Been playing this game for a good few years now, always pick it up with my mates and regularly manage to fill a 4 man crew on a galleon. Even so with the smaller boats and crew sizes, my friends and I always feel like we’re sailing a person or two short particularly with the larger boats. I know the devs have said 4 is the ‘magic’ number but I’m genuinely curious as to whether this is right, I think by increasing each crew by 1 or even 2 members would certainly make things both more enjoyable and also just easier to sail with. Taking into consideration different roles everyone on these ships take (sailing, adjusting sails, cannons, repairing etc) there’s plenty for it to work. And again with the larger boats, 5/4 max members on a galleon/brig respectively still works with the increase of the sails, cannons and just general size. Plus bigger crew sizes just increases popularity of the game surely! Think there should be a collective ask for this to happen!
SLIGHTLY larger crew sizes
They could do it if they start splitting people up on servers by boat size but they already have a game where they have stacked the deck in the favor of brigs for years and that's just the middle sized boat/crew.
Sloop and solo sloop are very popular in SoT. It doesn't make sense to keep making it worse for them in shared adventure. They won't switch to the bigger ships, they will just switch games. That's very much not good for a 6+ year old game that needs all the passion for the game that it can get.
The problem is a good crew with the current limits can run these ships so efficiently that they are nigh on unbeatable. With designated roles and good coordination, so any balance changes have to apply across the spectrum of skillbase.
So adding one more player to make it a bit easier to run at the lower end means at that higher end they can terrorise the entire playerbase with immunity. Watch some videos of competitive players to pick up tips and make your crew more efficient
