When I first heard about Player-Owned Ports update, I immediately thought of the Sailing skill, which was a hugely speculated skill release back in 2010. Ships, captains and sailing definitely reminded me of the much rumored skill.
So far, I am pretty excited about this minigame and have been religiously checking on my ports on a daily basis. I've come to see it as a more interactive, engaging and improved version of the Managing Miscellania minigame. I think there is a rather gentle learning curve, but the difficulty increases rather exponentially as you unlock new regions.
At the point of writing, I have the Scythe region unlocked and I'm collecting the parts of the forgotten scroll so that I can make the Tetsu helm. Another great incentive to boost my Smithing, I must say. Smithing has been stagnant at 82 for a couple of months now, and the ability to smith Tetsu helms would potentially help me recoup some losses from buying that Christmas Tree Hat.
In retrospect, there were some things I'd probably do differently if I were to start from scratch. Hopefully these tips would be helpful to someone else who hasn't progressed as far.
1. Upgrade the deck items first. They seem to always give more skill points than other parts of the ship. I stick to this rule whenever I unlock new regions now.
2. Have 1 ship doing long(er) missions while you have another ship collecting resources more quickly. The ship that is collecting extra resources could also be utilized to train crew that needs leveling up.
3. Upgrade your office as soon as possible. An additional ship really makes a difference.
4. Adventurer re-rolls can be used even after you've sent your ship on a special mission. In other words, the re-roll would give you an addition special mission to attempt.
5. Personal preference, I don't like to spend resources/chimes on speed crew or upgrades unless I have an obscene amount of leftover resources. When you progress into the game, 10 minute cut from 5 hours isn't exactly worth it.
6. This doesn't have anything to do with POP progress per se, but once you've built a workshop, you now have a quiet one-click bank that you can train skills at.
POP is probably my favorite update in a while and I can actually see myself investing quite a bit of online time here. A new D&D called God Statues was released quite recently. I'll probably write another review once I've gotten the chance to try it out.
