Sea of Conquest guide for starting players

Main game

When you get into the main game, you’ll have a brief grace period before you reach around level 5. During that period, you can’t be targeted by other players. As long as you hold off on upgrading your flagship too much, you ought to be able to build up a solid foundation of resources and get through a good portion of the main questline before you’re vulnerable to being taken on by higher-level players. At the very least, you should be sure to get your first additional ship before upgrading your flagship to this threshold.

Sailing around the ocean will use up two crucial resources, sailors and supplies. Sailors represent the people working around your ship and are vital for crewing the various decks and rooms you build aboard your flagship, as well as representing the health of your ships. Supplies keep your sailors happy, and in turn, ensure faster sailing speed and better damage on the high seas. You can replenish both at port or cook meals aboard using ingredients you find in the galley.

If you want to level up, then it depends on what you’re looking to do: level up your heroes, your ship or your account. Levelling up your characters takes time and skill books you gain from completing missions and quests. Although you can use Emeralds in a pinch, this will unlock stronger stats - and duplicate rolls grant you resources to upgrade your character. To increase your Adventurer Level (the level of your account) that unlocks new missions and chapters in the story, you simply need to complete tasks, whether that be upgrading your ship, attacking armed freighters and merchant ships or sea monsters.

Exploration can be just as lucrative as fighting, and exploring the high seas, especially when other players are mainly focused on gunning each other down, is an easy way to find things like temples where you can gain bonuses, lone ships to pillage and more. You can also go to various ports, and, using your golden compass, scan the entire island for more information and knowledge about the seas.

Trading

Real-life pirates made just as much money from stolen goods as they did from looting gold and other treasure, possibly more. Naturally, in Sea of Conquest, one of the most valuable avenues you can explore is trading - simply check in at the trading venues and you can auto-select your most lucrative goods to sell off. Watch your reputation with the different groups as well as they can offer additional benefits and rewards so long as you don’t go around attacking their associated merchant vessels.

The goal of Sea of Conquest is to become the strongest (and the richest, naturally, given you’re a pirate), to build up your ship and gather the resources to do so. You’ll also add new ships to your fleet to accompany your flagship, which will let you take on more enemies as well as add more firepower to your group.

To achieve this, you’ll unlock new heroes to crew your ships that are specialised for certain roles - First Mate & Gunner for example - which corresponds to their optimal placement on the ship. Naturally, Captain characters will be the ones you want in charge. You’ll start off with Henry Hells, and through playing the story, you’ll pick up your first captain, Jango, who’ll crew your first additional ship.

You’ll have to consider a number of playing fields - the first is the high seas themselves. This is a strategy-style perspective where you sail across the seas to visit harbours and plunder ships. From there, on certain story missions or modes, you’ll either enter ship combat or hero combat. Both of these take an auto-battler approach where you directly control your ship or heroes respectively to unleash their powerful abilities to turn the tide of combat.

Combat: The mechanics of combat don’t need much explanation; if you’ve played an auto-battler before, you’ll already be quite familiar with them. But for a brief explanation, you don’t control your characters or their placements directly and they’ll make their regular attacks automatically. However, you’ll also have the opportunity to occasionally activate special abilities with powerful effects, such as buffs or damage, aside from levelling. This is why it’s key to pick and choose which characters you deploy carefully.


Trials: These are player vs NPC battles which allow you to accrue Emeralds and other rewards such as speedups by fighting it out with preset teams of enemies, usually generic NPCs and heroes. While they can be a bit monotonous, they’re an excellent way to build up your funds early on as well as accrue adventurer XP to move along the story.

Gangs: The SoC name for guilds; Gangs will typically reward you with some emeralds for joining up and offer the ability to participate in raids or offer to aid other players when needed. They also offer goals to work towards and the ability to occupy turf, which you can then use to expand your domain into a full-fledged pirate kingdom.

Artifacts: These are effectively powerful - but limited - abilities that you pick up during the story. You’ll start off with the Golden Compass which lets you locate buried treasure - although you’ll need a treasure map to find the general area of the treasure first. After that, you’ll gain access to the Storm Horn, which can boost your ship when sailing to enable you to reach locations faster.

Next is the Sea Soul Mirror, which offers you a free daily gacha pull to summon a new hero. After that, we have the two highest-tier artefacts you’ll only unlock a few hours down the line: the Eye of the Sea and the Hourglass of Time. The former lets you teleport to your gang’s Turf or a Gang Member once every five hours, while the latter offers a free 2h speedup for construction on your ship every 2h.

Treasure Maps: Maps to hoards of loot that you’ll find on occasion, Treasure Maps are relatively easy to use. Simply mark a location to sail to on your map that corresponds with the ‘x’ on the map, and then when you get there, use the Golden Compass in order to narrow down your search location until a ship packed with loot bobs to the surface.

Overall, if you follow some of the information in this guide, you should be well on your way to building up yourself as a pirate of ill-repute in no time. Just watch out for other players and focus on keeping out of the way of any major conflicts and you should be alright.

I hope this brief guide gives you an overview of what you can do to move forward with your domination of the ocean waves in Sea of Conquest!