Yes a talked to death topic, new ships, many people suggest new, bigger, more powerful, ships with higher crew limits like the 6 player Man o War idea. As of now the current crew limits are very nice and can (sometimes) give a nice mix of ships and players. Adding in a 6 player ship could break it. My idea however would keep the same crew limits for the Sloop, Brigantine, and Galleon, but allow for a variety of ships to be placed into a crew size category.
As you know when setting sail, you are given 3 options, Sloop for 1-2 players, Brigantine for 1-3 players, and the Galleon for 1-4 players. But, what could be changed is instead of having it separated by ship, rather crew limits so when settings sail you'd be presented with instead of ships, a player count in which you could select, 2, 3, or 4, this would then take you to a menu to choose a ship based on the crew limit.
So selecting 2 would give you a selection of ships with a max crew count of 2 players. So you of course would get the Sloop, but this would allow Rare to add in new ships, but keep the player count the same.
This would primarily be used to make a variety of ships out on the seas because let's face it seeing the same 3 ships over and over for years will get boring after a while, but it would balance out the 24 player server limit.
Now you might ask, but what about other characteristics such as cannon count, speed, turning radius etc, well, that's up to Rare, but personally I would say keep it the same. The ships in the game were made to keep a balance, no need to make it anymore complex, so I'd say if you choose a 2 player ship or a 4 player ship, keep all that the same to their respective categories, for example, a new 4 player ship has the same functions as the current Galleon, a new 3 player ship has the same functions as the current Brigantine, etc.
Now I don't know what the dev team has said about new ships, but considering I've seen recently of people on here asking for new ships and no one saying anything like "Oh they said new ships won't happen", that has made me come to the conclusion that either new ships will/might come, or the devs haven't made any comment on new ships.
Thank you for reading this insanely long suggestion, please give feedback on it and your thoughts on the idea below. I also don't know if something like this has been suggested before, and in case it hasn't (unlikely), I figured I might as well.
