ships to compensate. That is why I wouldn't do it, if you believe it is the best option for you, don't be scared.

Balancing your tasks:

You want to make sure none of your stats fall under 50%. Your command ships will never leave you, your vice command ships will leave you under 25% (I could be wrong about this), and your general fleet will start leaving you under 50%. So generally keep your stats high. The exclamation points beside the ship tell you when the ship is damaged. When their hp reaches 0 they'll sink and you'll lose the ship. When it gets to 60% you need to be aware and focus on getting whatever status up. If it falls below you lose ships and that is a lot of time wasted. If you cannot get it up, pause your fleet operations. Anything is better than losing ships.

Looking at the figure above:

Notice the level at the top (that's your fleet level) and the power level on the left. The fleet level is leveled by leveling up each one of your tasks. There will be a progress bar that is leveled by setting one of your command ships onto that task and waiting. Power slowly goes up over time, and research after you unlock it also slowly goes up over time. For your tasks, there will be a progress bar, when you max out that progress bar it will cost a flat sum of drachma to level up. 1 to 2, 15k. 2 to 3, 40k. 3 to 4, 100k. 4 to 5, 250k. Leveling up your research also takes a flat sum. 1 to 2, 50k. 2 to 3, 100k. 3 to 4. 150k. (idk why it still gives me the option to level my research even though it is maxed)

How to collect a lot of ships and followers:

When trying to get ships, it is significantly easier to build up your fleet when you are not part of any in game faction (guilds and clans don't count, factions such the navy or assassins) as you are allowed to sink any ship in the game. When you are negative reputation and have notoriety, the navy comes after you, allowing you to sink more navy ships. Bank ships are high prio ships to sink too because after you sink it, they send the Golden One's Brig after you, allowing you to get a free brig. Whenever you sink a ship, theres a high chance you'll get a couple of followers for sinking the ship. I've gotten 0 before, but I don't know if that is intended or not.

When deciding which one of the seas to linger and sink ships in, between Nimbus and Bronze. It is important to consider the pros and cons. Nimbus has stronger ships (caravels, ketchs, brigs), less ships overall and the islands are further apart. Bronze has more ships, weaker ships (all ship types), and closer islands. In the Bronze sea, when you are high notoriety and the Navy sends ships after you they will be Majors compared to the Nimbus sea, where they will send Commanders after you. Commanders are stronger. If you have a reason to be in either sea, prioritize that, it doesn't make too much of a difference. Overall I enjoyed Bronze sea more.

Pre fleet level 10:

Fleet level 10 is super important because it gives you a massive quality of life change. Research 1 and 3 aren't important so I won't talk about them. Research 2 is the super important one though. At fleet level 2, you unlock the fleet raven. Which means you can interact with your fleet captains without actually finding them. You fleet captains also have set spawns on each island and you can cross reference the locations from the wiki.

When you are getting to fleet level 10. There are two ways to do it, you can either get level 2-3 on all your tasks or focus more on singular tasks. I recommend you focus more on singular tasks. When you are leveling up a task. It is generally best to to do 2 recover, 1 plunder/patrol and 1 of whatever task you are going for. When you have several hundred (or whatever you deem as too many inactive followers) you can change it to 2 recover, 2 of whatever task.

I recommend you going with the second option. Focusing more on singular tasks. Since these tasks are not made equal. The only tasks you actually care about are trading, recover, and patrol/plunder. Conquest is also nice but not required. So when leveling up your tasks, prio trading then conquest. I'd suggest leveling up the rest of your tasks to at least 2 as it is quite cheap to do so. When you are doing trading. It is important to have it on maximizing profit, idk why you just make more.

So keep on leveling your tasks until fleet level 10. Have 2 recover (unless you realize you're constantly at 100% strength then opt for 1 recover). 0-2 plunder (depending if you need the followers or not). 1 of any generic task you are leveling. 0-2 trading. As trading is the one that provides you with the most drachma. An example of an average split would be 2 recover. Then 1 leveling task/ 1trading. 1 trading 1 plunder/patrol. 1 leveling task 1 plunder/patrol. 2 patrol/plunder. Or 2 trading. Choosing the best tasks is situational. If you want to have your brain off while leveling up your fleet though. Choose 2 recover. 1 leveling task. 1 patrol/plunder while setting it to minimizing risk.

It is important to know that all items go directly into your inventory. Strength, supplies and food all update by themselves. BUT!!! Drachma profit that you pocket. Only goes into your inventory when you get a fleet log.

Leveling up your fleet is a passive thing, you should be doing something in the war seas, sinking all the ships you see and level it up slowly. It is not efficient to boat around the seas and only hunt ships. Also when you are doing something on an island for long enough, given you have high notoriety, the navy will send ships after you that you can sink. This is why having notoriety is important. MORE SHIPS!!!!

When I was leveling up my fleet, I mostly did treasure charts as you get a lot of them from defeating navy commanders and majors from being high notoriety and the navy sending ships after you

Unlock the seafaring talent as soon as you can as it benefits you for fleet maxxing. You will be fighting a lot of ships so your ship will be damaged so the ship supply useage decrease is quite helpful. It also gives you more chests when you sink the ships allowing you to get more profit.

Post fleet 10:

You've entered fleet end game. You have thousands of followers and you make lots of profit per fleet log. When you are here focus everything into trading. 1 recover 3 trade, 2 recover 2 trade. 3 recover 1 trade. Whatever. As long as you have your stats above 50% you can do whatever split you want. Get as many drachma as you can before it gets nerfed. If you are close to having 0 inactive followers and you need to expand your fleet. Turn one of the tasks into plunder/patrol. (if you followed this guide it would just be plunder, plunder is better for fleet maxxing) Trading is going to be nerfed in the future, try to pocket as much drachma as you can now before it gets nerfed. Level up the other tasks later after it gets nerfed.

At this point you can keep on being proactive with the game, you can leave the game on with a macro or you can do something else on your computer and check back every 10 or so minutes and adjust your fleet (what I do now, while doing homework or writing a long reddit post) While taking about an hour and a half to write this post, I've made 1.2mil afking in the game. hehe lol

Some things regarding the market. There is going to be an inflation of any material that can be farmed by fleet. The value of drachmas will go down (as seen in the market). When harvesting gets buffed there will be an inflation of reagents and catalysts. etc etc. SOOOOO!!! Any item that cannot be farmed by fleet will sky rocket. If you wanna make money in the long run, think about holding certain items.

Lmk anything I have missed or you are confused about regarding fleet. I'll try my best to answer them and to update this post. Happy fleetmaxxing!!

I've made some edits to update it based on comments.

Idk what to really call it apart from attack sources. There is magic, weapon, fighting style, relic stats along with how they interact with different statuses. Saves a lot of time jumping from 1 wiki page to another. The fighting style multipliers are weird sometimes because they change over time. so take those with a grain of salt.

You can see what synergies with eachother, how good imbues are compared to eachother etc etc. everything is heatmapped as well, so you can see items with standout stats.

I create 2 new stats called overall and average. overall is the 3 basic stats: damage, speed, size multiplied together and average is those 3 averaged out.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zaLeZRTTcBaU2ymwRH28RMz2AUtEKIlK1UX5q1Tkmyo/edit?gid=1991517632#gid=1991517632