This guide will give you a basic tutorial on how to handle ship combat in Seablip.
Definitive Guide to Combat
Before Getting Started
The game has an interesting combat system, but it’s hard to learn and the instructions for beginners aren’t very good. I failed almost every battle in the first hour or two of the game, and I couldn’t find much help on how the system works. Now that I understand how things work, I want to share what I learned so that beginners can get to the fun part of the game faster.
This guide will only cover the basics, including how things work and some basic strategies. It’s not about how to beat certain bounty bosses, and I might not be 100% right.
Before the Battle – About Ship Combat
This part of the guide will tell you about Ship Combat in general, including the encounter, how to win, and what you get out of it.
Ship combat explained
Ship combat is a big part of the game, maybe the most important. When you leave land and start traveling in the ocean, you can start a ship combat with any ship you run into.
Ship combat is a fight to the death, mainly for you. You might be able to capture your enemies, but you always die if you lose. Dying means you lose all your crew members and the rest of the day. You get to keep the ship, and losing crew members doesn’t always mean losing them forever (This might be a slight spoiler, so the guide won’t cover this part at all).
How to win
There are three ways you can win/lose a ship combat:
- Killing all the enemy crew members / All your crew members get killed (Your character will only get stunned and can’t fight for the rest of the combat).
- Destroy the ship by reducing its health to zero / Having your hull health reduced to zero.
- Destroy the ship by sinking it / having the sink level bar filled.
The corresponding parts from the UI
We will get into how to achieve each of those conditions in detail later in the guide.
What you need to win a battle?
Winning the combat not only keeps you alive, but also gives you a few loot options.
When you win the combat in one of the three ways above, you either get to examine the ship right away (if you killed all the crew members), have a chance to repair it (if it was destroyed), or you will lose the ship (if you sunk it). Either way, it breaks down into two general situations:
Having the ship remain intact / patched
You may have to spend a bunch of wood to get into this condition.
At this stage, you can examine the ship (with or without upgrades, depending on if it was left intact or patched), and you have an option to keep it (swap with your ship / add it to your ship magic bottle) or give up on it.
Important: ship magic bottle is different from magic bottle, which is for storing crew members!
Either way, you will get the loot from the ship.
Having the ship sunk, leaving only debris
In this case, you either enter this stage right away or you have to give up on repairing it. Anyways, in this stage you will get three options:
- Repair Parts: You can restore hull health by a huge amount (usually 8), this is good if you are far from home.
- Ship Upgrades: You can randomly obtain one upgrade from the sunk ship, you can also get nothing by chance.
- Item and Gold: You can get a bunch of gold and potentially items. You will get them anyways if the ship remained intact or gets repaired.
However, you only get one of the above in this case.
You may also get a few wood after exiting the battle and start navigating again (as floating wood around the location of combat).
What to do if you’re losing
When you know that you are losing the combat / bumped into a very powerful ship, you still have a chance to not lose it all.
There is an escape button at the bottom left of the screen. Once it is fully charged, you can hit it and escape without losing anything really. (You do lose the enemy ship for the rest of the day, even if it’s a bounty boss)
The button charges depending on how strong your enemy is. To hit it, you need to have it fully charged. It also requires you to have one crew member that operates the helm, and the helm must remain intact.
Your enemy could also escape. The game will send you a warning a couple seconds before they do so. You can stop them by either destroying their helm or destroying them.
On another note, the enemy can also ask to surrender by paying a little bit of gold or items. Usually it is much less than destroying them, so I personally just keep going with no mercy.
Upgrades and Damages
Damage Types
It’s very important to know the different types of damage so you understand what each perk means.
When you look at an upgrade, especially cannons, you’ll see three types of damage: ship damage, crew damage, and upgrade damage. This was confusing to me at first. Why talk about upgrade damage when you already have ship and crew damage? Well, these three each mean the damage you do to that thing. For example, upgrade damage means “The damage you do to upgrades”, not the damage of this upgrade.
Now let’s look at each type of damage individually:
Ship Damage
This is the damage done to the health of your hull on the very top. Your ship would be destroyed once you lose all hull health. There are also various environmental damage that could affect your ship hull health, but we will get to that later.
Crew Damage
This is the damage done to the crew member. When a crew member loses all their health, they die (except you, but it’s the same effect), meaning that they can no longer participate in the rest of the combat (unless you revive them via certain upgrades under certain conditions).
Without additional perks, crew members when boarding enemy ship will only seek to combat with enemy members, and the damage they do is crew damage.
Upgrade Damage
This is the damage done to other upgrades. Instead of numbers, you get a few categorical labels: Weak, Average, Great and Powerful. They correspond to the health level of each upgrade: Weak, Average and Strong (I don’t recall having a powerful-corresponding health level, but in case there is, you can easily tell by the color code).
Only when you have equal or higher upgrade damage to enemy upgrade’s health level, your attack would be able to destroy that upgrade. This is extremely important as it will heavily affect your combat strategies!
Environmental Damage
In this game, there is also environmental damage. This damage is converted to ship, crew, or upgrade damage. Environmental damage includes icebergs, sharks, and various elemental damage.
- Iceberg: Occasionally occurs. It damages the ship or upgrades at the bottom floor (near the water surface).
- Shark: Occasionally occurs. It does a huge amount of damage to crew members hit. As far as I know, it only affects crew members at the bottom floor.
- Electric Damage: Damages upgrades and crew members. Usually an instant damage upon certain upgrades or lightning strikes. It deals double damage if the area of impact has water, and it will spread to everything in the water.
- Toxic Damage: Continuously damages crew members. Cannot be extinguished if it is meant to last a certain amount of seconds. As far as I know, it does not stay on crew members for long if they exit the area of impact, maybe like one additional time. If ignited, it will cause an explosion.
- Fire Damage: Damages upgrades and crew members, and also the ship if there is an explosion or it is not extinguished. Fire will spread to the entire area if not extinguished. Upgrades cannot be repaired while fire is in the area. Crew members will automatically try to extinguish fire before repairing the upgrade.
Basic Ship Combat: Ship
It’s very important to know about ships before we look at the various upgrades in this game. There are a lot of properties attached to a ship, some of which are somewhat hidden and may not be obvious when you look at them.
Let’s look at the top left corner line by line.
Ship Health
- Ship health shows how much ship damage you can take before your ship is destroyed.
- You can upgrade it with gold and iron bars via upgrade shops or merchant ships.
Evasion Maneuvers
- Evasion Maneuvers shows the maximum evasion bar and the time it takes to charge each bar.
- Higher evasion charges means a higher chance of dodging cannon attacks.
- In general, the smaller the ship, the faster it charges up the maneuvers.
Room Sizes
- This shows the size of areas where you can install upgrades.
- Each square is a unit of size, so a 3-square area can fit anything under 3 squares.
- A 4-square area can fit two 2-square upgrades.
- This does not include the wheelhouse or any ship-specific upgrades.
Door Strength and Max Crew Size
- Door Strength: This feature is not released yet at the time of this guide.
- Max Crew Size: Shows the number of crew members (excluding yourself) you can have on the ship. This also affects how many crew members you can hold. For example, when switching to a ship with a smaller crew size, you will have to kick out extra crew members to fit.
Ship-specific Upgrades
- Better ships usually have unique upgrades specific to that ship.
- You can usually get these ships from ship merchants or bounty ships.
- For example, this ship of mine has “magic shield”, which automatically shields me occasionally. It operates on its own, so no crew members are needed or can be assigned to it. It also can’t be looted, meaning I can’t move it or remove it from the ship.
- These upgrades are usually not selectable, since no crew members can repair them if they break. However, they are usually attached to the wheelhouse, where the helm is. Destroying the wheelhouse will usually also destroy the upgrades, but repairing the wheelhouse also repairs the upgrade.
- Ships may have more than one ship-specific upgrade. Usually, the more the better.
Hidden Features
There are also some hidden features about each ship that you might want to consider when choosing your ship. These are passive facts about the ship that are not quantifiable, but they’re important when planning your attack strategy.
Indoor Area and Outdoor Area
- Areas are not just defined by their size. Depending on the ship orientation, an area can be either indoor or outdoor.
- This affects installable upgrades (e.g. certain cannons can’t be installed indoors) and damage types (e.g. lightning from the sky only strikes outdoor areas).
- Some ships may lack areas in general, but offer better oriented areas.
Floor Area and Top Area
- This is similar to the above, but it tells you the spatial orientation of areas.
- Floor areas are close to the sea surface and are subject to hull breaches (water leaks), icebergs, and shark attacks (anything from under the water).
- Top areas are usually outdoors, meaning they are vulnerable to lightning strikes and any dropping attacks like parrots or squids.
- Hull breach is a serious hazard. Not only do you lose if it keeps leaking and sinks you, it also slows down crew members on the entire floor and leaves you vulnerable to lightning.
- A long ship usually has quite a few floor areas, which makes the ship very vulnerable to hull attacks.
- This is also tied to the next point about distances, because top areas are usually harder to get to in battle.
Distance between areas
- During battle, it’s normal to re-orient your crews. In these cases, the distance for them to navigate is an important feature.
- Some rooms are accessible from nearly all directions, meaning you can quickly send crew members for repairs.
- However, some areas like the top ones require climbing tall ladders and usually only have one access direction. This puts you at a big disadvantage if your opponent’s attack is rapid and destructive.
- It’s also worth noting that when two areas are next to each other, you risk having them both destroyed by a single carefully aimed cannon.
Wheelhouse Location
- The wheelhouse is one of the most important areas of your ship, if not the most important.
- You need it to increase evasion maneuvers, escape, and support all your attached ship-specific upgrades.
- It’s important to recognize which of the above areas your helm is in. This makes it either easily accessible and repairable, or vulnerable to all kinds of attacks.
Basic Ship Combat Guide: Upgrades
I personally would put upgrades into four general categories: Cannons, Environmental, Boarding, and Support. There are also three types of operation for these upgrades: Crew-operated, Monkey-operated, and Self-operated. I will discuss each of these in detail.
Cannons
- Cannons are probably the most common and crucial type of upgrade.
- Upon the Reload-Aim-Fire cycle, they deal ship, crew, and upgrade damage on impact.
- Not all cannons do all three types of damage, but most do. You can find this information in their description.
The Reload-Aim-Fire cycle describes how a cannonball is fired:
- The operating crew member reloads the cannon.
- They aim at the previously selected target.
- They fire the cannonball.
- A new cycle starts.
If you haven’t previously aimed at any spot, the cannons will not fire. If you select a crew member and don’t click anywhere, it will hold its fire until you fire the shot. This is very important when dealing with opponents that potentially have a shield. If you don’t time the cannons right, you won’t be able to hit them at all.
The aiming system is not very intuitive. Here is a diagram of how to do it step by step:
You can also click crew members on the ship to do it. However, I don’t recommend this because it sometimes triggers other events like swapping positions or boarding. I recommend doing it via the little menu at the bottom.
A very crucial and important aspect in the later stages of the game is SHIELD. Almost all higher level ships in the later stages have a shield, and you will likely have one too. Shields block all cannonballs’ damage and effect! This is why it’s always important for you to develop some sort of anti-shield strategy sooner or later. Thankfully, other types of upgrades can somewhat handle that.
Environmental
- In contrast to cannons, environmental upgrades attack your opponents through the environment.
- Whether it’s dropping bombs from the sky or water grenades from beneath the water, they will not be blocked by shields!
- Environmental upgrades can generally be divided into two types: Sky type and Water type. It indicates where the attack will be performed from.
- Sky type environmental upgrades attempt to drop stuff from the sky, like parrots carrying bombs, flying squids, or slimes. It will come from the top and first impact your top areas.
- Water type environmental upgrades come from beneath the water and first impact your floor areas.
- Both types usually inflict a large amount of ship damage, minor crew and upgrade damage. Many of them are combo-ed with elemental damage and hull breaches, making them quite annoying to deal with.
Although these seem to make up for the cannon’s weakness, they are not perfect:
- Many of them have direct counters that neutralize their effect. For example, monkey watchtowers can prevent parrots from coming near; lightning poles can redirect lightning damage away and use it to attack sky type environmental upgrades. If your ship has no way to disable those counters, these upgrades become essentially useless.
- They are usually monkey-operated or self-operated, and their cooldown is way too long compared to cannons. Most of them will likely get destroyed after one or two attacks at most. They are way less effective in many situations, sometimes even when there are shields.
As you can see from the image I shared, I have no environmental upgrades installed on my primary ship, mostly because of powerful cannon and boarding/support upgrade combos. They are definitely good to have though, just don’t let them be the dominant damage source of your ship!
Boarding
- Boarding is another effective way of getting around shields.
- It’s also very effective for capturing ships because killing all enemies before destroying the ship leaves you with a fully intact ship to loot.
- Boarding upgrades are used to send your crews to the enemy ship. They often need a bit of time to charge before use, kind of like reloading. They will be disabled upon destruction.
- Boarding is a viable strategy in this game, but it will conflict heavily with other upgrades, mostly because cannonballs will damage both your enemy and your crew. Moreover, if you destroy the enemy ship while your crews are on board, they will also get flushed away by the ocean.
- In the strategy section, I will write about how to build a ship centered around boarding. For now, I will stop here.
Support
- Support upgrades are basically everything else. Usually, they are meant to help you recover from certain losses.
- For example, water pumps can slowly remove the water from hull breaches; healing stations can recover crew’s health; soul altars can revive crew members who died in the specific battle.
- They usually do not require an operator, but they will need repairs as they also take upgrade damage.
- Shields are also support upgrades. Although shields from upgrades are generally weaker than ship shields, they are still something and can potentially be a very important part of your strategy.
Depending on your strategy, I heavily recommend having one of those that suits your style. They sometimes offer big advantages when encountering the right type of enemies.
Operator: Crew, Monkey, or Self
Each upgrade requires an operator. Those that don’t are considered self-operated, meaning they trigger automatically. You usually need to assign a crew member to non-self-operating upgrades, unless they are monkey-operated. The difference between the three can be summarized as follows:
- Crew-operated: You need to assign a crew member to operate the upgrade. In addition, you will need a crew member to repair it if it gets destroyed. This is the most common for most cannons.
- Self-operated: You do not need and cannot have a crew member operate the upgrade. However, they need to be fixed by a crew member when destroyed. For those that come with a ship, they are usually attached to the wheelhouse, meaning that repairing the wheelhouse will repair them.
- Monkey-operated: You do not need and cannot have a crew member operate the upgrade. Monkeys will do it for you. In addition, sending a crew to repair it would significantly boost the recovery time of the upgrade.
It’s worth noting that when you don’t need a crew, sometimes you also cannot have a crew, meaning that the upgrade won’t benefit from reload reduction from your crew. This is a really important distinction to make.
Basic Ship Combat: Crew Basics
Crew members are the organs of your ship. They navigate the ship, operate the upgrades, and perform various repairs. Having the right set of crew members is key to being the king of the pirates!
Let’s understand a crew member through the following example:
On the left, you have:
- Class: a general modifier for crew members. There are Pirate, Whales Company, and Pocket Crews. Pirates are slightly faster when attacking during boarding but slower in repairs. Whales Company are better at navigating and repairing ships. Pocket Crews are from chests you open and don’t seem to have any special effects based on their description. Class also affects what gifts they prefer.
- Health: Hit Points of the crew member. If it goes to zero, they die.
- Exp: Experience required to level up.
- Mood: Mood status of the crew member. Higher mood gives various bonuses, while bad mood does the opposite. You can boost their mood via gifts or weekly payroll.
On the right, you have:
- Available Points: points left for distribution.
- Crew Level: levels of your crew member.
- Stats: various attributes, which will be discussed in detail later. The green value in brackets is what you start with.
- Skill(s): skills you obtain as you level up your crew member. You unlock the first one at level 2 and the second one at level 5. These will also be discussed in detail later.
Stats / Attributes
The most important part of a crew member. These attributes are:
- Health Points: how much extra maximum health your crew member will have. This is one of the most important and universal stats because any crew member build could use more health. The points do not mean a uniform increase in health; it usually brings up the health by around 4/5. Any crew members with the same amount of health points will have the same amount of health.
- Walk Speed: affects the time it takes for your crew member to navigate from one point to another. It’s worth noting that from reloading to firing a cannon, the crew member also has to walk that distance.
- Reload Speed: affects the time it takes to reload an upgrade. It’s more of a modifier to the original reload time of specific upgrades. Note that this only affects upgrades that have a reload time attribute (certain upgrades that take time to charge are not necessarily reload).
- Repair Speed: affects the time it takes to repair an upgrade. Works similarly to reload speed.
- Attack Damage: affects the damage a crew member does in close combat (not ship combat!). This means they deal more damage when fighting enemy crew members, but it does not impact the upgrade they operate.
- Intelligence: affects the chance of breaking the upgrade upon firing. This can be very deadly in intense scenarios, so don’t neglect this when leveling up your crew!
- Luck Points: affects the chance of dodging attacks in close combat, as well as cannons or environmental damage. This is probably the second most important stat one can have!
Choosing attributes that match the role of your crew members can be essential in ship combat!
Skills
Skills can be categorized as active or passive. They are pretty straightforward.
The list of skills is not exhaustive, but to give you an idea, their effects could be (but are not limited to):
- (Passive) Fireballs: Cannon balls create fire on impact.
- (Passive) XXX Immune: Immune to Fire / Electricity / Toxic Damage.
- (Passive) Untasty: Your smell repels sharks, keeping this sailor safe from attacks.
- (Passive) Potion Lover: When this sailor has less than 5 health and is not dead, they are instantly restored to full health (1 potion per battle).
- (Passive) Waterbucket: Splash water at your current location.
- (Passive) Lucky Sea Dog: Occasionally shield the ship from damage (increases with crew level).
- (Passive) Reliable Crew Mate: Mood never drops below “Good”.
- (Active) Technician: Instantly repairs all damaged upgrades during battle.
- (Active) Repair Master: Restore 1 point to the ship’s hull during battle.
- (Active) Heal All Crew: Restore 2 health to all sailors (multiple charges).
- (Active) Immunity Boost: Lasts 25 seconds. Grants Immunity to fire, poison, and electricity.
- (Active) Water Expert: Instantly repairs all water breaches.
There are definitely more skills, but these are the ones I’ve seen or remembered to list. You can probably see how it goes.
I hope this was helpful to you!
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