Best ship design

Morale
In most games, bigger is better. In Pixel Pirates however, you want your ship as small as possible. (within reason) Larger ships aren't more powerful in Pixel Piracy, but they do get considerably harder to keep clean. Having a massive ship riddled with garbage makes your crew unhappy, so efficiently cleaning a ship is key. Apparently the crap on the ship affects your crew even when they are not on it; even when they are in the tavern. Hence a relatively small, uncomplicated design aids you in keeping morale high, allowing you to build a larger crew. In order to help keep the ship clean, it would be useful to keep your crew (and their waste) up where it can be quickly disposed of. For that reason its best to keep the food and the booze on the deck, next to the edge where junk can be kicked off right away.

In addition to keeping the deck clean, plants also help to counteract the natural morale degradation. The more you can cram on the better.

Speed
You will still want your ship large enough to max out your sails at four, but no bigger. That paired with a wheel will make your vessel swiftly get from tavern to plunder and back again. Keep in mind masts must be 7 high.

Fire Power
Of course you'll want a few cannons as well. If you've played for any amount of time, you'll have figured out that the cannons aren't what make or break a battle; its the melee combat. Cannons are helpful, but unlike most pirate games, they aren't the main event in Pixel Piracy. The idea of a deck bristling with cannons and ammo is great, in concept. The problem with that is the fact that the ammo will explode when enemy shots hit it; possibly causing more damage to your crew than the enemy. Even the toughest enemies don't fire that many shots, but you certainly don't want to give them a chain reaction of BOOM! and it does quite a damage. That said, you should keep your ammo sparse, and where possible, shielded.

Normal cannons fire in an arc, and for the best result, you'll want them to be on the highest point of your ship. If the enemy ship is significantly larger, they'll just harmlessly impact the front of the ship. Both kinds of cannons can be fired from below deck, so keeping the majority of them, and their ammo, safely away from enemy fire is recommended. You'll want to build your deck four squares high so that bombs hitting the top deck don't ignite the ammo below. Although swivel guns have a smaller area of affect they fire at the crew directly above or below deck, so they usually end up doing more damage and are preferable to standard cannons.

Loading up your ship with several pillaged cannons becomes easy by mid game. The hard part is having enough crew with the skill to fire them. Pragmatically speaking, five cannons pack a lot of punch, and if you have 5 crewmen trained to fire them you are in pretty good shape. You'll need to be pretty good at keeping up morale in order to go for more than that.

MISC.

 * Use lamps below deck to prevent spiders
 * The spare swords are great, but they can distract some pirates from doing their duties.
 * Store food in barrels & always have some rum on hand.
 * A bigger ship doesn't mean a more powerful ship, and smaller are easier to clean, so you should almost never need to capture an enemy ship; the plunder is more valuable.