I know being a pirate, by which I mean an actual pirate in this game, has advantages, but I feel we need a couple of our own ships.

A true pirate ship would be fast, armed to the teeth, have a huge hold for plunder, a huge pack of scruvy knaves, and probably a week hull.

Some special abilities would be nice like "Run and Hide" or some kind of danger molification for the player plunder.

Everything here seems to steer you to NPC combat, but isn't PC really the fun part?

A siimple one is no NPC fleet penalty for having a few hawkers, maybe call them spy trawlers, gather intell on fleets.

A ship that could fight AND carry a lot of cargo would be a nice solution.

Otherwise its easy to get in a trap where you've progressed with too large a fleet and you really can't plunder at all. Not fun!

I mean all these ideas as constructive, BTW>