I did check for another thread about this first, but the thread I found talked about adding npc ships.
Well I would kind of like that, it's besides the point, and for my thread I'm applying this to the current state of the game where there are only player ships.
This is a pirate game. We are sailing around as pirates.
Fact is, the above two statements are not currently true.
They won't be true until we can actually steal ships from eachother.
Whether it's by winning a boarding fight or sneaking onto an unoccupied vessel, there needs to be some way to prevent the other crew from spawning back on the ship. Now I'm not saying people should be trapped on the Ferry of the Damned during this process.
If your ship is being stolen and spawns have been blocked you should re-spawn on the island that was closest at the time of theft.
A key factor of this necessary addition is that it can't be so easy to steal a ship as to render attempting to sink it pointless. However it is made to work, it needs to be at least difficult enough to make sinking an enemy just a little easier.
Once the stealing crew has held on long enough or sailed far enough away, they would gain "official" game recognized ownership of the ship, and the other crew would have a new ship spawn somewhere on the map, as if they had sunk.
An important note is that stealing a ship would NOT scuttle your old one.
Firstly that means that while you steal an enemy crews ship, they could steal yours and fight back with it.
Secondly it means that a crew could maintain use of multiple ships if they wanted, with killed members re-spawning on the last owned ship they were on. The four man galleon crew could sail around on four different solo sloops.
However, only a crews original ship would re-spawn if stolen/sunk, and it wouldn't re-spawn until the crew is down to 0 ships.
Frankly I find it quite disappointing that a pirate game would launch without some form of ship theft already in place.
Edit: I forgot to mention earlier the premise that a crew could get multiple ships, and then split up. Go to different islands at the same time, work on different objectives and get in different fights. The ability to do this would actually reduce the odds of being in outnumbered fights.
Edit: Sidenote: Voyages could appear on all owned ships, so they crew doesn't have to return to the same one just to vote.
