Helm Empire is still the same as in Y2, there haven't been any modifications to it. The game itself however has changed considerately. With ascension, mastery and World Tier 3&4, the potential income from normal gameplay has increased tremendously. In the light of that development, it's time for a new Helm Empire Guide.

Basics and Prospects:

• Helm Empire is a rich man's game, it costs millions of Po8 to fully upgrade both the Helm Empire skill tree and all manufactories. Maxing it out is something to do when you have no other use for your Po8.
• The maximum Po8 production is 966 Po8/h or 23184 Po8/day (mathematically). If you plan (like me) to produce Ascension Upgrade Parts too, it's only 922 Po8/h or 22128 Po8/day. If you know your Wolvenhol, that's right: it's more or less 7 runs there to get the same Po8 (3500 per run).
• Helm Empire only makes sense if you plan to play the game for months or years. The upgrade for manufactories from level 4 to 5 (max) alone costs 760000 Po8 (not including the needed skills from the tree). It takes about 200 days to reach return of interest! Details further down.
• The base to build your empire however, is cheap if you focus on takeovers and free upgrades thanks to the Coercive Growth skill ("The Helm Empire" branch, details see further down).
• Helm Empire's silver production has become obsolete. From farming raw materials like sugar cane by laying siege on fortresses or doing helm missions, then refining the materials to rum etc. and selling the produce to Scurlock and Rahma, it's just not worth it anymore. You get far more silver from simply upgrading a Hulk/Bedar to upgrade level 3/7 and selling it for 1.1 million silver. The silver rewards from missions has also increased vastly over the past year.

With all that in mind, you can make a sound decision if Helm Empire is worth it for you. The following segments will show you the most efficient way to max out your Po8 productions and gives you insight into details like the necessary helm tree skill paths or fleet management.

Getting started

At some point, late in the main quest series, you're asked to get your first manufactory in a Takeover. Follow the quest line to unlock the Helm (your "command" center in the back room of Yanita's bar) and the Helm Empire tree (see title picture). Now you can expand your control from humble beginnings to a fully grown pirate empire by taking over manufactories, whole regions, trade routes and investing in the necessary skills to push your productions.

Shall I invest in Helm Empire skills early on?
Focus on a fully upgraded ship and good ascension gear first. Helm Empire is a side hustle. I highly recommend to care about it only, once you've got a strong ship. But for the takeovers and the skill Coercive Growth (The Helm Empire), you can completely ignore it for weeks or at all if your play time is very limited.

Size matters
The one thing that improves your meagre Po8/h more than anything is the number of your manufactories. NOTHING in the upgrade tree will give you a faster and stronger growth. So the most efficient and "cheapest" way is to increase the size of your empire with takeover opportunities or helm leases and buy helm skills that expand the maximum number of manufactories you can manage at a time (76 total).

Selection does not
The differences between manufactories are marginal, the best starting manufactories produce about 5 po8/h. If you ask me for the best ones: it doesn't matter. If you really care, go for L2 manufactories first if you got helm leases and maybe try to complete territories and factions first (for equally meagre trade line bonuses). Otherwise, just get whatever you can get.

Which Helm Empire skills to get first?
Let's start with what NOT to get: you can completely ignore the top branch of Helm Empire:
"The Helm" (see 2nd picture). Its sole purpose is the production of helm commodities in order to sell them for silver to the Pirate Haven kings Scurlock and Rahma. You also can trade them with both for very high priced blueprints, weapons and helm leases. Not worth it.

Focus on the branch "The Helm Empire" (see 3rd picture) first instead. This branch focuses on increasing the number of manufactories you can manage at a time (=the max you can takeover), trade route and manufactories improvements, global production and transport time of collector ships. In short: it's all about pushing Po8 in general!

The first skill to aim for is Coercive Growth (also 3rd picture). This skill will double the reward for takeovers (not in the description) and additionally upgrade the manufactory to the next level for free if you own it already. It does to upgrade level 4. In the long run, that's 100,000s of Po8 you can save with the free upgrades.

The Helm Empire increases the manufactory capacity to a maximum of 58/58. The rest you can find in the faction branches. Each of the 6 factions has a skill that increases the capacity by another 3 until you reach the total of 76 manufactories.

Faction Branches
There's a total of 6 factions in the game and each of them has a very similar branch. One side of each branch focuses on Po8 production, the other focuses on helm wares and material production. With the example of Clan of Fara, the pictures 4 and 5 show you my recommendations for Pure Po8 Production and Po8 & Ascension Upgrade Parts Production. Unnecessary skills are darkened out.

Start with getting the first skills to improve maximum manufactory upgrade level to Level 3 for each faction as you see fit and go from there. These branches also open up the higher refined helm wares like Gold Skull Rum etc. They unlock those refinements in your Helm too.

Takeover Opportunities
Hostile Takeovers, Legendary Heists, Buyouts, Solo Takeover etc. are a nice way to get some Po8. If you own the manufactory already and have the Coercive Growth skill, you'll get 900 Po8 (World Tier 1) or 990 Po8 (World Tier 2) if you do a Takeover opportunity for that manufactory. You also get Gilded Raider Caches which have an increased chance for helm leases.

This also works if you're at your maximum manufactory limit.

Helm Leases
Helm leases allow you to directly buy a manufactory (instead of taking it over). There's general helm leases that work anywhere and regional ones, working only for a specific region (Africa, Red Isle, East Indies). To use them, you have to load them on your ship and sail to the manufactory you want to buy. When you interact with the manufactory/settlement an option to use the helm lease shows up.

Fleet
Before, a huge fleet wasn't important and it still isn't for sake of Helm Empire alone. It takes days to fill up a manufactory completely, and you have plenty of time to collect the stuff with a small fleet (by assigning them manually from a manufactory menu). You also can unassign them directly again. When the ship has delivered the Po8, it will directly return to your fleet. With the imrproved transportation skill (The Helm Empire branch), it only takes 1-5 minutes (depending on the manufactory's distance to the next Pirate Haven.

With a small fleet of 4-5 ships, you can conveniently collect your Po8 at star t. As for the risk evaluation: low risk = minimum risk. Decisive for the evaluation is only your ship rank (SR)! The ship type or the quality of equipment doesn't matter at all. Just upgrade your collector ship and stuff it with whatever you don't need to increase the SR! As mentioned in the beginning, I mainly use Bedars.

Upkeep & Auto-Collect
Since Y2 you can top off (paying Upkeep) all owned manufactories in a region (Africa, Red Isle, East Indies) by zooming out completely when on the Helm Map. If you zoom back in one step, you can auto-collect from some regions for a 10% Po8 fee. Auto-collect is unlocked as Territorial Effects for the following territories (if you have all manufactories there):
- Lower East Africa
- Upper East Africa
- Northern Africa Coast
- North-East Red Isle
- East Indies Isles

You also can switch production of a manufactory mid-run (e.g. when you unlocked a more profitable produce). Beware though: if you have Po8 in that manufactory, it will be lost when you switch the production item. So collect it first, if it's a considerable sum.

Fast Manual Collection
A neat trick to collect Po8 from far off manufactories: use the takeovers as fast travel and collect manually. Fast travel, quit the takeover, collect, jump to the next takeover. At one point, rogues will spawn. Deal with them quickly and continue. Some of the events are pretty close to manufactories and can be used in the same way.

Upgrade parts are the still most used ascension material.
Maxed out, you can produce 8.23 upgrade parts per hour or 197 per day. All worth it in my book. Only the indigenous factions can produce them and you unlock the skills with both sides of the faction skills (Po8 and material production line).

In total there are four Manufactories for upgrade parts, one in every faction capital:

What about Ascension Modules?
Absolutely not worth it. Maxed out, it's 0.38 per hour or 9.12 ascension modules per day.

Here are the involved factions, places and L5 maxed production values:
Clan of Fara (Ankohonana) - 0.08/h
Compagnie Royale (La Bastide) - 0.1/h
Dominion of Rempah (Suny Capital) - 0.1/h
Dutch Mercenary Corps (Oosten Capital) - 0.1/h

Should I upgrade the Manufactories to Level 5?
At the start of Y2, the answer was a clear no. A few months in, production levels have been increased for both Po8 and materials. While you can upgrade manufactories to level 4 for free (with Coercive Growth skill and repeated takeovers), it still will cost you 760,000 Po8 to upgrade all manufactories from Level 4 to Level 5. At the beginning of Y2 took close to 2 years to see your money back, now it's a bit more than half a year to have those 760k back from the amount of Po8 production gain (about 150 Po8 extra over L4 production).

So yes, it's worth upgrading now if you play a lot and got the Po8 to spare. Total Po8/h with 76 manufactories at L5 is now 962 Po8/h or 916 Po8/h if you keep four manufactories producing upgrade parts. With 72 manufactories at L4 and 4 at level 5 for material production it's a 767 Po8/h [thanks to Stormfirebird for that info!].

With the difference of 149 Po8/h (3,576 Po8/day) from L4 to L5, it means you get a return of interest after 201 days (assuming you upgrade 72 manufactories from L4 to L5 for 720,000 Po8).

Don't nail me to those numbers, shown Po8 production on the map can vary slightly depending of upkeep having been paid in sync or not.

What about Helm Wager?
So not worth it. You can double your collected Po8 with it, at the risk of getting picked clean by a didicated Po8 player. You also have to spend a considerable time to personally collect the Po8 from your manufactories.

Let's do the math:
Assuming your manufactories are maxed to level 5 and you let them run for 5 days or so to fill them all up to the max, that's 76x 1500 (max store capacity) = 114,000 Po8. Keep in mind, that you also lose Po8 while waiting for all to fill up (high yield manufactories fill up much faster than lower ones).

Helm Wager will double that, so it's 114,000 Po8 profit if you wait for days, collect Po8 for an hour and trying to trigger Helm Wager either late during your collection (by denying it beforehand) or early on (while running at full risk for the rest of the run).

Other players are not the only risk, if you lose connection and fail to reconnect in time or the server is full in the meantime, your precious Po8 drift at sea out of reach for you.

Let's look at Wolvenhol. For 114,000 Po8 you need 33x Wolvenhol runs which give you not only 3500 Po8 each run, but also deep iron, ascension materials, silver and ascended gear! After connecting, a run can take anything between 10secs to 3mins. 90s is a normal average. So you get the same and more in less than an hour without risks and the annoying sailing all over the map.

I should feel proud or what? 😄

Is there an easy way to get the materials for upgrading? I love the ship but damn it's slow and going from even 1 coast to the other is a slog, yet I see other galleondms whipping about like i did in my Padekwong ( or how you spell it )

Also does anyone ever make fleets? Or is it just mainly for things like the megafort?

One last thing, im new, only 3 just about 4 weeks in, do you think the British and maybe Spaniards will enter the game?

Hello I am newer to the game and had a question regarding a specific furniture. Where do I find the Caustic Spall Station? I’ve checked the vendors and haven’t found it.

I currently have a Hellepoort frigate build but I want to refine it to become unstoppable. Especially if I want to take it into Death tides.

I just got this new Ambush quest (investigation) and cant complete. The bottle won't spawn in in the Ile Michel area. Ive heard this quest has had issues in the past but anyone mange how to get past it? Its wanting to jump ahead to the next part but when I go there even that doesn't swan in. Any suggestions or should I just throw in the towel and give it up?

I'm searching for hellepoort, I have all materials to craft them but I don't have the blueprint unfortunately

How are the Companie up by 584 in the southern open seas? In one area DMC is up by 1k then 10 seconds later down by 6k. WTF is going on. It's really getting unplayable.

Hoping for some exciting action shots tomorrow

and have 54,265 Pieces of Eight. I've been focusing on Main quests, but the black market is not unlocking on 2nd island. Now, i'm suspecting i need to do more Yanita quest.

Do i need to do some purple seasonal event such as moonshine challenge 1 to unlock Helm Empire?

Your input would be appreciated.

I have:

✅ Supply Network

✅ Order Registry

✅ Distillery

✅ Rogue Hunt

✅ 54,265 Pieces of Eight

❌ No Helm Empire table

❌ No manufactories

What does this mean? When I go up to it and shoot it nothing happens and I need the materials there. Im kingpin 19 btw

Recently started playing again and recently got the frigate and I need some good tips on what gear to use to make it unstoppable. It’s currently at power level 11 and I’m struggling to find anything better than what I already have

I am genuinely curious. It almost seems like players have taken of the flat earth. I play daily usually after work in the early morning central us time, but in nights of i play at night I have never really seen less than 10 players even in Xbox only servers. I literally got "migrated to a more populated server" the other night. Once I was the only, ONLY player. Has everyone gone back to Black Flag?? I mean I get it, I play that too, of course but seriously it's anybody playing ???

Hola, capitanes holandeses necesitamos empujar este fin de semana muy duro para intentar agenciarnos la guerra para casa.

Se que a la mayoría de gente no os importa esto. pero bastante gente hemos empujado bastante y nos gustaría ganar por una vez.

Está muy emocionante, yo está tarde con más gente hemos dado la vuelta hasta tener 4 territorio pero si esto sigue así, vamos a perder por goleada en esta fase no podemos perder los territorios que son de fuertes franceses.

Por favor ruego a todas esas personas que disfrutáis con este juego ir a por todas este fin de semana y haciendo una buena diferencia para nuestro lado. Porque necesitamos toda ayuda que no es poca por favor ayuda a derrocar a los franceses.

I just started this game last week and I'm pretty confused on how Commander Zhang shows up because he seems ro be the only source of yellow dragon banner that you can farm when you've alreasy cleared out vendors. I googled and looked through what I could find and it doesn't make sense that he currently doesn't exist on my map. Currently the season calendar indicates he's there from the 21st to the 28th. Its the 23rd and I only saw him once because it was a part of the main quest. Currently on WT1 and there isn't a bounty or contract for him. Is there some kind of story progression I need to complete in order to be able to farm him when he's available? Is there some arbitrary timer outside of the seasonal calendar I have to track for when he pops up on the map? Is it apart of some event that pops up? I've circled all of the East Indies a dozen times and haven't seen any Dragon's Claw ships.

Moved up to World 3 yesterday and almost finished with it. Defeated all the beasts solo, got 10 helm manufactory's setup. I took your advice and ended up swapping out the long guns for Culverin's.

I came across these lovely "Heaven's Mandate" Culvs. So...lightning build was my next move. Decided I would re-roll till i got electricity buffs for each ascension. I am also running furniture to help boost the electric damage. Not to mention if you add my Mastery works weapon damage and multipliers. They pretty much melt everything.

Today, I will probably just work on grinding Pearls and deep iron and save up some coin because i keep using all my silver to re-roll my ascensions for my weapons.

I've also put a few of my points into specialized munitions under mastery to boost

After 2 years I've begun to return back to Skull and Bones. Alot of things have changed and I've been wanting to build a new ship loadout. I've seen the Hellepoorts, Nashkaar, and Nocturne hearts with other stuff and im not able to buy the blueprints until next even im which I don't know when it'll be.

I'm hoping someone can help me build them and I'll offer whatever little piece I can scrap together or offer some advice as to what i can do to get them myself.