Despite being mostly a conquest and strategy game, Kingdom of Pirates has several RPG elements, mostly in the form of the Pirates systems through which you can recruit a variety of different characters, deploy them across your multiple outposts across the world, and have them improve the effectiveness of your plundering activities. You can even take them to combat in the game’s battle stages, in which have better and rarer pirates will help you clear these levels with ease.

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

If you’ve played other mobile games in the past—gacha games and RPGs, in particular—there’s a good chance that you’re already quite familiar with how the character system in Kingdom of Pirates works. However, for those of you that are new to this genre, or to mobile gaming in general, you’ll find most of the important things you need to know about the pirate’s system in this brief overview.

Pirate Rarity

Like with most other mobile games with RPG elements, the characters in Kingdom of Pirates all come in different rarities, represented by the color of their portraits. These colors, in ascending order of rarity, go from the lowest green pirates to blue, then to purple, and finally to orange. And when it comes to their quality and power, there’s really no other way to go about it: The better the rarity, the better the pirate. Rarer pirates give better plundering boosts and also have access to better passives for combat stages.

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

Of course, unlocking the rarest pirates, while possible through conventional means, will often take much longer, particularly since the odds of getting them are very, very low. This brings us to our next point…

Recruiting New Pirates

Kingdom of Pirates is similar to most other gacha games in the sense that, in order to unlock new characters, you must save up resources and purchase them either from the rumor shop via their fragments; from the tavern, or receive for free when you reach certain parts of the main story.

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

Aside from the ones you get from the campaign, however, the pirates you can unlock are mostly randomized; you never know what you’re going to get. This factor of randomness makes it very difficult to obtain the strongest pirates. Nevertheless, after some time playing, you’ll get plenty of chances to obtain fragments for the characters you want, as well as for others.

Upgrading Your Pirates

Even the strongest and rarest characters in Kingdom of Pirates are basically useless when you first get them, especially when it comes to the combat stages. This is because while most of them can offer passive bonuses to increase your plunder rate when assigned to an outpost, their actual strength is determined by their level and rank. In this sense, pirates that you recently unlocked are very weak and must be upgraded before taking them on missions.

There are two main ways to upgrade a pirate in the beginning: By increasing their level, and by promoting them to higher ranks:

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

  • Leveling Up: By simply paying a sum of doubloons, you can increase your character’s level, granting them permanent stat boosts and buffing their effectiveness in combat. The doubloon cost goes up as the character reaches higher levels.
  • Upgrading Rank: This process is a bit more involved, and requires multiple fragments of the character in question. Once enough fragments are collected, you can use them to increase their star level, granting them significant boosts to their stats.

While you can get doubloons simply by playing the game and completing challenges, you’ll need to keep an active eye out for character fragments as these appear mostly in the rumor shop and must be purchased with prestige.

Upgrading Your Protagonist

Your protagonist is the pirate you receive at the very beginning, after choosing the initial storyline. This character functions very much the same as other unlockable pirates, with a few minor differences. Specifically, your protagonist can derive power from different sources like the Maiden system, and can therefore be much stronger than other characters. Similarly, while you must collect character fragments to increase the star level of other pirates, your protagonist requires Pirate Codes, which you can get from the item shop, from bounty packs, and from increasing your bounty level at times. Other than that, upgrading your protagonist is pretty much the same as with any other character in Kingdom of Pirates.

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

We want to make special emphasis on the Maiden system here, as it’s one of the best ways to boost the potential of your protagonist. For every maiden, you befriend and romance, your protagonist will receive a buff to their combat power. In this sense, this system is just as important for your protagonist’s progress as any other upgrade. However, each maiden has its own upgrade paths and requirements, and you’ll often have to give them lots of different gifts to boost their intimacy and charm. 

A good rule of thumb when it comes to romancing maidens in the Kingdom of Pirates is to always use your daily allowances of dates, in order to get some steady progress with them. In this manner, your protagonist will progressively get better, at a faster rate than many other pirates, in any case.

Kingdom of Pirates - Everything You Need to Know About the Pirates System

This is most of what you need to know about the pirate’s system in the Kingdom of Pirates. While it’ll probably be a while before you’re able to unlock powerful characters, it’s very much worth it to work on upgrading the ones that are already on your roster. If anything, assigning them to outposts will increase your silver production, and leveling them up will help you to get through combat stages much easier.