A suggestion:
Make the Sotd the same types of boats we the players have (Schooner, Brig, Galleons) except be glowy and be crewed by AotD!
If you do not want to have them follow the wind rules, this is fine. Keep the same pathing or whatever.
However, having the ships be like ours they would be vulnerable to sinking like ours. Also they would be vulnerable to boarding!
One tactic for winning against these ships would be boarding. You get on board and have to fight the AotD then fight the captain boss.
Once the Captain boss is taken out, the AotD stop fighting and become capture-able for a short period of time. they will follow you to a cage...one timer runs out they become volatile and will try to kill you again.
Captured crew are to be kept in a cage for (server's taming rate time) for them to turn back to actual NPCs that you can hire.
Successfully captured ships turn into a bare-bones standard version of the ship you where fighting. Severely down on all HPs needing lots of hammering to bring back to good condition...(schooner with sails common cannons and a wheel only for example) maybe with a chest with the blueprints in it.
Destroyed SotD would drop Flotsom and crew (would still need to captured and hold them to turn them back)
At the very least let us fight our same type of boats!
these sci-fi things are dumb.
Having the ships pop up from the depths and arrive at the surface instead of just popping into existence would be bad ash too.