Rates & Classes

Naval Action carries dozens of ships, from a one-masted cutter to a hundred-gun first rate, and it sorts them with the same vocabulary the age-of-sail navies used. Two questions answer almost everything a new captain needs: what rate is it (roughly, how big and how heavily armed), and what type is it (a warship, a trader, or a premium hull). A third question — can you crew it — decides what you’re actually allowed to sail today.

The rating system

Ships are graded from 1st rate down to 7th rate, borrowing the historical Royal Navy system. The rule of thumb is simple and runs backwards from what you might expect: a lower rate number means a bigger, more heavily gunned ship. A 1st rate is a towering ship of the line; a 7th rate is a small, nimble craft. Rate tracks broadside firepower — historically the number of guns — so it doubles as a rough measure of size, crew, and staying power.

The ladder, read from the top of the line down to the small craft, looks like this:

In everyday talk, captains group these into ships of the line (the 1st–4th rates that stand in the battle line), frigates (the 5th–6th rate cruisers), and the small craft below them. You’ll sometimes hear the word “unrated” for the smallest boats — that’s the historical term; in Naval Action every ship still carries a rate, right down to 7th.

Rating: the other thing called rating

Awkwardly, the game now uses the word twice. Everything above is a ship’s rate — 1st through 7th, a property of the hull design. The August 2026 update added a separate per-ship number called Rating, which measures how valuable a particular ship is as a target. Two Bellonas share a rate; they can carry very different Ratings.

Rating is built from three things:

• Base rating. The ship’s battle rating, which every hull of a type carries regardless of how it is fitted. This is the floor and it never goes away.
• Equipment rating. What you have done to her — the frame and planking woods she was built from and the upgrades bolted on. Rare woods and rare upgrades count for more than common ones.
• Her guns. A ship’s damage output feeds into the equipment rating, which produces a neat edge case: a ship with no guns fitted has no equipment rating at all and falls back to base rating alone. An unarmed trader is worth only what her hull is worth.

You can read it off the ship tooltip, and it matters for one reason: the reward for sinking a player scales with the Rating of the ship you sank. A well-found, richly fitted hull pays its killer more than a plain one. That cuts both ways and it is worth internalising early — every rare wood and gold upgrade you add makes you a slightly more attractive target to every hunter in the Caribbean. Fit a ship for the job you mean to do in her, not for the sake of filling the slots.

Ship types

Rate tells you how big a ship is; type tells you what it’s for. A ship’s type is independent of its rate, and it changes what the ship can do:

• Combat ships — the warships, from cutters to first rates. This is what you fight in. One important restriction: a combat ship cannot enter an enemy nation’s port.
• Trade / merchant ships — built around a large cargo hold for hauling goods between ports (see Making Money). Unlike warships they can slip into enemy ports — useful, but risky, since they’re lightly armed and a fat prize.
• DLC ships — hulls bought as paid add-ons rather than crafted. They span the whole range of rates and behave like their crafted cousins in battle, with one difference: a DLC ship can’t be permanently taken from you. Covered on its own page — see DLC Ships.

The Basic Lynx deserves a mention of its own: it’s the free starter ship every new player can claim, and claim again without limit if it’s sunk. It’s small and needs guns and repairs bought in port before it can fight, but it gets you on the water and even has hold enough for early cargo runs.

Deep water and shallow water

Every hull is also tagged deep draft or shallow draft, and this matters more than newcomers expect. Shallow-draft ships — most of the small craft and lighter hulls — can sail into shallow water that the big deep-draft ships of the line physically cannot reach. That governs which ships can fight in shallow-water battles and port battles, and it’s a genuine tactical lever: a light ship can duck into the shallows to shake off a pursuing first rate. It shapes where you can go, too: because the starter Bahamas region is largely shallow water, deep-draft ships of the line can’t reach most of it, and Pitt’s Town is the only deep-water port there. See Open World for how the region works as a safe starting zone.

What you can actually sail: rank and crew

Here is the gate that catches every new captain. Owning a ship is not the same as being able to sail it well, because every hull needs crew — a handful for a cutter, a full complement of hundreds for a first rate — and the crew you can command is capped by your rank. Naval Action’s ranks run from Midshipman up through twelve grades to Admiral, and each promotion raises your maximum crew.

Put a ship under-crewed and it suffers: slower reloads, sluggish sail handling, not enough hands to manage damage or board. So in practice your rank decides which rates are realistic. A junior officer fights happily in 6th and 5th rates; the heavy frigates and ships of the line wait until your rank — and your crew cap — can fill them. Promotion comes from combat experience, so the way to bigger ships is simply to fight in the ones you can crew now. See Rank Progression for how that ladder works and Crew Management for getting the most out of the hands you do have.

Choosing a ship for a role

There is no single best ship — every hull trades speed, strength, handling, and the crew it demands against one another, so the right choice depends on the job. Match the ship to what you actually intend to do:

• Solo PvP and hunting — lean toward smaller, faster, nimble ships (6th and 5th rates). They’re cheap to crew, hard to catch, and let you pick your fights and run from the ones you can’t win.
• Trading and hauling — a merchant ship with a big hold, accepting that it’s slow and weakly armed. The value is in the cargo delivered, not the broadside.
• Line battles and RvR — ships of the line (1st–4th rates) for the armour and the broadside weight to trade fire and hold the line. Fleet and port-battle rosters are balanced by Battle Rating (BR), a per-ship value the game uses to keep sides even, so RvR ship choice is as much about fitting the BR budget as picking your favourite hull. BR is a fixed figure per hull, shared by every fully-crewed copy of a given ship — and since the August 2026 update it also caps who you may attack in the open world: no tagging a player whose ship rates more than six times yours. See Types of Battles.