It's rough sailing alone on the Sea of Thieves. It's even rougher with some lousy rando crew that won't talk to you and who have other ideas about how to run the ship.
Today I was minding my own business stocking up at an island when two clowns rolled up on me. I have no idea what they were thinking; they rammed me and jumped on my ship, so I killed them and started putting fire on their sloop. I had 120 cannonballs, and over the course of a half hour, I made pass after pass and hammered them with about an 80% hit rate. I masted them three times, set them on fire several times, killed both of them probably four or five times each. Eventually I stole their supply crate and used it to set them on fire. But they had enough supplies that they just kept repairing faster than I could put holes in them. I, on the other hand, had to take breaks from the guns in order to repair and bail out my sloop.
I'd like an option where crew spots could be filled with NPC "urchins." These would perform tasks on board ship on par with the AI level of skeletons. My thought is that they could hang around the docks of outposts, and each urchin could have two randomized roles. Roles could be:
- Cook. Cooks all your uncooked food.
- Bilgerat. Bails your ship and puts out fires.
- Handyman. Repairs the ship.
- Scavenger. When you anchor at an island, they hop off and gather supplies.
- Gunner. They use the cannon with fairly poor accuracy and firing rate.
- Diver. Like Scavenger, but for loot in wrecks and in the water.
- Lookout. Calls out when ships are sighted, and ships within a certain range get marked on the map table.
All urchins would be able to defend the ship (but not board others) with sword and pistol. They would respawn in a similar way to the player, but with a longer respawn time, and their combat skill would be on par with a skeleton. My thought is that an urchin would perform their normal tasks unless the ship is boarded by a "hostile pirate" (weapons out), in which case they would defend the ship.
