Couple tips for anyone starting this or considering starting this.
Never stop grinding for resources. Early game it’s not too bad but you do get a taste for how much you will actually need when you build your first ship, mid to late game it gets very, very resource heavy.
Always pick up food and potion ingredients. Better food means better bonuses, but needs more ingredients to make so grab it when you see it! Potions ingredients will also be very important as fights will only get harder and you’ll need to heal more often if you can’t master the dodging and parrying.
Upgrade your gear and your ships gear. I kept losing fights and sea battles over and over and over, upgrading my gear as high as I could for how far I had progressed definetly helped out a ton. Specially for sea battles against multiple ships. Once I upgraded the hull, cannons and my boarding crew it was like going from playing hardcore instadeath mode to playing the game normally so keep an eye on it!
Before you start exchanging your insignias and letters of favour for reputation with the different factions, make sure you check the different provisioners!! They will all offer different schematics for upgrades, building and so on and early on silver will not be easy to get until you find the different factions own holdouts where they actually buy things off you.
So don’t waste your silver early, look at the different provisioners, see what they offer at what reputation level and then decide wich factions to turn your insignias into. (Also note that upon switching game sessions the reputation does not carry over, but you can go back to the session where you have said reputation, buy what you need and then switch back and have what you bought still available.)