• Intelligence gathering and Port Reports are probably the strongest way to get a little bit of starting capital.
  
• Stick near the coasts and other landmasses to reduce Terror buildup.
  
• At first, your prow light is the biggest devourer of Fuel; turning it off will let you save an awful lot. Try not to let Terror get too high; past 50, you have the chance to get Nightmares when you return to London, past 70 or so you'll start to encounter hazard events and at 100 you'll end up with a mutiny on your hands; a game-over, if you don't pass a stat check. That said, Terror can be mitigated fairly easily now, so don't be too worried about it.
  
• Combat is actually fairly useful as a Terror reducer; even easy creatures like zee-bats and crabs can reduce it by 5 points or so, not to mention any benefits from the dead creature itself.
  
• Opening the University should be a high priority; it lets you sell plenty of things to get cash money. It's not a tremendously good idea to sell Tales of Terror, Zee-Ztories and Memories of Distant Shores, though; they tend to have other uses.
  
• Make use of Hunter's Keep while you can; stopping off there can reduce Terror and Hunger, and get you Supplies and zee-god Attention. Salt's Attention from Cynthia is pretty useful; you can use it at the Salt Lions to get an Extraordinary Implication.
  
• If you can find the Salt Lions, you can deliver a few loads of Sphinxstone to make a lot of easy money. You don't get that many deliveries; 2-5, depending on your luck, but it's an extremely good way to start off. You need 200 Echoes to start off, though.
  
• The final Sphinxstone delivery gives an extremely large payout, but may be located anywhere from London to Irem. The cash from the deliveries should let you afford to make the trip. If it helps, Adam's Way is always on the southern coast, and Irem is always in the top right corner; the Chelonate's position is random, but it's generally somewhere in the last two columns of the map. If you toss the Sphinxstone overboard, you can pick it up again at the Salt Lions, though you will need to pay up again.
  
• The initial quest for dropping off a Tomb-Colonist in Venderbight is a good way to get a small starting bump; but if it seems too difficult or expensive, you can put it off. The important part is picking up the First Curator's quest; it can give you an awful lot of money in very short order.
  
• Finding the Avid Horizon early can be a tremendous boon; it's always somewhere on the top row, but on some maps it can spawn very far away. Still, if it shows up nearby, you can get a Hunter's Eye easily for the First Curator. You're given one "Beginner's Luck" item cache per game; if you use this at the Avid Horizon, there's a chance you can find an Eyeless Skull, which the First Curator will also accept. If you luck out, you can make 2000 echoes with very minimal effort.
  
• Using Admiralty's Favour early on to get Fuel is a pretty good idea; it's hard to cover the expenses at first, and you won't need it for much later on.
  
• If your Admiralty's Favour is less than 3, you will always be sent to Demeaux Island or the Corsair's Forest for your first Intelligence-gathering mission.
  
• You don't need to submit Strategic Information from the Admiralty Commissions straight away. It's generally a good idea to try and get two if you can afford to; you can use them from your Hold to create Vital Intelligence, which is worth more and unlocks Spycraft options.
  
• The Merchant Venturer is a pretty great way to get extra money; you can sometimes obtain the items he's asking for in London, but it's almost always a better idea to find them elsewhere.
  
• Talk to your officers! They all have stories to pursue, and all of them provide rewards, be they rare items, upgrades or just improved versions of the officer.
  
• The Genial Magician's story is a pretty good one to start off with; it's not terribly long or expensive, and allows you to build the Serpentine engine, which comes with good stat boosts and innate efficiency.
  
• Buying new engines is often not a tremendously good idea unless you have a whole lot of money to spend and nowhere to spend it; the increase in speed is fairly marginal, but the increased fuel costs can bite.
  
• Several islands have stories that can be completed in one or two trips; Nuncio, Visage, Pigmote Isle and a few others. If you can find them early on, they can provide a powerful capital bump.
  
• Also notable is Varchas; it can take three or four trips, but leave you extremely well off by the end. Make sure to sleep in the inn at least once; you'll get a Terror bump, but you can talk about Dreams of Smoke with the Sun-Priests to get a Mirror Charm afterwards, which the First Curator will want.
  
• Sunlight Smuggling is no longer a method to get a million echoes in ten seconds (approximately), but it's still a pretty potent way of accumulating funds. Take Mirrorcatch Boxes from Khan's Shadow to the Surface, bring the resulting sunlight to the Blind Bruiser or the Isle of Cats, get paid. Every box increases a menace quality by 4-7; ill effects start to kick in over 100, 140 is pretty hazardous, at 200 you can't visit the Surface any more. Resting in your lodgings decreases the menace by a little.
  
• A little cannibalism goes a long way.

• This guide lists some of the best trading routes. Most of them are best pursued as incidental drop-offs between other pursuits, rather than something you actively focus on, but there's money to be made one way or another.
  
  
• This guide isn't terribly well formatted at the start, but the latter half has some useful tips on early stories and the best ways to take advantage of them.
  
  
• This guide lists the locations of places where you can resupply, to help plan out voyages, as well as places to collect officers without having to wait for them to appear in London.
  
  
• Finally, if you really just don't want to deal with the economic aspects of the game but are still interested in the story, this guide can let you tinker with some of the values to make things easier. It's possible that some of these will be available in an option menu at some point, as a form of difficulty slider, but for now you have to do it manually.

Spacemarine9 fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Mar 4, 2015

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Coolguye fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Jul 6, 2014