Crew Management

Almost everything your ship does in a fight is really your crew doing it. The same sailors load the guns, trim the sails, man the pumps, fight the fires, and storm an enemy deck — and there are never quite enough of them to do all of it at full tilt. That is the heart of combat in Naval Action: not just steering and shooting, but constantly deciding where your hands go. Get the allocation right and a frigate punches above its weight; get it wrong and a fine ship reloads at a crawl with its pumps unmanned. Several other pages defer the details to here — this is how the crew actually works.

One pool, many jobs

Your crew is a single finite number, shown on your ship’s status panel, and it is divided among the tasks that need doing. The catch is that a full warship needs more total hands to run everything at once than it actually carries — so the crew is always being shared out, and what one job gets, another goes without.

This also means crew is a casualty. Every sailor killed shrinks the whole pool, and because the pool feeds everything, losing crew slows your reload, your sailing, and your repairs all at the same time. A ship that has been raked and grape-shot isn’t just short of men for boarding — it is worse at everything. (Where those losses come from, and why every hit on your planking now bleeds crew, is in Ammo & the Damage Model.)

The focuses

Crew divides among a handful of focuses, each toggled and managed by a number key:

• Sailing ([6]) — how fast you trim sail and swing the yards. Starve it and every sail change and manual manoeuvre slows down (see Manual Sailing).
• Gunnery ([7]) — how fast and how fully your broadsides reload. Short on gunnery crew and you fire seven guns where you wanted twenty.
• Survival ([8]) — the emergency hands that pump out leaks, fight fires, and make urgent repairs to the rudder, pump, and magazine. It draws crew only when there’s a crisis, but when there is, it takes all it needs.
• Repair ([5]) — launches a hull, sail, or crew repair. Unlike the focuses around it, a repair no longer pulls sailors off their stations (a recent change), so firing one off won’t silence your guns — it’s gated by its own cooldown instead, not by crew (see Ship Protection & Repairs).
• Boarding ([9]) — the party that prepares to storm an enemy. It starts a fight switched off and only fills up when you call for it (see Boarding).

When a battle begins, sailing, gunnery, and survival are active and boarding is idle, with your crew shared across the live jobs. From there, the management is yours.

Optimal and minimal crew

Each task has two thresholds worth knowing, because they decide what “enough crew” means:

• Optimal crew — the task runs at full speed. Guns reload as fast as they can, sails trim instantly, repairs finish quickly.
• Minimal crew — the task still happens, but with penalties; it’s slow and partial.
• Below minimal — the task doesn’t happen at all. Too few hands on the guns and they simply don’t reload.

With a fresh, full crew you can usually run everything at or near optimal and never think about it. The decisions start when casualties thin you out or two jobs both want a lot at once — then you are choosing which task gets to run full and which one limps.

Shifting crew between jobs

You steer the split by toggling focuses on and off. The crew is shared in proportion to each active job’s need, so switching a focus off hands its sailors to the others. A worked example makes it concrete: suppose sailing wants 50 hands and gunnery wants 150, but you only carry 120. They share out roughly proportionally — sailing runs short, gunnery runs short. Switch off gunnery for a moment and sailing jumps to its full 50 while the rest pile onto reloading the guns you do have. You’ve traded reload speed for handling, on demand.

The advanced habit is rotating focus: the moment your guns are fully loaded, ease off gunnery so those hands speed your sailing or your repairs, then throw them back to the guns before the next broadside. A captain who keeps the crew flowing to whatever matters this second gets more out of the same ship than one who sets the split and forgets it.

The shifts that win fights

A few reallocations come up again and again:

• Lining up a broadside — make sure gunnery has the hands to fire a full volley, not a ragged half one. See Gunnery & Aiming.
• In a turning duel — favour sailing so your trim and yard-work stay sharp enough to hold the angle and the weather gauge.
• Flooding or on fire — let survival take what it needs, and if it’s dire, switch gunnery or sailing off to clear the crisis faster. A sunk ship fires no guns.
• Going for a board — drop sailing and gunnery so the maximum number of hands pile into the boarding party, pushing your preparation toward 100 before the grapples fly. This is the single biggest lever on a boarding’s outcome (full detail in Boarding).

Protecting and boosting the crew

Because crew underwrites everything, keeping it alive is its own priority. As of the 2026 combat changes there is no longer any safety in low numbers — a crew can be wiped out entirely by grape and splinter fire, so present an angled hull and manage your rig to deny the enemy the crew-killing shots (that defensive craft is in Ship Protection & Repairs). When you do take losses, the heal-crew repair brings a chunk of them back.

You can also raise the ceiling. The right perks, books, and modules increase how fast crew shifts between jobs, how many you carry, and how hard they fight — and marines turn part of your complement into specialist boarders. Which to slot is covered in Mods, Books & Perks.