There you are, sailing away on the beautiful sea, a hold full of goods you got for insanely low prices. You’ve been carrying out tasks for the Gods and they couldn’t be happier. Your Tradewinds Odyssey trading and questing (guide here) are going fine. Dolphins play in the water and…those aren’t dolphins, they are Nerids!
Getting the hang of combat in Tradewinds Odyssey can be a bit tricky, but it’s quite simple once you know a few basics. This guide goes from baby steps to jump kicking pirates in the head, and it won’t take long for you to do the same.
It’s your fleet (on the left) against pirate hordes or a menagerie of mythical beasts (on the right). At each edge of the screen are green health bars for each unit in combat, which will turn red as they take damage. Combat starts paused, so you can take everything in before the fighting starts.
The middle bottom of the screen has a button with two vertical swords. The pointer is over it in the screen shot at right. Clicking there (or on an enemy) will start combat (crossing the swords). You can pause combat at any time by clicking the button again. This is very handy because combat is very fast paced.
You can attempt to flee combat by clicking the flag to the left of the pause button. It usually doesn’t work out very well, though. You will find you still take a lot of damage you will have to pay to repair, and you don’t have any of the loot from winning the fight to cover the bill. Use it only out of desperation.
If you just let your ships go at it, they will largely attack the enemy right in front of them, or if that lane is empty, the nearest enemy. That’s usually good enough if you are in the habit of keeping your ships in good repair. But we can do better than that.
Focusing fire is a time tested tactic in RPG and strategy games. The point is to target your attacks on one enemy at a time, taking it out and moving to the next. That way, you take less damage as the fight goes on. If you divide your attacks amongst your enemies, you have as many enemies half way through the fight as you did at the beginning. They might all be half dead, but they are still dealing damage.
Taking one out at a time means that halfway through the fight, you should be facing half as many enemies, and taking half as much damage, as you were at the fight’s outset. In Tradewinds Odyssey, you also get the advantage of the enemy ships having to shuffle towards the center as you thin their numbers, during which time they can’t ram.
The first thing you have to do is select your boats. Note that they are all selected at the beginning of the fight, but if they should become unselected (which happens when you select individual boats to perform ramming attacks, descried later), you can bring them all back to your command by dragging a box around them with your left mouse button. You can see the screen shot below at left, but if you’ve played an RTS, you know what’s up.
Targeting is as easy as left clicking on an enemy. But upon which loathsome enemy shall we unleash our fury? Sometimes, like in the screenshot below center, it doesn’t really matter, you just want to kill one and then the other. If depends on how you and the enemy match up. In the screenshot below right, the top combat pairing has us at a disadvantage, so we want to settle that score first. Start with the pair that puts you at the largest disadvantage, and save the matches where you can take a beating for a while until last.