I think that it would be helpful to have an option to choose to display the current action and the action time bar at the bottom of the screen along with the charterers health. This way if you want to know what action a character is preforming its always in the same place. this would also keep the map from being quite so cluttered.  

At the same time I can see why it would be nice to have a the ability to see what actions people are preforming in relation ship to there movement. What if you linked it to tab where holding tab would pop up the action bars over peoples heads or on mouse over it appears over there head.

What do you all think.

The current action is actually shown on the Combat HUD. Personally when animations and combat feedback is improved I will be disabling Combat HUDs, but if any changes are made to the UI to make the combat HUD a part of the action bar then hopefully that can be toggled off as well.