Lol, well you'll soon pick it up. I tend to go to the store and sell anything I don't want (planks and sail cloth, because I never carry any of those) then I go to the shipyard and fix the ship and then to the tavern to hire some crew. I will go to the store and accept the Bluebird quest, then see if there are any merchant jobs the store owner needs doing. Finally before leaving town I head over to the port controller and see if he has any jobs going (tend to ask him 2 times if he says no the first time) and finally its time to board the ship, so I save once aboard and that's it off to the open sea to take do the merchant job.
I always do the same thing in the exact same order as my opening start for new games. I tend to spend most of my early game time doing merchant jobs to help cover the upkeep costs and get some money for hiring officers to help further increase the ships effectiveness in battle (just in case I find myself in a battle some day). When i'm finally happy I can fight other ships, then its time to go pirate hunting. If I start as a pirate then I go searching for ships that are all alone so i can have a nice tactical battle and hopefully take on low crew losses.
I always pick Red Legg as my character, for the updated beta patch i have down graded his ship from the Schooner to the Sloop. I felt that the Schooner (although fitted him well for what kind of character he is) was a little to good a ship for him. I could spend a lot of time not ever needing or wanting to swap ships with a captured ship, even if the captured ship was better in speed or more cannons, bigger cargo hold etc. The Schooner was much better than most ships i would encounter anyway, so i figured the ship was to good as a starting ship, and demoted him to a Sloop, which is good enough.
I'm thinking of adding a few ships, but i can't remember what they looked like. I don't want to many ships using the same base models, but the ships i was thinking of looking into are.
Galeon1 aka Carrack in GOF 1.2
BattleFrigate aka Battle Frigate in GOF 1.2
PO_Fleut50 aka Whydah in GOF 1.2
CaravelR aka Caravel Redonda in GOF 1.2
I will need to look at the models in gm view to see what they look like, i have a feeling the Battle Frigate is the same model as the Constitution, the Po_Feut50 is the stock version of the Fleut from POTC (just a guess) not sure about the CaravelR and the Galeon1 i think is the same model as the Galeon in GOF 2.0 known as Golden Hind (if it is, then that ship won't be ported in). I don't want to add to many ships for the base mod, in a separate mod i could add all the ships that was removed, which is something i said i would do. But i want the base mod to make full use of unique ships and models, not to many large class 1, 2 or 3 ships or large trading ships, i don't mind more class 5, 6 and 7 ships, because that would add something more to the mod. Right now though, i want to play the game with the new beta patch and have some fun and not start delving into files and porting ships over and starting the game over again to see how the new ships effect the balance of the mod. But in a few weeks perhaps more ships could be added for a future patch, after this beta patch has been tested and bugs looked into and hopefully fixed.
