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Pick a nation and see which sea areas its privateers should prey on: where the ports are rich and unguarded, where rivals' shipping is thickest, and where pirate hunters and angry neighbours make it costly. It opens on the early game; drop in your own save to rank from where your campaign stands now. It all runs in this page; your save is never uploaded.
Sea areas coloured by score; click one for the details.
The game works out each port's plunder in its engine, so the page can only estimate it. Once you have a privateer out, hover its income in the game's Privateering tooltip: it lists gold per location. Type a few of those numbers into the ports table above (the Game shows column), with the privateer's power, and the page will work out which per-port figure the game uses and its factor.
You hire a privateer for a whole sea area — one per area — with the Privateers or Letters of Marque advance, the state piracy policy, or a few government reforms. It harasses everyone else's maritime presence there and plunders the ports along it. This page reads your save and, for every sea area, adds up what a privateer there would take, whose shipping it would hit, how hard the area hunts pirates, and how much the port owners would come to hate you.
From the ports beside the area, one location at a time (the game's tooltip lists them). Ports with a
coastal fort or naval battery can't be raided, nor can your own, your subjects'
or your overlord's, nor those of countries you've given an anti-piracy agreement. How much each port gives is
worked out in the game's engine; the only number in its files is a factor of 0.01
(PRIVATEER_STEAL_MONEY_FACTOR). The page multiplies it by the trade flowing through each port by
default; you can switch to the port's tax and calibrate against the game's own tooltip, and the result is
remembered.
The average maritime presence other countries have in the area's sea zones, weighted the way the game's AI weighs it when it picks privateer targets: enemies at war and rivals count in full, neutrals a fifth, allies, subjects and overlords not at all. Privateers wear that presence down, and maritime presence is a big part of merchant power in the markets along the coast.
The save records how much anti-piracy harassment each area saw last month (ships set to hunt pirates).
Each point costs a privateer about 0.5% of its power a month (PRIVATEER_HARASSMENT_IMPACT),
privateer durability presumably softens that (the exact rule is in the engine).
Every port owner you rob loses opinion of you in proportion to how much of its monthly income you take: 10% of it (or of 5 gold, if it earns less) costs the full â250, capped at â100, recovering 10 a year. They also get the Disrupting Trade casus belli against you, and anti-piracy countries the Anti-Piracy one. Small coastal states with rich ports get furious fastest.
As the sailing distance from the sea zones off your own (and your subjects') ports, in map pixels, against your naval range: 1,000 to start, more from naval advances. The game's own measure may differ a little, so the range box is yours to adjust.