Age of Booty Achievement Guide & Road Map

Age of Booty
Age of Booty Achievement Guide

Overview:
- Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
- Offline: 10 (160 ) (5 of them can also be done online)
- Online: 2 (40 )
- Approximate amount of time to 200 : 5-10 hours
- Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
- Number of missable achievements: None
- Do cheat codes disable achievements? No cheats
- Does difficulty affect achievements? Yes. There are three different challenge sets, each with a different difficulty
- Glitchy achievements: None
- Unobtainable achievements: None
- Extra equipment needed? Not required, but up to 3 extra controllers may be used for the online achievements

Introduction:
Age of Booty is a real-time strategy game, where you control pirate ships and attempt to capture towns on small maps. It consists of several challenges rather than any lengthy campaign, and any challenge can be replayed at any time. The achievements are relatively straight-forward, but due to the sheer amount of luck required to beat some of the harder challenges it may take some time and effort to unlock the full 200 .

Now let's get going, I suggest you begin with Cartographer to get that one out of the way, then move on to the Challenges, starting with the tutorial to get a feeling of the game mechanics.

Step 1: Offline Achievements
The following achievements are challenge-related and cannot be done online:
Landlubber, On the Account, Freebooter and King's Pardon. These will all unlock naturally as you complete all the challenges.
The following achievements can be easily unlocked during the challenges, but can also be done online: Plunder, Bombs Away, Flushed Away, Cherry Picker and Boom Boom.

The only really hard challenges are the 7th on Medium and the 7th on Hard. A few different strategies for the 7th Medium can be found in this thread. Try one or more of them, eventually you should find one that works for you.

Refer to the General Advice section in the achievement guide for some good tips on the 7th Hard challenge. Good luck!

Step 2: Online Achievements
There are three ways to do the online achievements. The first option is obviously to play the game normally, and eventually accumulate 10 wins for Old Salt while getting Sea Legs in the process.

Another way is to find yourself a boosting buddy (achievement trading thread) and create a match where each of you include a guest account, and place the guest accounts on the same team, while you and you buddy stay on the other. This way, the guest ships will not pose any problems. Also, both of you will get the wins.

The third option is, if you can't find a boosting partner, to use this strategy:
"If you possess 4 controllers (can even be GH controllers) then all you do is go to set up a 2 vs 2 match. When it says searching for other players press X on another controller, you can then sign the other 3 controllers in as guests and the game will let you play with no one else needed.
Then you just use the 2 boats on your side to capture the towns."

While using the second or third method, you can unlock the non-challenge related achievements (see step 1) almost effortlessly, since the guest controlled ships will be standing completely still.

Conclusion:
All in all a quite difficult game, due to the amount of luck required on some of the challenges. The AI partner is not very helpful, and sometimes even makes the game harder. Sadly there is no local co-op for the challenges, as this would eliminate the AI problem and make the game more enjoyable.

[x360a would like to thank David x360a for this road map]

Cartographer

5
Create and save a custom map.
From the main menu select Map Editor. Once in press start and save the map. You don't need to even place any tiles.
Plunder

10
Capture a town.
You get this in the first tutorial level. Select any town and press to go there.
Bombs Away

10
Destroy a neutral or enemy town’s defense with a bomb.
You get bombs by destroying merchant ships, and can place the bomb by selecting a hex and pressing . Towns will require some damage first as 1 bomb isn't enough to destroy even the weakest town at full health.

Don't worry about getting this as soon as you get a bomb. There are later levels where the merchant ships only drop bombs.
Flushed Away

15
Use a whirlpool curse to teleport an enemy that is attacking your town.
(1)
The enemy must be attacking your town, so must be in one of the hexes immediately next to it. If they start to capture your town you won't get the achievement. Place the whirlpool under the enemy, but you may need to be close to attack them to make sure they move back onto the whirlpool.
Cherry Picker

15
Capture a neutral town after the enemy has destroyed its defenses.
Easier with large towns as it gives you more time to realise they are attacking it. Just sit back and wait for the enemy to destroy the defenses and start capturing. Move onto a hex next to the town to block the capture, destroy the enemy and capture the town.
Boom Boom

15
Sink two enemy ships with a single bomb.
You can get bombs from merchant ships, and it's best to leave this to a level where they only drop bombs. Wait for two enemy ships to attack a town and place a bomb between them.
Landlubber

15
Beat all easy challenges.
Beat all the challenges on easy. There are seven challenges you need to beat for this, and they will show a red star jewel when completed. All of the easy challenges are straight forward and shouldn't be a problem.
On the Account

25
Beat all medium challenges.
(1)
Beat all the challenges on medium. There are seven challenges you need to beat for this, and they will show a green star jewel when completed.
Freebooter

40
Beat all hard challenges.
(2)
Beat all the challenges on hard. There are seven challenges you need to beat for this, and they will show a silver star jewel when completed.

Many hard challenges also come with a time limit. If you capture the required number of towns before the time runs out you win instantly. If you get to the end of the time limit and you have the most towns, you win. If you are tied on towns with another player it is a stalemate and doesn't count as a win.

So this part of the guide doesn't look cluttered, see below for more advice on beating the final hard challenge.
King's Pardon

10
Beat every challenge in the game.
There are 21 challenges split into 3 difficulties. If you do enough to get each of the difficulty achievements above you will get this when you complete the last challenge in the last difficulty. There are a total of 21 challenges to get this, and each will fill in with a coloured star shaped jewel to show which you have completed.

===========
General Advice
===========

The final hard challenge was tricky and took several attempts. The enemy start with more ships and have several upgrades. Don't consider fighting them directly without the support of a town until you have upgraded your ship a lot. My preferred upgrades (when I could afford them) went Speed, Cannon x3, Speed x2, Armor last.

I start by takking Nassau directly below the start, then focus on getting resources from the small villages and boxes. Attack merchant ships to get resource steals, as the most important resource on this map is gold. Taking the central town with (the only) 2 gold deposits will help you hugely, but often gets taken by much larger ships very early on. This isn't always a bad thing, as they are destroying a fully upgraded neutral town, and you only have to destroy a basic one to steal it back.

Where other maps may have taught you to expand quickly, here it is best to stick with just one or two towns and get them fully upgraded. Once done they still aren't invincible, but the AI prefers fighting weaker towns, or just fight amongst themselves. Let them destroy each others upgraded towns so you can attack much weaker ones.

This tactic relies on the AI constantly fighting each other. Sometimes you get lucky and they keep each other at 1 or 2 towns, but sometimes one will get 4 towns very quickly. If you're unlucky there is very little you can do about it as they have much more powerful ships, and more of them, right from the start.
Sea Legs

10
Win a game in Player Match.
(1)
Unlike most games where Player Match means unranked and is therefore easy to boost, in this game Player Match is Ranked. The easiest way is to get on a team of either 2 or 4 that have microphones and use them. Pair up and you should have no trouble taking towns against an unorganised team.

There is a rather simple way to boost this achievement and Old Salt, granted you have 4 controllers. (Guitars and other peripherals will work.) When you turn on all controllers, head into the Multiplayer lobby. From here, set up a Player match. You will be able to set up a player match with all four of your controllers. Set the match to be a 2 vs 2 match. You won't have to deal with any A.I. or other players, so you'll be able to win all 10 of your games easily.
Old Salt

30
Win 10 games in Player Match.
(16)
The same as for Sea Legs, but win 10 matches.