Tips (High Sea Saga)

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K1AN's Guide, For optimizing loot gain! [High Sea Saga]

• http://www.reddit.com/r/Kairosoft/comments/30dlqb/k1ans_guide_for_optimizing_loot_gain_high_sea_saga/

Nightmare mode - walkthrough

This section is a stub. Please help expand it.

This page discusses replaying the game again on nightmare mode, and contains many tips along with some relevant content from other pages. There are a *lot* of ways of playing this game, so please contribute your suggestions as well. Part of the allure of playing a Kairosoft game is figuring it out - the help and rules are sparse, so consider these hints spoilers if you don't want to know. High Sea Saga is a bit extreme, it suggests all sorts of ways to optimize teams and battles and organization, however it can take a week to test out some ideas. Coupled with the fact we only have 1 save spot, it makes sense to collaborate with others to see if our ideas have merit or if they will end in frustration and regret. Please make ample use of the comments section below to share progress!

First off, don't bother trying to replay this game in hard or nightmare mode until you've finished the game on normal difficulty and have gotten bored. There are many reasons to try nightmare mode:

• You can replay the first 2 countries over 2-3 days and re-live the bulk of the game and then quit.
• You can upgrade your equipment to obscene levels and finally be triumphant on most of your online battles. (except against the cheaters)
• And finally ... you may have a high tolerance for pain and want an extreme challenge! As others have noted, there is no new content to unlock, except that some quests have "extreme monsters" added to them. You can choose to play part of this, or the full game. If you complete with this walkthrough, it will likely take you several months, as your front row people need ~180,000 HP and 2nd row ~100,000 HP. Equipment upgrades and the hearty skill will only help a little bit - you'll need to grind your people through all jobs about 30 times or so for the front row.

While I was able to complete the game in normal mode in about 6 weeks without buying a gold pass or medals, this is not reasonable with Nightmare difficulty. I bought the gold pass for 1 month, and made it to the pirate seas. I was able to complete the rest, a bit slower, without a gold pass. If you buy the gold pass, I recommend cancelling it soon thereafter so you don't get charged again. For Android, you'll still pay for and be able to play it for the full month, it simply won't auto renew. Why? Medals! Keep in mind you'll probably want to upgrade 2-3 weapons over level 1000. If you use Smith Ticket2 from the special store, it will cost 32 medals to upgrade a weapon (and other items) 9 levels. This works out to be ~3500 medals to upgrade past level 1000, or ~10,000 medals to do it for 3 sets of weapons, armor, etc. Free play gives 10 medals a day, while gold pass boosts that to 30 medals a day. You can use various tips to boost this 15x/day, so gold pass can be enhanced to allow you up to 450 medals or ~100 levels of upgrades a day. At this rate, it will take 10 days to bring one set of equipment up to level 1000 or >30 days to do it for 3 sets of equipment. You're likely to have other things going on in your life and not want to play the game 24x7 so this can stretch out from 1 month to 2 to 3 months. Also, you will have to re-hire your crew if you want to keep them, and this costs medals. The cost is much cheaper if you have a gold pass!

Phase 0: how to wrap up your normal mode game

OK, let's start with your game in normal mode, assuming you've finished all quests and are getting a bit bored. Here are some tips before you replay in nightmare mode:

• After level 50, the special store will have "Create Replay Data" for 25 medals. This is a static snapshot of your team when you purchase the replay data. It will add a Replay button to the main screen, and you can use it multiple times to replay the game from this save point. Don't purchase replay until you're ready to move on, as any additional play after this point won't be saved in the replay data. Also, you only have 1 save spot, so once you select replay and start again, it will replace your old save files. If you don't prepare before you replay, you can't go back and try it again!
• Food is saved, equipment/items (and their upgrade levels) are saved. Great! The last & hardest dungeon gives lots of food. Increase your inventory as much as you can and stock up! I maxed out at 990 slots per item, and had ~400 Kairo Cakes when I restarted. This helps quite a bit in Phase 2, half way through nightmare mode when you need to upgrade/feed your people tons.
• Money is NOT saved, so spend it on upgrading ship cannons or upgrading equipment. Don't spend it on relics as they are not saved and will need to be repurchased later. Don't worry too much about $$, it is easier to get in the first part of nightmare mode when you upgrade your equipment lots and win most of the online battles.
• Ship structures are NOT saved, but it does remember your upgrade levels. Others report that Kairo points are kept, so sell ALL your ship structures. The directions imply you keep your ship structures, but that didn't work for me.
• Your ship is not saved (of course), so you'll need to redo quests, build it back up to level 4 and place down all your ship structures again. I recommend taking it easy and just placing down cabins, holds, labs, and brigs only and playing through the first 2 countries first. If you choose to continue at that point, you can put down a nice ship layout and optimize it a bit.
• Important: visit the Special shop and purchase items with medals that you think you'll need. The Rank resets to 1 when you replay, so it will take a long time to get them again. You may wish to level up a bit just to get the best Special shop items.
• If you choose to use monsters in your front row as tanks, then I strongly suggest you select the best possible monsters now & upgrade them as much as possible. The final Kairo Islands repeating quest gives tons of high quality food, and it will be a long time before you can grind for food as well on nightmare mode. Note that LX sized monsters will not be available until you reach a high rank after your replay, so you'll need to have some high level people in your front row until then.
• I strongly recommend renaming your characters! For myself, I assigned the first position of each combat team a 1, and the first combat team got the suffix a, the second b, and so forth. I followed it up with a single name. So my first person in my first combat team is "1A Abby", the first person in my second combat team is "1B Bert", etc. This makes it easy to know who's important to rehire first, who should placed in the first row if you get the combat placement upgrade, and who is who when scrolling through the 60 person crew list looking for the right person. I also have 6 people with cook ability (reduce stamina regen time by 10 secs) named Cookie1-6, and 6 people focused on research named Research1-6.

Good luck going forward, there is no going back!

Phase 1: relive the glory days

For the first 3-7 days, just have fun. Collect as many medals as you can, rehire most of your crew, start upgrading your best equipment, fight and win online battles, and re live the bulk of the game by completing the first 2 countries. I found this part to be the most fun.

If you haven't adopted a good battle lineup and set of equipment yet, do this before you move on. One approach is to do lots of online battles to build up your gold and use it to acquire equipment that is hard to get from quests. (like monkey guns, prin spears, and wairo shields) Look at how others are organized via online battles and see what is most effective.

There are *lots* of ways to configure your teams and no one right way. For sake of discussion, I'll share what I've done, as it gives a good example of thinking through tradeoffs. First I have 4 combat teams that can head into battle, and I purchased the ability to organize them any way I want. The first person in each team is the "front row" of tanks, while the last person in each combat team is the 5th row and hidden until people start dying.

• Everyone: falcon helm, legend mail, legend ring
• Front Row: tanks! highly leveled up characters, prin spears, wairo shield. Skills are spear master, defender, hearty. Since we don't have skill slots for healing, play with various abilities. I like "Cause x1.25 damage to monsters" and "Get more research items from battle". Avoid SP consuming abilities.
• Row 2: spear guards + healing, prin spears and wairo shields too. Skills are heal 3, spear master, defender. Most have ability "absorbs 5 SP when attacking".
• Row 3-5: gun toting healers: monkey gun and some wairo shields. Skills are heal 3, gun master, and defender or hearty. Most have ability "absorbs 5 SP when attacking".
• Row 5: This is where I put non-combat abilities, like "can bring monsters on quests", "use cannons in ship battles".
• Exceptions: A few scattered people have "cancel enemy support skills (uses SP)", "Double unit's aura duration", "spear attacks remove enemy auras". Don't go wild, huge chains of monsters mean that these people will stop healing after a while when SP runs out.

To get here, I used online battles to get >15 Monkey guns, >10 Prin Spears, and >10 Wairo shields. Once I maxed upgraded Wairo shields, I'm considering getting them for everyone.

Phase 2: ramp up equipment upgrades!

After you finish the 2nd country, you'll notice that things are hard! Time to start upgrading your key equipment as much as you can. It makes a tremendous difference to your player stats. You can save some medals by upgrading base items to their new max and then using them at the blacksmith to boost key equipment to level 100-150. You'll need to drastically update your front line "tanks". If these are people (they are for me), then it pays to wait a bit until falcon helm and legend ring boosts your int to the 8,000-10,000 range. The high int and other things make them learn Melee and other knowledge types *much* faster.

Each difficulty mode increases the max level. However, we now have an interesting puzzle. In normal mode, the max level goes up linearly with the importance of the weapon. With the harder modes, the max level is no longer linear. We want to upgrade the best equipment as rated at it's max level and we don't know what that is anymore. Here are the ones I've worked on so far. Please add anything you've found too!

All known nightmare mode equipment max value stats

Icon	Type	Name	HP	SP	Attk	Def	Spd	Int	Weight	MaxLv	Other
	Weapon	Fruit Knife			103		103	75	L	40
	Weapon	Legend Knife							L	>276	please help!
	Weapon	Kairo Blade								>61	please help!
	Weapon	Sailor Wand		175	202		14	167	L	80
	Weapon	Harpoon			123					30
	Weapon	Spear			134					30
	Weapon	Prin's Spear	3963		37275	590		996	H	750
	Weapon	Flintlock			582		13	110	L	50
	Weapon	Monkey Gun	3524		28067			754	H	1250
	Weapon	Wairo Shield			68	9377		2698	H	1640	8% nullify, +2 level speed
	Weapon	Simple Bow			136		10	113	L	60
	Head	Falcon Helm				7034	3787	4264	L	1080
	Head	Legend Helm				10752	24		H	660
	Armor	Cloth Belt				267	621	279	L	120
	Armor	Thin Armor				2916	296	4194	L	900
	Armor	Pajamas				11551	986		N	1020
	Armor	Legend Mail				14940	54		H	720
	Acc	Pearl Ring	1579	268						250
	Acc	Ribbon	8178	732		1466	712	1708	L	650
	Acc	Diamond Ring	22204	1779					H	1250
	Acc	Legend Ring	15119	1246	3655	2601	764	3053	H	1050

Please add the results of your investigations to the table above! And let's keep the next table as small as possible as well.

Recommended Nightmare mode equipment

Icon	Type	Name	HP	SP	Attk	Def	Spd	Int	Weight	MaxLv	Other
	Weapon	Prin's Spear	3963		37275	590		996	H	750
	Weapon	Monkey Gun	3524		28067			754	H	1250
	Weapon	Wairo Shield			68	9377		2698	H	1640	8% nullify, +2 level speed
	Head	Falcon Helm				7034	3787	4264	L	1080
	Armor	Legend Mail				14940	54		H	720
	Acc	Legend Ring	15119	1246	3655	2601	764	3053	H	1050
	n/a	Full set of jobs	5537	158	1717	767	64	57	n/a	n/a

For example, Legend Helm used to be the best, but it's max level under nightmare is 660. Speed is a problem, and we can see Falcon helm gives speed, and it goes all the way up to level 1080. The speed and intelligence boosts are required for back row spell casters, and good all the way around when learning knowledge. Another way of looking at it is "how many levels/full sets of jobs do I need to upgrade to accomplish the same thing?". Falcon Helm has ~3700 less defense, which can be made up in ~5 level upgrades with your characters. BUT Falcon Helm has ~3750 more speed, which would take ~58 level upgrades to do the same if you went with Legend Helm. (just about impossible) By this measure Falcon Helm and a few level upgrades are also the clear winner.

Prin's spear at max level 750 and Legend mail at 720 suggest to me that something else may prove much better in the long run. I tried a few other armors, but didn't see anything much better. Pajamas is a close 2nd, but more interesting is thin armor. While it doesn't protect much, it has a huge int boost that is awesome for learning knowledge.

Another issue you'll see is that I've listed 3 weapons (Prin's spread, Monkey Gun, and Wairo Shield) to be upgraded a total of 3640 levels. From what I've found so far, all the other types have a single best thing, this makes the weapon upgrades take all the time. I'd suggest leaving Wairo shield for last. It seemed to take forever to upgrade, and I was really disappointed that the 8% nullify or +2 speed level improvement didn't go up after all that work. (they both went up in normal mode once maxed out)

This approach of upgrading equipment mostly works until you get to Pirate Seas. At that point you'll see the classic signs that you're overwhelmed. The monsters hit first, hit hard, and do too much damage before your healers can help out.

Phase 2.5: thoughts on grinding level upgrades, and achievements

If you choose to keep going after the first 2 countries, focus first on online battles to get the best equipment for everyone, grind medals to max up the upgrades on that equipment, and grind a few quests as noted below to level up your front lines.

Grinding is mindless work, the only way I made this work for me is to make it easy. I found quests that I didn't have to pay attention to (without failing) and did most of the grinding while leaving my tablet alone or to the side of my desk while working. Make it as easy as possible, the only annoying times are powering up characters with food, as that requires a lot of attention and needless clicking to go past menus and dialogs you've already seen 100,000 times.

I found the gold pass to be a mixed blessing. While I needed it to get started, I only wanted to pay for a month. That meant I felt I had to grind 24x7 for the full month to get the full benefit. When it ended, my pace of leveling up slowed down maybe 30%, but I felt free to put the game down for a week here and there to read books and play other games. Without that sort of freedom, I doubt I would have completed the game. The funny thing is that grinding this much certainly deserves another month of $5 gold pass to speed stuff up. If you can afford it and also not worry about putting the game aside for a week or two, you'll do better than I did. :)

Personal Achievements

There is *NO* achievement system in this game, unless you count relics. However, there are various optional parts of the game that are interesting to figure out and master. I came up with my own achievement ideas, and playing with these areas as a break from the main grind kept me sane and interested. Feel free to add your own ideas to this list too!

1. Hoarder: For ~1000 coins, you can max out your inventory to 990 items/each. This is worth doing over time, so you can grind in a dungeon until your food is maxed out, then go back to base to learn knowledge. Take it up a level and use Sally Prin's to max out at 990 on all potions and Egg color items. Take it up another level by filling ~10 spots on your ship with temporary peeps that grind knowledge and max out your knowledge books. During my grinds, I realized what food could go into Sally's and used that up first before my peeps ate. Finally, you can max out 2nd level items, such as ultimate books and egg color up (all). On the monster farm, max out stock at 240 and save all your eggs to free up room in your holds. All of this excess inventory makes other investigations much easier!
2. Inventor: As you upgrade the best weapons, take a break, use some cash, and try using the blacksmith to upgrade the intro/easiest items in each category. When it maxes out, use that to upgrade the next item in line. You can also use these basic items to level up your best inventory to level 80 or so, saving some special upgrade items. Easy mode is simple, in that the item lists in each category seem to be linear. Going to the next item lower in each list meant you could max it out to a higher level and get a better benefit. The item at the bottom of the list was best. In Nightmare, the max levels are *not* linear, and it's quite possible for a previously inferior item to max up to a higher level and work better. As you find new max levels, add them to the list below! Trying this for all equipment is simply impossible, and using the blacksmith is painful due to the huge number of clicks in the ui for a level upgrade at higher levels. Nonetheless, this is an interesting diversion ... to a point. :)
3. Gambler: When the dice game is discounted, play it with 2 peeps on your ship that also have reduced game costs. Play it up to the max level of 9 as quickly as you can and stay there. At the beginning of each level, look at the board and note all ability spheres and kairo point +/- areas and anything else you want. Use the peek-a-boo early on in a level to see what chests hold and update your strategy. Buy dice to get all the + points and spheres. Once you make it up to level 9, you'll get 300-500 kairo points for each + location. Build up your Kairo points. Past 10,000 there are no relics, I built it up to 75,000 just to see. Use the kairo points on discount days at the kairo center to buy large holds and labs. With 7 labs, 9 large holds, and all the smaller holds, I can typically capture all loot after a quest. Perhaps 20% of the quests involve me throwing away some loot. You'll probably use close to 1000 coins to max out the dice game and get a bunch of kairo points, but the improvements to your ship make the grinding much more efficient. I didn't play with this until late in the game, but if you do it early on, you can fill open holes in your fighting team with fiends.
   1. Note on costs - for one complete run of 7 dice games on a discount day, I netted 4239 kairo points at a cost of 88 medals. This works out to be 50 kairo pts/medal. If it was on a regular day, it would be 35 kairo points/medal. This run had a dry stretch in it, my gut feel is that I get a little over 5000 kairo points on average per run. Your mileage may vary!
4. Breeder: Once you have tons of eggs saved away, fill up your monster guidebook. If you've hoarded egg color items, it's fairly easy to just play with eggs and hatch over 80% of the monsters just by feel. For the last 10 or so monsters, I used this guide to get to the rough ranges required and hatch them. See phase 3b below for more tips on breeding monsters. For an added challenge, wait until fortune is on sale, and spend ~2000 coins on getting monsters & eggs. Every 300-500 coins you'll see a rainbow egg. Get it! It will hatch into a special monster or a rank 4 normal monster. Likewise, play with some campaigns to get special monsters. Fortune special monsters come as L50. If they are rank1, then they missed the lvl 25 and lvl 50 upgrades and can't be upgraded. I haven't gotten them from campaigns yet, but it sounds like if you do it that way, if you get a rank1 monster it will also be L1 and can be upgraded. Taking this to the next level means not only filling up the monster guidebook, but acquiring all the special monsters as well. It's also worth upgrading the top 5 regular monsters to X level. Some people fill their front lines with monsters. I didn't take this approach, but now that the game is done, I may grind for more food and see what these monsters can do!
   1. Note on rare monsters and quests - some of these are ridiculously hard. We just had Megapooch available, I'd have to kill 2000 of them over 3 days. In 4 hours of questing areas where people have seen it, I killed 0 Megapooches. Even if I had averaged 1 an hour, this would be impossible for 2000 of them, even if others were playing it to help!
   2. Can anyone comment on the effectiveness of special monsters (can't be hatched from eggs) vs. LX monsters? Which have better stats? Is it even worth trying to get special monsters on quests and upgrading them to level 2?
5. Millionaire: Sell all your excess equipment on weekends, use territorial to capture people and sell them, fight online to get cash for bounties. I built my $$ past 200M gold. It's good to keep ~20M gold around in case you need it for something, otherwise you can apply it towards your canons. Buying and fully upgrading the waterfall canons can probably cost >500M gold. I never did finish maxing them out. Unfortunately, I saw little/no benefit from improving my canons. It takes a lot of time to get the $$ with little to show for it. But ... there's not much else to use your $$ on.
6. Cheery: You can buy the ability to use the cheer mode in quests, and sally's allows you to boost the cheers. Like the canons, I saw very little use in this. Some of the cheer upgrades are hideously expensive. But, if you max out your starting cheer level, lower the cheer cost for frequency and defense up to 2 CP and improve the effects and limits, it might be useful. This is one area that can wait until you finish the game on nightmare mode and have lots of excess inventory. I found it much better to have cheer off for quests, as I could use an unlimited number of items AND allow my crew to research all the loot from the last quest.
7. Self Sufficient: I leave my tablet alone, playing the game, for about an hour while my peeps gain knowledge. Once activity is down, you'll no longer get food from the island. Occasionally, life will intrude, and I might not make it back to my tablet until several more hours have gone by. If any of my ship structures consume gold instead of food, then I can be down several $M in gold. Ouch! Optimization #1: get the most rewarding ship structures that cost no money, some have no cost at all! Now if you forget to come back after idling your tablet, there is no cost. Optimization #2: one of the abilities is to get gold when using ship structures. Combine it with the skill to have no cost to use a ship structure, max out the ninja job for speed, and you might be able to make $$. Ideally you can now add a few ship structures that cost gold and make food. If you balance them out, you should be able to idle your ship anywhere, not lose any gold even when activity is down, and continue to generate food and acquire knowledge. This would be awesome for leveling up your peeps, as you could let it run overnight and let everyone max out at 20 knowledge in all categories. EXCEPT I can't seem to get this to balance right, my gold making peeps just are not generating enough gold or something else is not working. If you find the right formula here, post what you did!

Remember, these "achievements" are just areas of the game I made up - areas that are fun to explore as breaks between grinding runs.

Phase 3: improve your front line "Tank" characters

At this point I found I had to upgrade my Front Line characters. If level 1 means that you've successfully completed all jobs, the level 10 means you've done all jobs for a character a full 10 times, level 20 means 20 times, etc. Once I had my entire front row upgraded to level 10, I started making progress, but still could not complete the more difficult dungeons. I'm working on upgrading them to level 20 now.

If you are using monsters for your front line, skip to phase 3b below.

Here's a routine that worked well for me:

• First do some prep. On the crew list screen go to your front line crew and mark them as "Ship Duties" only. Make sure you have a crew of 6 or so people dedicated to Research, all with the Seer "+2 items research" ability, related skills, and maxed out as Ninja on their final jobs for speed. Make sure all other crew members do not have Research selected to keep this elite crew processing loot quickly. Make sure you have few or no ship structures that use cash in case you leave your system idle for too long. It's also helpful to have a small group of people that try to max out the ship structures.
• Find a dungeon that gives lots of food, make sure some of your team have the Fisher ability. Aim to max out your holds after each run. Don't battle with cheer on, that way your research team can empty out the hold completely while you do a 2nd run in the dungeon. Do 3-6 dungeon runs.
• Go back to your Base. Change your front row crew to have only the Hermes skill so they move fast! Let the system idle there for about an hour. When "activity is down", go back to the island with your preferred dungeon. Make sure your ship has red carpets everywhere for maximum speed!
• The other key stat for gaining knowledge is intelligence. If your grinds are going well, downgrade equipment to items that max int.
• While your ship is in transit, open up the combat teams menu and job change for each front line person. Max out as many jobs as you can, and finish up in a job that allows heavy equipment. This can take 30 minutes, so it's important to do in transit or activity will be lost on your base or your dungeon island. You may need to change the skills away from Hermes and back to "Spear Master, Defender, Hearty" and equip shields if the dungeon is too hard without them in place.
• Do this base to dungeon routine ~4 times in a day. While it will take all day long, your system will be idle for much of it. After a solid day, you will likely upgrade all your front row characters a level (a full set of jobs).
• Keep in mind it may take you 4 weeks of this routine to make your front row strong enough to proceed through Pirate Seas. It's likely to take another month past that to finish the game.
• I recommend trying to upgrade 2-4 levels at a time before trying hard quests again as it gets discouraging to try it after each level upgrade. If it takes more than a couple potions to finish a hard quest, then your peeps are too weak. Don't force it!

TIP: Once you've mastered every job and it removes mastery, go back and power up your character again (1 at a time, team power up doesn't work with this) with a single piece of the cheapest food you have. You'll instantly master that job again. This helps multiple levels of upgrades when you consider you don't need to re-master a big job like Fiend again with its huge food requirements.

TIP: When leveling up, I stopped using the power up menu for the most part, as it often defaults to the max value of a food item. Combine this with days of repetition and every now and then I'd have an accident. Hmm, 990 Filet Mignons used by mistake. Crud! Instead I use the combat teams job change command, and then drop down to items from there since that default is always 1.

OPTION: While I tended to level up my characters 1 at a time, you'll see the "Team Power Up" option where you can do a whole combat team at once or all combat teams. I used this once to upgrade my entire combat team crew 1 level. I estimate it took ~4x longer than doing just 1 person. You still have to manually change each persons job, and it works best if every person is on the same job at the same time, and they can all advance at once with similiar knowledge. It also helped to have the first person be farther along in this job or the next job. That way i could find the max level for them without wasting food for anyone else.

If you ever want to stop playing the game, this is a good place to do it! It takes a tremendous amount of grind and repetition to upgrade 4 characters * 48 jobs * 10 levels = ~2000 job upgrades. Kario really needs to add a button that says "use my food and upgrade jobs as much as possible", perhaps available after you've done a full level upgrade. I think the game should focus on the fun parts and make the micromanagement easy ...

It took me another 6 job level upgrades for my front line to get to Kairo island and front line HP of about 100,000. I found the week to level up was hard on my wrists and no fun, and the quests on Pirate seas that took an hour each were not much fun either. So I took a break for a while.

Phase 3b: alternative - improve front line tank MONSTERS

If you've chosen to use monsters as your front line tank characters, this section discusses some pros/cons/tips.

Benefit to using monsters:

• Upgrading is SO much easier! Simply grind for food and feed them all your food. Done. This is a huge benefit, but it does come at a cost!
• I think monsters ramp up in ability faster than people ... but each level gets harder and harder to level up.
• BUT ... if you max out a monster only to find a better one later, you have to start all over again, whereas a person can just be reconfigured.
• BUT ... the best monsters use abilities that use SP. For people, you can give them equipment with high int (for high SP) and the ability to reclaim SP as they fight. You can't do this with monsters. So it is very likely you'll need to keep tossing SP potions at your monsters while they fight. This will require more of your time and attention.
• BUT ... since monsters can't have abilities or new skills, you can't give them ones that increase capture rate (to max out $$ by turning them in) and you can't increase the number of items found, so you'll have to farm more often.

Benefit to using people:

• People are infinitely more flexible. You can change their equipment, skills, and abilities. You can try many different strategies and pick what works best for you.
• People can have shields and block! That's why I was able to win with ~190K HP in my front row, ~100K HP in the 2nd row, and ~38K HP in rows 3-5. Most monster hits don't go deep or to everyone, and having shields on everyone often blocks attacks from going to deeper levels.
• Monsters have a level cap, but I don't think there is one for people. I don't know where the crossover point is, it is possible it is a year of grinding and effectively not an issue.
• Each full set of 49 jobs you upgrade to a person (I consider it a level) always costs the same. So while people may improve at a slower pace, it is consistent, while monsters get harder and harder to upgrade and have a cap.

And a couple other points:

• Recruiting people after starting a new replay costs medals. The cost is not so bad if you have a gold pass, and the people are immediately available from the tavern when you start.
• Monsters are kept and don't cost medals to retain, but you have to have a high rank to use high level monsters, so you might have to make do with people for a while.
• You don't have to have your front row as all monsters or all people, you can mix and match!

This walkthrough was written for using just people, and at the end I went back to try and figure out the monster strategy. Please fill in any key points I've missed!

OK, so if you chose to go the monster route or play with it, here are some tips on how to get started!

• A lot of work goes into feeding and leveling up your monsters, so pick the best ones early on or you will have to redo a lot of the work!
• Expand your monster farm as much as you can, and work on filling out your monster guidebook so you can tell what you'll need for upgrades!
• Review the monster page and pick the best normal monster(s) to focus on. If you get special monsters as you go, then you can swap out as needed.
  • I look for what monsters are the hardest for me to defeat!
  • Pick rank X monsters for nightmare, and don't bother to level them up more than you have to before you get to rank X.
  • I picked 4 Baelzebub X monsters as my goal. Baelzebub2 has SASASS and Ultimate3.
  • On the way, I got 2 Kairodrillers up to X. Kairodriller2 has SSSSAA and Ultimate 3.
  • On the way, I got 1 Kairoman up to X. Karioman2 has SSSSSS and Ultimate 3. (best!)
• Get your preferred monster as version2 level50, then use the upgrade option to see what you need for the upgrade.
  • Upgrades need 3-5 Level50 monsters of both type2 and type1.
  • Don't put a lot of work into capturing the upgrade needs, as they change every time you do it.
• If you build up your monsters from eggs:
  • Note the level changes at L25 and L50 and the chance for blobbins.
  • Build up lots of egg change color items. Getting your primary monster upgraded to version2 L50 and all the required monsters will take a lot of time and patience!
• You can also do much of this from the monster farm using the lottery function:
  • Try to do this on the 3rd of the month. Build up a lot of medals in advance. 10 medals each go very fast, 7 medals on the special day go much further.
  • I used this approach, and about 2500 medals to fill out my monster guidebook. I got all normal monsters and about half the special monsters with a bunch of duplicate special monsters.
  • Once you have your primary monster at version 2 level 50, look at the upgrade requirements. Lookup each of those monsters using this site to see their size (such as large-neutral). Copy this info down and sort by version as well. Do this for your primary monster types and some secondary fun ones. Check off requirements as you find them.
  • Now when you're presented with eggs, you should have a lits of what egg types and monsters are the most important.
  • The benefit of this approach is that you can do most of it in a solid day of game play AND you can get special monsters too!

For comparison, here are some monster stats at similar levels:

• Level 01:
  • DrillerX L01: HP  3899, SP 197, Atk 1111, Def 978, Spd 243, Int 137
  • BaelzebubX L01: HP 3756, SP 191, Atk 986, Def 938, Spd 305, Int 193
  • SkeldrexX L01: HP 3792,   SP 183, Atk 1012, Def 954,   Spd 321, Int 200
  • MegapoochX L01: HP 3876, SP 201, Atk 918, Def 1099, Spd 180 Int 181
• Level 50:
  • DrillerX L51: HP 28170, SP 306, Atk 8681, Def 5359, Spd 882, Int 219
  • BaelzebubX L50: HP 25145, SP 253, Atk 7381, Def 4498, Spd 923, Int 270
  • CollasquidoX L51: HP 21,235; SP 245; Atk 6494; Def 4229; Spd 731; Int 249
  • SkeldrexX L50: HP 25273, SP 241, Atk 8092, Def 4789, Spd 1078, Int 278
  • MegapoochX L50: HP 24739, SP 291, Atk 6507, Def 5461, Spd 463, Int 265
• Level 500:
  • DrillerX L500: HP 124,880; SP 767; Atk 38,887; Def 22,883; Spd 3689; Int 635
  • BaelzebubX L500: HP 113,006; SP 545, Atk 33,512; Def 19,581; Spd 3769, Int 820
• Level 600: (not much of a jump, but you can see what +100Lvl brings)
  • DrillerX L500: HP 139,558; SP 836; Atk 43,472; Def 25,486; Spd 4124; Int 699
• Comparison to my front row people during the end game:
  • Front Row L?: HP: 190,000, SP 5,400; Atk 84,000; Def 54,000; Spd 8,700; Int 13,000

Right now, my level 500 monster last about a second in the front row on the end game (last quest kairo island). When compared to my front row people who can do it, it's clear stats need to double at least. Int and SP for monsters appear particularly low, so they'll need more SP potions.

I have not finished upgrading my monsters yet, so I'm sure I've missed something. Please feel free to add to the above advice!

Phase 4: complete the game on nightmare mode

Getting through the survey to uncover Kairo Island was an almost impossible task as I pushed it before I was ready. I used ~200 recovery elixirs and ~80 aura tonics to survive. Clearly I was way over matched.

The first ~9 quests on Kairo Island were fun and doable and then it started getting tough again. At that point, I estimated needing at least a couple weeks of level up grinding to be competitive again. (and the reality was more like 3-4 weeks) Unfortunately, that process is not fun (come on Kairosoft, please give us an easy command to do full level ups! or at least allow us to turn off the annoying ~200 popups and animations at each step that we've already seen a million times and hold no value)

I took another break, and let my gold pass lapse then a grinded up a bunch of levels and finished the game!

Ok, a couple weeks away from the grind was good for me. :) I started up again and played a couple more weeks and have completed the boss battle, quest 14/14 on kairo island. When I paused, it was taking me ~100 recovery elixirs to complete a quest. After 4 full level upgrades for my front row, it took ~10 recovery elixers. After another 2 level upgrades, it was close to even. BUT that let me progress ~5 quests up to the #14 boss quest. That one was hard, and even with my 6 upgraded levels I went through ~200 elixirs again and all 5 retries at 3 medals each. It was close, but now I've conquered Kairo Island. (with more quests to do)

A few additional tips:

TIP: Upgrading your entire set of combat teams (30 peeps) 1 level (all 48 jobs, then a bit more so they can use heavy weapons) is really painful - it takes a tremendous amount of food! I estimate this took me about a month with some breaks in between. I switched approaches. I put my front row combat people in the first combat team and used the battle options/change formation ability to keep them in the front row. This let me do the "Team Power Up" on just my front row people. I developed a rhythm where it would take me a little more than a day to upgrade my front row peeps 1 level (all 48 jobs). In a week and a half I was able to upgrade them ~6 levels. That made a huge difference!

TIP: My full boat had ~12 people that didn't really have any assigned tasks. So I now use those spots to grind for knowledge. I go to the tavern and hire a full set of 12 traders at 2 medals each. I change their ship duty to focus on just ship duties (acquiring knowledge) and equip them with suggested values so their int goes up to about 5000. Then as I am leveling up my front row, this set of 12 people eventually acquire 20 knowledge in each stat. I dismiss them (getting 5 knowledge books/ea person/ea stat) and re-hire. This gets me ~60 knowledge books every 2-3 days or close to 150 a week. While upgrading my front row peeps, I sometimes find 1 or 2 don't have enough knowledge or I'll push through 2-3 extra jobs. This knowledge grind gives me more than enough to do this without worry. It also means the upgrade front row grind (get food, get knowledge, change jobs, etc) has 1 or 2 less cycles in it as I can press forward more quickly. Another great side effect is that the huge number of traders is increasing my wealth, and I've generated over a hundred smith ticket (Wpn) x1. Nice!

TIP: I prefer grinding on Umadbro/Heavy Island for food. It has buildings, so while my combat teams are questing, my onboard crewmates are researching the loot and converting it to food and equipment. With time, I balanced this out so usually all the research was done by the time the quest finished. I also made sure several people had the "get more research items from battle" fisher ability to get lots of items. Along the way, I would sometimes get too much loot and have to toss it. The Kairo Center rates are terrible, it took over half my game and tons of sold Guardian Armors from Heavy Island to be able and buy one large hold. Others here shared advice to use the Dice Game. It works, but at a cost of medals. I suggest you do most of your equipment upgrades first before playing the Dice game. Optimize it to play with a discounted cost of 3 medals on the cheap days. Buy cards to land on all the + kairo point spots. Rapidly advance across the full board to start the next level. Build up to level 9, and then you'll find the + kairo spots give 300-500 kairo points EACH. Awesome! I rushed the process and spent around 300 medals, but at the end my dice game was at the final level 9, and I was able to buy 3 large holds and another lab. Finally I don't have to worry about too much loot. And would like to increase it even more to make my food grinds more efficient!

Done! I complete nightmare mode on Kairo island. The last quest was tough, I had to grind for about a month and raise my front row people 8 levels and my 2nd row people 4 levels. Even with this done, it was medium difficulty, as I had to toss potions here and there to make it through ok.

Here are the stats of my front row people, to give you some indication of how many upgrades you might need:

• HP: 190,000
• Atk: 84,000
• Def 54,000
• SP: 5,400
• Spd: 8,700
• Int 13,000
• Skills: Spear Master, Defender, Hearty
• Equip: Prin's Spear, Wairo Shield, Falcon helm, Legend Mail, Legend Ring. (all max)

While 1st row people have ~190,000HP, the 2nd row have ~100,000 HP, and rows 3-5 only ~38,000.

What now?

• Go have a life!
• Play another game without so much grinding.
• Visit the achievements area above - play other optimization parts of the game you missed!
• If you haven't used monsters much, see the monster tutorial above. That could last you another week. :) I'm doing that now and grinding up my peeps a bit so I can easily use the last Kairo Islands quest to quickly feed my monsters.

Helpful Tips

• The number of combat team members is determined by how many stars the character has in the first position of the team. Five stars allows for more crewmates on a combat team.
• Hire as much crew as possible at the beginning to be part of your combat and non-combat teams. This can help to increase your rank easier at the beginning state.
• Don't be afraid to use items to power-up your strong character and have him/her change job continuously. This can help you to beat difficult battles.
• Avoid relying too much on attack solely and neglect defense and speed. Character with low defense can be beaten very easy while character with low speed can barely hit the opponents.
• Put Shops close to each other together with the buildings/environments that boost the houses to get max profit and fast G's
• To ease the games battery consumption, try setting the games quality to low. Which may increase the battery life by about 20 percent while playing the game.
• Capturing enemies in combat (the skill Territorial helps) and then turning them in at your base or a prison is a good source of gold, as well as turning in prisoners after winning online battles.
• You can get crew in the Dice Game. At higher levels of the dice game you can get ones with high stats, better jobs and more stars. A good idea is to play the dice game at the 1st, 11th, 21th and the 31th every month since the Dice Game costs are halved.
• A good way to get money fast is PVP but spend as much money you can on cannons before you go to the hard walkthrough.
• A good way to get medals fast is by installing kairo club and download many paid kairosoft games.
• Fill your non-combat crew as soon as possible, the 1-2 medal cost people are great. Place them in an area where they can max out on skills. Leave them alone for a while as you play the game. They'll help with ship functions. When you don't need them anymore, dismiss them. It will save all their unused knowledge as books. I had ~20 people that got dismissed this way, all maxed out at 20 knowledge for each type, and ended up with 400 melee, ranged, sailing, curiosity, etc. books. This method is great for shifting the knowledge to front row tank characters for quick leveling.

Maximizing Non Combatants

Monsters can only do limited type of actions compared to Crews. But their presence can be maximized with the right monsters. Best monsters for this role is UFO and Titan Jr.. Both monster types have a very very high movement speed allowing them to do their duties a lot faster than any other type of monsters.

Recommended final job for all non combatant crews are Ninja. For the same reason as with non combatant monsters, Ninja's skill allowing them to move at a very fast speed. Ninja however require at least 8 mastered jobs to change into one. Choose jobs that needs low lvl to master to quickly create a ninja. However, there are some jobs that are recommended due to their mastered skill that can be very useful to set later.

• Thief.
  Economical skill is a must have for all non-combatants. It gives some chance for the crew not to pay for facility cost when using them.
• Doctor.
  Islander is a very good skill when one aims to level the island facilites. It has a chance to trigger a major boost to any island facilities' xp.
• Seer.
  Shipmate skill is very useful for those aiming to max ship facilities level. It gives major boost to ship facilities' xp when a crew is using them.
• Trader.
  Thrifty allows crews that pick up gold bag (mainly from deck battle drops) to get extra gold from it. It's not a major boost but Trader is one of the jobs that has the lowest lvl to master so there's no reason not to master this job.

Original Jobs that are recommended to be non-combatants :

• Tycoon.
  Try to get as many as possible. Their ability gives them a 100% chance to get money when using ship facilities. However, the ability's effectiveness depends on the current crew level. So to fully maximize this, any crew that has tycoon ability should be max leveled.
• Farmer.
  This job is a must to have to keep the ship's activities going even when the location's activity are exhausted. Their ability allows them to resupply food at an extra 100% gain than any other job. Combine this job with some tycoons and crews can keep using ship facilities without needing to rely to resupply at ports and still can gain money.
• Bookie.
  An optional job to consider using especially for those that play the dice game alot. Only need 2 to get the maximum benefit.
• Sailor.
  Same with bookie, this is optional. Having some sailors on board can give some extra boost to ship's speed. Only need 5 of them for maximum benefit.
• Cook.
  This is a good option to have. Their presence allows faster stamina regeneration which is always a good thing. Only need 6 to get the maximum benefit.
• Seer.
  Again a good option for non combatant. Their effectiveness will drop if there are not researching making them just like ordinary crew.
• Joiner.
  Very useful to have some of these job if planning to build a lot of island facilities. Otherwise, they are not really recommmended to have.
• Smith,Trader,Genius,Dealer.
  Try to get at least 1 of each. Shops on board is a always a good thing although it's not exactly a steady source of income on all situations. However, they are still useful due to the Onboard Shop system.
• Pilot.
  Not exactly a good option to have as a non combatant. But they do reduce stamina needed to travel using ship.

Onboard Shops

Crews with Jobs (Original or Current) of Smith,Trader,Genius and Dealer will change their Cabin to also functions such as shops. When visiting an active (activity is not exhausted) island that has buildings built, citizens from the islands will visit the ship's shops to spend money. If the shops have merchandises in stock, the respective store satisfaction for the island will also increase. When respective satisfaction bar for each store is full, citizens of the island will gift an item and the satisfaction bar is reset back to 0 again.

Restocking shops' merchandises is done by doing research in lab. Whenever there's an empty merchandise slot , research will always generate merchandises that will be distributed to shops that has empty merchandise slots.

Shop Satisfaction Gifts List

Shop Types (Job)	Common	Uncommon	Rare
Tool (Trader)	Egg Color Up (G) Egg Color Down (G)	Melee Book Ranged Book	Smith Ticket (Wpn)
Weapon (Smith)	Egg Color Up (R) Egg Color Down (R)	Ranged Book Sailing Book	Smith Ticket (Head)
Armor (Genius)	Egg Color Up (B) Egg Color Down (B)	Sailing Book Curiosity Book	Smith Ticket (Arm)
Accessory (Dealer)	Egg Color Up (P) Egg Color Down (P)	Curiosity Book Work Book	Smith Ticket (Acc)