William Luard

Hello! Looking at the upcoming update for the crew system I had some thoughts on how to make crew more than a simple commodity alongside the future food and water (though I have some ideas for those systems as well). First of all, the simplest addition, would be experience gain for the crew. A crewmember can gain experience from any action in a battle, and the experience improves their effectiveness at tasks, their survivability, etc. Perhaps the experience could be stat specific, so that a crewmember that has been loading cannons for weeks or months will be more efficient at that than the shipmate you hired yesterday. However, the shipmate has been working the masts all the battles both yesterday and today, so even if only slightly, he is better at working the sails than your veteran loader. This brings me to my second idea, crew types, that allow a captain to hire crew based on what he needs, his economy, and his renown. Marines is an example of how this could work. It could be only a matter of starting experience, or it could be a preset permanent for the crew, if one would choose to implement this instead of the crew experience. The presets could make the crew better at certain tasks, like waging war, or whatever one might need for trading or exploration/travel (and not moving large shipments) The problem is that given how little you can affect a lot of the processes in the game at this point. Once/if new mechanics are introduced to the game, more unique crew and crew types will be really good for the game I believe, but as it stands now, crewmember experience seems the most approriate addition. However, if crewmembers remain a simple commodity that is just a number (the way it seems now) none of these additions will be possible, but I wanted to state them none the less.

Hi. I'd like to suggest that the games mail mechanic is expanded. It could be expanded in a lot of ways, but first and foremost one should be able to read the mails that they've sent. I am not talking about the chat system here, but the mail, which most people rarely use I've found. Being able to read received and sent mails is very important and useful. As of right now you can only read the ones you have received. Reading sent mails will make correspondence between players possible over several sessions, even when it is necessary to have a log. I might be wrong, but as far as I know there is no way to access a chat log of the previous session, so unless that is going to be possible in the future, this simple mechanic, which is quite normal for a mail system, should be implemented.