Tradewinds Odyssey Tips Walkthrough

a:1:i:0;a:2:s:13:”section_title”;s:23:”Tradewinds Odyssey Tips”;s:12:”section_body”;s:18976:”

Welcome to Gamezebo’s strategy guide for Tradewinds Odyssey, the fifth game in The Tradewinds series from Sandlot Games. In this quest-based adventure game, you can play as one of 6 different characters in mythological Greece. Each character must complete their Main Quest, a unique story of 11 chapters. In addition, there are many optional quests you can accept for more adventure. You can also earn trophies, called “feats” for doing things like making a single transaction of 9,000 drachma at once.

This guide is divided into sections:
General Tips
The Map and Finding People
Trading Tips
Gymnasium Tips
Moneylender Tips
Blessing Tips
Shipyard Tips
Reliquary Tips

General Tips

• Once you complete the main quest for any of the first 4 characters, you will unlock the 2 bonus characters for play.
• Although the Main Quest is different for each character, the Optional Quests are all the same, so it’s up to you when to play them. If you have Easy Mode turned on, places with tasks for Optional Quests will be marked with a blue “?”.
• The sixth character’s Quest is to complete all the optional quests. So if you want, you can skip all optional quests for the first 5 characters, and you’ll have a longer quest for the last one.
• The game does have an autosave that saves when you enter a new city. You can also create your own save files at any point. You can’t name your save files—they just have a timestamp.
• You can see what Feats (Trophies) you’ve earned by clicking on the Feats page in your journal.
• You can set up multiple player profiles on the same computer. Each profile will have its own journal, so feats under one profile will not show under another. However, if you play two characters under the same player profile, the Feats will all show together. So if you want to earn all the feats, you will have to play all characters under the same player profile.

The Map And Finding People

• You can hover your cursor over any city on the map and you’ll get a pop-up window that shows you what services and goods it offers.
• If you turn Easy Mode on, then the next city/building you need to go through for your main quest will be marked with an orange “?”.  You can turn Easy Mode on and off at any time, so if you want the full adventure experience, you can wander around on your own, and then if you get stuck you can turn easy mode on for one step, then turn it off again.
• If you need to find something out on the ocean, and you have Easy Mode turned on, an orange “?” will appear there. However, you may need to try selecting different destination cities to find the exact route that goes through the “?”.

• If you are in Easy Mode and there are no orange “?”‘s showing in the city, click on the Set Sail button and look at the world map to see if you’re supposed to be somewhere else.
• If you are in Easy Mode and there are no orange “?”‘s showing on the world map, then you currently have a task that requires to collect some tradegoods, but they are available in multiple cities so there’s no one place to go. For example, you might have to buy 10 goats, but it doesn’t matter where you buy them. Check your journal for the task to see what you are supposed to collect, then hover the cursor over different cities until you find the ones selling what you need.
• Heraklion is in Krete. So anything “west of Krete” is west of Heraklion.
• Gythio is in Sparta. So anything “west of Sparta” is west of Gythio.
• If you are looking for someone royal and they are in their own city, they will probably be in the Acropolis. If they are in someone else’s city, they will probably be in the Gymnasium.
• If you are looking for someone divine, check the Altar first, then the Reliquary, as there are priests in both places.
• If you are looking for someone who constructs things, like a carpenter, try the Shipyard.
• If you are looking for something special to buy, it might be in the Agora/Marketplace, or it might be at the Shipyard. Magical items will be at the Reliquary.
• Check your journal for hints about what to do next for each quest. If you click on a Task name on the left page you will see its details on the right.

Trading Tips

• You can sell any tradegoods in any City on the sell screen. You can only buy what’s on the buy screen.
• Although the cities start out offering a few different items, once you’ve sold 10 units of something, that city will also offer it for buying. So pretty soon all cities carry most tradegoods.
• The indicator bar at the top left of the screen tells you how full your fleet is.
• If your fleet is completely full, you will not be able to recover any goods from defeated enemies in battle. These are often expensive stuff. I usually left an empty 5 slots in the beginning to make sure I could get spoils of war, but that’s up to you.
• As always, buy low, sell high. In the beginning, salt, olives, and honey are all pretty cheap and widely available, so you’ll do most of your trading in those. Over time you’ll buy some of the other goods, too.
• Remember to always check the sell screen, as you may have items to sell that aren’t available to buy in that city yet.
• There’s no penalty for selling something you just bought. So you can buy 100 salt at 20d, then decide you don’t need them all, and immediately sell back 60 for the full price. This is helpful if you get Quest requests since you went to the Agora/Market and need to make room for something else.
• If you need something for a Quest and you buy it at the market, it will go out of your trading inventory and into “Items,” and leave empty cargo spaces where you can buy more stuff. But you have to have empty tradegoods slots to buy it in the first place. Say you go to the Agora/Market and your tradegoods meter is at 0/100. You need 100 fish for a Quest. You buy the 100 Fish. They will immediately to into Items inventory and the meter will go back to 0. But if when you arrived at the Agora/Market your tradegoods meter was at 80/100, you would only be able to buy 20 fish at a time. So you buy the first 20, they move to Items, and you are right back at 80/100. Then you have to repeat that 4 times. You can always check your journal under the Quests to see how many things you have left to buy.

• See the Tips for the Gymnasium to find out how to get combo tradegoods like Wine and Olive oil.
• In previous Tradewinds games, an item was usually at its cheapest price the first time you saw it. That is not true in this game. Specifically goats, marble, and metal start out at a high price. So if you are buying these for a Quest and you are low on money, you may want to come back 3 times before buying, as this will often lower the price on big ticket items by a couple of hundred drachma per unit.
• Whenever you see Honey at 50 or less, buy it. You’ll make a good profit within a month or two. A good buy price means you should be able to make money selling it within a month or so. Anything above that means you might have to carry it around for awhile to make a profit.

• Salt: 5 – 40. 20 is a good buy price.
• Olives: 20 – 90. 35 is a good buy price. 60 is a good sale price.
• Honey: 40 – 180. 70 is a good buy price. 110 is a good sale price.

These items can also be used for Blessings, but those Blessings aren’t really needed for the Main Quest. As tradegoods, buy low, sell high:

• Fish: 75 – 400.  110 is a good buy price.
• Wheat: 150 – 700. 200 is a good buy price.
• Metal: 600 – 1200. 700 is a good buy price.

And these items are needed in some Quest tasks, but otherwise are just regular tradegoods:

• Pottery: 90 – 400.  140 is a good buy price.
• Goats: 600 – 1,200. 700 is a good buy price.
• Marble: 1,150 – 1,400. 1,200 is a good buy price.

Gymnasium Tips

• If you go to the Gymnasium and make donations to the Inventors Guild, you can invent a few new products like wine, but I didn’t do that until the Quests required it or I got into Free Trade mode. But if you’re really into trading, you can try it.
• When you make a donation of at least 20c, then press talk, a Quest bubble will pop up that says Good Combo. If you accept it, you’ll get an optional quest to collect specific ingredients for the new combo. Collect them, bring them back to the Gymnasium, and they’ll give you one free item.
• Some are worth a lot more than the ingredients you collected, and some are worth less, but it does mean a new item will be available to trade.
• Similarly, you can make donations for information to the other Guilds, but I never found these worth buying.

Moneylender Tips

• Once you have over 12,000d, borrow the max from the moneylender. Most characters won’t ever need to pay it back, and you need the money to buy more armaments.  
• In fact, NOT paying back the moneylender will get you more money! The moneylender will send pirates to beat you up for paying late. However, using standard battle tactics, you will win all these battles, and you usually get to seize a lot of money from the defeated pirates. I had one debt of about 80,000d, and I collected over 200,000d from the 3 sets of pirates sent because I was late!  However, if you don’t like battles, pay off your debt often, because it will mean extra battles.
• Nothing bad will happen to you if you don’t pay, you just won’t be able to borrow more money. However, I would much rather invest money in better ships or weapons than worry about late fees to the moneylender.
• Some characters will borrow about 24,000d early in the game so they can buy another ship. Do a lot of other things. Then want to buy one of the really expensive ships buy only have around 80,000d on hand. That’s a good time to pay off a debt in full, then immediately borrow the higher amount. But otherwise I just didn’t bother to pay them.

Blessing Tips

• Blessings are new for the series, and they are a big help in battles. There are several different blessings, but they are all for use at sea during a battle.
• The two most useful are Hades Fire (20 salt) and Athena’s Mercy (20 olives) because they are cheap to buy and really useful.  Hades Fire is an explosive blast that hits all the enemy ships at once, and Athena’s Mercy heals your own damage.

• You will be able to win almost every battle by using 1 Hades Fire at the beginning, then your special power, and 1 Athena’s Mercy anytime the health of any of your ships drops to about half.
• No matter how many Blessings you have in inventory, the button will take a little time to “recharge” before you can choose it again. So if you start a battle with some damage and suspect you’ll need to use 2 Athena’s Mercy blessings to survive, use 1 immediately so there will be time to recharge before the battle ends.
• You can only use the blessings while there are still enemies on the screen. So sometimes you may want to wait to ram the last enemy until, say, the Athena’s Mercy button has recharged and you got to use it again.
• The biggest your fleet, the better the Athena’s Mercy is, because for the price of 20 olives, which is usually about 800d, you can heal damage that would cost 20,000d in repairs at the shipyard after the battle.
• Buy the blessings for Hades Fire and Athena’s Mercy so you have a stockpile of 5 of each at the beginning, 15 of each once you can afford it, and 25 of each as the game goes on. Hades Fire will help you win most battles, and Athena’s Mercy healing is cheaper than paying for repairs.
• The other blessings are also useful, but a lot more expensive, since they cost fish, metals, or wheat. I did like having about 3 Winds of Boreas in stock, as if you come up against a really strong navy, 1 of these will help tremendously.
• Poseidon’s Blessing is useful for the minotaur, since his special power is ramming and it makes ramming do even more damage. But it’s not as helpful for the other characters until you have very strong ships.
• Since all items sell for their current Buy price at the Agora/Marketplace, you can restock most quickly by going to the Agora/Marketplace, buying, say, max salt, going to the Altar, clicking on Hades Fire and then donating for max blessings, and then going back to the Agora/Marketplace for more salt. When you finally finish, you can sell any extra items back at their Buy price, then buy what you actually want for tradegoods.
• If you need blessings, it’s fine to pay up to 40 for salt and up to 80 for olives. At that price, it’s still cheaper to use blessings than the cost of ship repairs.

Shipyard Tips

• Each shipyard will have 1 and only 1 ship for sale during any one visit. That makes buying decisions easy.
• If you sell any of your own ships, you will get full price, including full price for any armaments.
• You can’t sell a full ship. So if your trading meter is at 200/200 aqnd you want to sell a ship with cargospace of 30, you have to go to the market and sell 30 of anything before you can sell the ship. Or go to the Altar and trade 30 items for blessings.
• If you buy the ship that’s currently for sale, and then sell it, you won’t be able to buy it back again on this visit.
• If go to the armaments screen, you can sell any armaments by using the – button, and you immediately get that money back. So it’s easy to upgrade from regular to premium weapons. Say your ship can carry 6 short range weapons. You have 4 archers and 2 spearmen. – archers once and + spearmen once and it will cost you 800d, since you got 200d back for the archer.
• The Small Vessel and Penteconter are worthless—trade them up to better ships as soon as you can afford it.  
• The Unireme is OK as a fighting ship if it’s heavily armed, but you can’t ram with it or it takes too much damage. Keep it until you have at least 4 ships, then start trading up for stronger vessels.
• Most characters will only need a navy of 4 heavily armed ships of the trieme level or above, but more is always better.
• It’s almost always worth borrowing money to buy a new ship.
• It’s more important to get a dart for longrange use than to upgrade archers to spearmen. But once each ship has at least 1 longrange weapon, it’s fine to use money to upgrade the shortrange armaments.

• If you keep about 2,000d as a cash reserve and keep a good stock of  Athena’s Mercy Blessings, you will be able to keep your ships in good repair.

Reliquary Tips

• Unlike previous Tradewinds games, it seems like all the Reliquary items do exactly what they say. I guess having the Gods dropping in on a regular basis keeps the priests more honest! 
• At the Reliquary, all characters can use the Osprey Feather, Scythe, Brooch of Palas, Highly Volatile Compound (in that order) as early as you can afford them. These all improve your battle results.  With these four items even a fleet of just two fully armed triemes can win most battles.

• If you have a lot of money, like over 100,000d, and you already have at least 4 heavily armed ships, it’s good to go to the reliquary and buy the Discus and the Harpy Fletchings.  Other items are a matter of taste.
• The crate that increases your cargo space increases it by 10%. So it’s not really worth it when you only have a total cargo space of 80 or 100 tradegoods. But once you get a cargo ship or two and have tradegoods space for several hundred items, it can be worth it if you have a lot of money to spare.
• One note—if you buy the Cup of Hermes to reduce the cost of blessings, be aware that the priests will cheat you if they can when you go to buy the blessings. Say you bought the cup, so the price of Hades Fire is supposed to be 18 salt instead of the regular 20. If you have 18 and only 18 salt in inventory, yes, the Altar will give you one Hades Fire. But if you have 20 salt in inventory, the Altar will go ahead and take it all!  So if you want to take advantage of the discount, you have to stock your inventory low to buy the blessings 1 at a time. That’s pretty tedious.
• You can sell magical items you receive as rewards if you want.  Some are worth keeping, some are not. They only show up as important later in the game a couple of times, and most of those items you won’t be allowed to sell. Do keep any swords you receive, though.

“;

David Tovey