Uncharted Waters New Horizons

Gain enough experience in battle to raise the battle level and you can raise that stat. The experience gained in battle is comparable to the capacity of the ship you defeat or sink. There is some experience for each melee or each time you damage a ship with cannons, but the majority of the experience goes to the one that reduces the crew to zero or sinks the ship.

The main character can increase the courage stat with a duel.

Either way you may have to reload and do the battle again to get an increase in courage even when you get enough experience.

Are you wanting to raise a mate's courage or the main character's courage?

It normally isn't a problem if you are on a Royal mission. If it is really bad, the best way is to load up your ships with gold (or something expensive) and then be caught entering the palace of the ruler that is mad at you.

By being caught they will take 80% (4/5) of your money and that includes any that you have in the bank. That totally wipes out the red from that country and you are immediately neutral (zero).

If you are caught in an allied port when entering a building they will take a certain amount of your gold on hand (not in the bank), but that only lowers the anger by 20.

If the anger is 20 or less you normally don't have to worry about it at all. To be caught in an allied port or in the castle it has to be above 20. The higher it is the more likely it is that they will try to catch you and take your money while in port.

Raising your main character's courage is the easiest, but there are a few that have very low battle numbers to begin with, so it takes a while.

Thank you both for the prompt and helpful responses.

Yeah, adventure fame is limited to around 9,000 for the ports and around 20,000 to 24,000 for the discoveries. The other is the map, and if you have a completed map then that fame is done.

The story events (I think Ernst has 2 events) add fame, but you are way past the first one. The last one basically ends the game for him. I don't know if you can gain fame for that event even because I usually have the max adventure fame at that point. I think it takes about 40,000 adventure fame to even trigger the event. It is possible that you can trigger the event if you get the "completes the map" scene, but you probably have to get that from Mercator when playing Ernst.

Will Mercator even talk with you? Do you have the option to get a Contract with him? Do you still have dark areas on the map?

Other than that you may need to resort to codes...if someone knows those.

He still spoke to me and forgave me for betraying him and renewed my contract. It just sucks because Ive completed the whole map with no dark areas. I guess this means ILL NEVER BE ABLE TO FINISH RT HE GAME. CANT EVEN SEE JAPAN. LAST WE EVENT WAS AFTER I WAS MDE A DUKE BY TURKISH KING