Peter’s Booty Haul – BATTLES – Upgrading your Groggy Gunboat

Fire up your cannons as there’s a high seas battle afoot and I just wanted to gather and share a little information so we don’t all start misfiring or shooting ourselves in the foot.

This post is about upgrading, if you’re looking for a guide to simply attacking you will find it here.

Peter’s Booty Haul BATTLES- Groggy Gunboat

Upon reaching Pt. 3 of the main Questline See No Evil you will be prompted to repair the Groggy Gunboat. This has a 10 sec repair and once repaired your gunboat will be ready to go into battle and as battles = rewards you will want to boost those rewards by upgrading your Gunboat but don’t rush these upgrades too fast as their is a sting in the tail.

You will notice that there are 3 boats in Blackbeard’s fearsome flotilla, but when you initiate your very first attack you will only  damage one of these. That’s because your Groggy Gunboat is only at Level 1, but don’t be disheartened as we all started off in the same boat, and from what I’m now seeing in my game upgrading our gunboats is a simple process once you’ve collected the items required for each upgrade but remember as we upgrade our Gunboats and destroy more of Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla, it fortifies and gets stronger. If you played during Raid to the North Pole you will know what I’m talking about, if you didn’t hopefully this will help make things a little clearer.

The main reason to upgrade your level  is it will initially allow you to do more damage and destroying more boats in Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla means collecting the higher rewards that come with this. What follows is a quick guide on how to upgrade, a sprinkling of the rewards you will get and the perils you face when attacking a stronger enemy. This has not been easy to write as the visuals TinyCo have in the game don’t always make things as clear as they could be, and we don’t get given notes of variables etc, but I’ve tried my best to highlight things with the visuals I could take from my game and spending the resources I’ve managed to earn, remember I’m just playing along like you all are.

Okay now we get to the nitty, gritty part, so tighten your seat belts as I take us through the crazy world of gunboat upgrading.

Once you enter the attack screen you can see and do the following, 1: select your character/s, 2: see the damage they can do, 3: the cost of the attack, in this example it is 5 bottles of grog, (which you can collect from clearing drunken pirates), and 4: the reward you will receive once victory is yours.

This was my attack screen at Level 1 using only Peter to attack, you will see with destroying 1 ship the rewards are 3 limes and 2 salt.

This was my attack screen at Level 3 using only Peter to attack, you will see with destroying 2 ships the rewards are 6 limes and 2 salt.

This was my attack screen at Level 5 using only Peter to attack, you will see with destroying 3 ships the rewards are 9 limes and 6 salt.

But this is where it gets interesting, by defeating all 3 ships I then got the following screens and in the second screenshot you can see Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla has now strengthened and I’m now at Raid Level  2 and with this comes consequences as the ships now become harder to defeat.

To show you what I mean by the perils of upgrading, now look at the next two screenshots. You will see that even with my Gunboat at Level 5 I am not able to do as much damage to Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla now  its at Raid Level 2. And as a consequence the rewards I will get have fallen.

And what’s more interesting is that even by adding a second crew member the rewards don’t rise.

So now in order to increase my rewards I am going to have to collect more resources to upgrade my Gunboat further, bit of vicious circle isn’t it?

Now in my game I can’t see any visual changes to Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla to indicate they are at an increased level, unlike in the Raid to the North Pole Event where the buildings we are attacking changed colour. And the battles still take 3 hours, so all that is confirmed visually is the changing amount of rewards. If anyone can see a change me and my magnifying glass are missing in Blackbeard’s Fearsome Flotilla, please put me out of my misery and tell me.

Now you know the consequences of upgrading I will give you a short guide on how to upgrade your Groggy Gunboat. You can only upgrade when there is no battle underway and there are two different screens that give you the upgrade option. The attack your enemy screen before a battle is set and the battles not over yet screen after a battle ends. You will see an upgrade option as marked in the screenshots below.

Press on upgrade and you will be taken to the upgrade screen, here it will show how many gunpowder kegs you need for the next level.

To get the gunpowder kegs needed to upgrade you need to exchange limes and cursed treasure at The Black Market.

Clicking on Get below the gunpowder keg will show the exchange price and if you have the resources you can make the trade.

Once you have enough resources and have made your trade/s you can upgrade your gunboat through one of the option screens previously mentioned above, the attack your enemies screen, or the battles not over screen.

Now I’m not going to include a breakdown of the costs of every upgrade or the rewards here, as with so many variables I think that would be better in another post of its own, which we will try to put up in the coming days. Just know you’re going to need a lot of limes and cursed treasure to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade and as I said earlier stronger doesn’t always bring increased rewards immediately, instead it’s a gradual process., where rewards will go up and down depending on your level AND the raid level.

I hope this explains things, to be honest it’s been one of the more awkward posts to put together but I wanted to get you the information as quick as possible so if you feel you’ve hit rougher seas by upgrading you will know you’re not alone.

Something else I will add is Part 9 of the main Questline requires you to upgrade your Groggy Gunboat to Level 10, but whether or not you need to have completed that to move on to the next phase is anybody’s guess at this time.