Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Guide: Mastering Kenway's Fleet
Before you send your newly captured flagship straight to a watery grave, you need to understand how the completely overhauled naval economy actually functions.
The Caribbean is expensive. Upgrading your gear and fortifying your hideout requires a massive pile of reales. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced brings back Kenway's Fleet. This feature is your personal armada, allowing you to send captured vessels on background missions to generate passive income while you explore.
The system is vastly different from the original game. The tedious turn-based naval combat mini-game is completely gone. Instead, you get a streamlined, hands-off management simulator that demands proper planning. You can access the fleet map by interacting with the table inside the Captain's Cabin on the Jackdaw or by visiting the Villa at your Great Inagua hideout. If you just throw random boats at dangerous missions, you will lose them. I spent way too much time replacing sunken schooners before figuring out the optimal loop. Here is exactly how you build a profitable empire.
Building Your Armada From Scratch
You can’t manage a fleet if you don’t have any ships to your name. Every vessel in your armada has to be taken by force out on the open water.
How To Capture Enemy Ships
Whenever you engage in a naval battle, your goal is to reduce the enemy ship's health bar to zero without completely destroying it. Once the ship is disabled, you sail alongside it and initiate a boarding sequence. After you wipe out the crew and completely drop their morale, you take control of the vessel.
The game gives you a few choices here. You can lower your wanted level, restore the Jackdaw's health, or occasionally loot the captain's lockbox. To grow your empire, you need to select the option to send the ship to Kenway's Fleet. Just remember that early in your playthrough, you have a very limited number of slots available. If your docks are full, you will be forced to salvage the captured ship for parts instead.
Upgrading Your Berths
You start with a tiny roster, but you can eventually expand your docks to hold a maximum of ten ships. To get those extra slots, known as berths, you need to upgrade specific facilities around your Great Inagua hideout. Once you meet the base requirements for a new berth, open your Fleet menu, select the newly unlocked slot, and purchase it with a chunk of gold. The price goes up with every new berth you buy, so make sure you are actively completing assassination contracts or looting chests to afford the expansion.
Mission Types And The Perfect Fleet Composition
Not every ship is built for the same job. In Resynced, you have to assign specific vessel classes to matching mission types to get anything done.
Hunting For Three Star Ships
You need to pay close attention to ship rarity. A one-star Brig has vastly lower health than a three-star Brig. Since missions deal a set range of damage to your dispatched vessels, low-tier boats will get ripped apart on difficult routes. Your ultimate goal is to replace every single ship in your roster with a three-star variant.
The Optimal Nine Ship Setup
Once you max out your docks at ten slots, never fill the final space. Always leave one berth completely empty. If you stumble across a legendary three-star Man-o-War out on the water and your docks are totally full, you will be forced to salvage it instead of keeping it.
For the remaining nine slots, you want a specific setup to maximize your gold output. I highly recommend running two Schooners, four Brigs, and three Man-o-Wars. Schooners and Brigs handle all your highly profitable Trade and Piracy routes. The three Man-o-Wars are exclusively used to run Patrols and keep the seas safe. Notice I completely skipped Frigates. Scout missions simply restock warehouses, which isn’t nearly as efficient for farming pure gold. If you desperately want to run warehouse missions, you can swap one Brig for a Frigate, but I strongly advise against it.
Managing Risk And Keeping Your Ships Afloat
The ocean is a dangerous place, and your fleet operates on a strict math equation. Every mission shows you exactly how much potential damage your dispatched ship could take.
Controlling The Risk Meter
Look at the bottom right corner of your fleet map. You will see a skull icon tied to a meter. This is the regional Risk Level. The more acts of piracy your fleet commits in a specific zone, the higher this meter climbs. If you let a region reach high risk, the potential damage modifier will spike over 100 percent. That means even your toughest ships can get instantly sunk if they roll poorly on the damage threshold.
Before you send your best money makers on a high-risk route, you need to dispatch a Man-o-War on a Patrol mission. Completing a Patrol directly lowers the Risk Level for that specific map section, ensuring your Brigs and Schooners can safely pillage without taking catastrophic damage.
Strategic Ship Repairs
Your ships will inevitably take a beating and return damaged. From the main Fleet screen, you can select any damaged boat and hold the repair button to fix it instantly using a small amount of resources.
Before you waste your materials repairing every single scratch, check the math. You only need to repair a ship if the maximum potential damage of its next mission is higher than its current health bar. If a route deals a maximum of 40 damage and your Brig currently has 60 health, send it out immediately. Save your repair resources for when a ship is actually in danger of sinking.
Unlocking New Regions With Forts
You can’t just send your fleet anywhere you want right from the start. A massive portion of the Caribbean is locked down when you first open the map.
Liberating Naval Forts
To open up new trade regions, you have to capture the naval forts scattered around the world map. Every single region is tied directly to a specific fort. If you haven’t blown the walls off a region's stronghold and claimed it for yourself, your fleet can’t operate there.
Make it a priority to heavily upgrade the Jackdaw's hull and mortar systems so you can start knocking out forts early in your playthrough. Once a fort falls, that entire section of the sea becomes a brand new playground for Kenway's Fleet, unlocking fresh missions and higher payouts.
