naybasplacetoputrpgideas

Help me get Romance into my Battleship game

I synthesized these idea waking up in the middle of the night not beeing able to fall asleep and have been inspired from vastly different media i hope it is not to convoluded to follow.

I recently read the Cataphract post annd the At your Order posts and was fascinated by both.
I also started playing Rule the Waves again.
This lead to me thinking about a similiar project but with warships instead of armies or airships.
It was also clear to me that while these operations wargames sound amazing I want the whole managing your ship to be more of a downtime activity and Ship combat a side activity but not the main thing in the game.

This lead me a strange problem, I was hyped about a secondary aspect of a campaign but had no clue whatsoever what I intended the core gameplay to be.
The classic risk your characters life for gold and glory and become stronger doing so makes little sense when you start out with a literal warship more powerfull than what any adventurer could dream of, and its not like you couldn't not make it to gold and glory as a pirate.
While nothing concrete I had by now decided I wanted the whole thing to be on the light hearted side, I also kept thinking about Porco Rosso although I wasnt sure what to do with that.

What I had achieved so far was come up with 2 solutions to my problem.

  1. Have the game be a treasure hunt for some Mc Guffin like Indi where the artefact in question needs to be researched extensivly before it can be located and eventually retrieved and whichs value can not be meassured in gold
  2. A mission based story, with the players working for some faction and on crucial missions infiltrating hostile territory sabotaging enemy installations or inciting rebellions.

Another piece of media I am thinking about by now is One Piece, not because I like the show, in fact I have never seen it but from what one gets from pop culture the upbeat pirates after some kind of treassure seem to fit the bill and it makes me feel like I am missing the media experiences I need to create what I wanna go for.
I am unhappy with both my solutions as they require this to become more of a story game and I want it to be a sandbox.
Thats when the spark it me
What if instead of some faction giving missions to the players there are multiple possible love interests who the players want to impress and run errants for.
This makes my One Piece problem even worse because I have never played any romance game and can probably count the romance movies and books i have watched/read on my hands.
I think there is a vast spectrum of agency the potential love interests could have from not even partaking in the romance(like with Minnesang) or high agency captains with their own ships or even leaders of factions of there own with political interest in the struggle for power. So here are a bunch of short ideas/scenes i could imagine to be fun.

I was recomended to watch teh Action Button review of Tokimeki Memorial which I am currently doing but am thankfull for any further help.