Proposal
As the name suggests, add reserve slots for deckhands. These reserve slots would be purchaseable with Galleons, and enable you to have more deckhands than there are slots on your ship. Only deckhands placed into ship slots give you their buffs, including their stats, profession, and any artifacts they’re carrying.
Details/background on your proposal
The specifics to reserve slots are as follows: you always have a single reserve slot for free. You can purchase additional reserve slots for Galleons- the cost is half the cost of buying the next tier of ship. For example, since a Sailboat costs 300 Galleons it would cost 150 galleons to get your second reserve slot- and it would cost 10k Galleons to buy your 5th since Brigs cost 20k.
Every deckhand would need to be leveled up separately (including actual level, profession level, and skill level), but you would be allowed to have multiple deckhands of the same profession so long as only one of them is equipped at any given time (so for example I could swap my Speed enchanter for a Durability enchanter and that would be legal)
As with other ship related changes, the changes you make to which deckhands you have equipped are only reflected when your ship is respawned. In addition, you should get a tutorial prompt the moment a deckhand enters your reserve slots explaining how reserve slots work.
I would also suggest that the deckhands get their own submenu in the Shipyard, accessible by pressing a button beneath where they normally show up. That way it’s easier to display all important information about a deckhand at a glance instead of needing to hover over it (for example, showing the name, level, profession, and tier all at once in a rectangular box similar to how ships are displayed in purchase screens)
Reason to add/change
This change would mainly benefit people who want to have multiple ship loadouts, and also give players the ability to check out every deckhand profession personally in order to find out which ones they like best.
For multiple ship loadouts, let’s take me for example: I have a speedboat build, with 3 speed deckhands and a turning speed deckhand. If I wanted to change out some of those deckhands so I could make my boat build more geared to combat instead with durability and ram strength, in the current game I would have to fire my current deckhands and lose all the progress I made on them (they’re all completely maxed out).
For the people who want to check out every deckhand profession (or just completionists who want to be able to have every profession at once) this gives them wiggle room to do that without sacrificing too much- they can just keep the deckhand for later in case they want to benefit from the stats it gives, or in case that profession gets buffed in the future.
