Waterways: ports, routes and ferries

The one-minute explanation

Four objects, easily confused:

Port

A container at a settlement. It has no capability of its own—its capacity is simply the sum of its terminals.

Terminal

The capability unit. Passenger, cargo or mixed terminals handle people and freight; ro-ro and rail-ferry ramps handle vehicles and rolling stock and cannot substitute for the first three.

Scheduled route

The sailing service between two ports, with a vessel type, a daily frequency and fares. This is what carries passengers and cargo.

Ferry link

A car or train ferry: a pseudo road or railway laid across the water, letting vehicles and trains cross without unloading.

Terminal compatibility decides what you can run

One rule governs every water build:

• A mixed terminal satisfies any route type.
• A mixed route needs both passenger and cargo capability at each end—one mixed terminal, or a passenger terminal plus a cargo terminal.
• A single-purpose terminal serves only its own type.

The quote is incremental, which rewards planning. A port that already has a cargo terminal pays only the difference to reach mixed capability; a port that already has passenger capability pays only for the missing cargo dock. Existing compatible facilities are always reused and cost nothing.

Ferry ramps are separate facilities again, added when you buy a ferry, and they contribute nothing to passenger or cargo handling.

Creating a route

Both endpoints must sit near navigable water, and a water path must actually exist between them—the game searches for one and refuses the route if it cannot find it. If a settlement is close to water but not on it, a small port settlement is created for it automatically at the nearest coast inside your territory.

The path itself is found for you, preferring deeper water and avoiding cramped coastal cells, and its length sets the distance and travel time. Every trip also includes port handling time on top of the sailing—which is why short water hops are rarely competitive against a road.

The quote lists setup cost, any missing terminal capability at either end, an optional ferry surcharge, and the resulting monthly cost. One caution when reading it: the preview is computed at one sailing per day, so the capacity and monthly cost shown are for that minimum service, not for the frequency you will actually run.

Tuning a route

A route has four controls: operation state, sailings per day (one to thirty), passenger fare and cargo fare. Fares are per-distance rates you set yourself; a cargo route has no passenger fare and a passenger route no cargo fare.

Beside each field the panel shows a suggested value and your current setting as a percentage of it. The suggestion sizes the service to roughly 80% utilization—and it sizes to unmet demand, not merely to what you are already carrying, so a suggestion well above your current frequency is direct evidence of a capacity shortfall. It reads the busier direction, never the sum of the two.

Pressing Use suggested fills the fields but changes nothing until you apply. The preview then re-runs the real assignment and shows the expected result as a range between the immediate and the settled outcome.

Reading the signals

Load factors, carried volumes and utilization are all reported per direction, since one schedule publishes the same capacity each way. A route can be overloaded outbound and half-empty inbound; the load-factor column sorts by the worse direction, deliberately.

Frequency does more than add capacity. Travellers perceive a waiting cost inversely proportional to how often you sail, so going from one sailing a day to four removes several hours of perceived journey time. That can win a corridor outright, independently of whether the extra seats were needed.

Fares and frequency interact, which is why they are set together: raising frequency lowers the load factor, which lowers the suggested fare. Chasing the suggested fare immediately after a frequency increase is self-defeating unless the new capacity actually fills.

Suspension has a trap

Suspending a route stops its sailings, its capacity, its revenue and its entire contribution to the endpoints' service scores. Its car ferry, if it has one, disappears from the road network at the same time.

Two things do not stop: the fixed monthly route fee continues (only the per-sailing part goes away), and the port terminals keep their maintenance and depreciation.

The trap: terminals are only protected while a route actively needs them. Suspend a route and its terminal becomes closable—and once closed, the route cannot be resumed until you rebuild the facility. The port manager warns about this, and it is worth reading twice before tidying up a port whose routes are merely paused.

Port capacity and congestion

Port capacity is shared. Every route touching a port draws on the same terminals, so adding a second route through a busy port does not add throughput—it divides the existing capacity. Transfer traffic is doubly expensive, consuming a handling action at both unload and reload.

Congestion costs nothing until a port passes 100% utilization, then grows quadratically: modest overload is affordable, sustained overload is not. The panel folds the surcharge into the port's cost figure rather than breaking it out, so the symptom is a port whose costs inflate without new construction. The port filter flags congestion from 95%, slightly before the cost begins.

The remedy is terminal capacity—or moving traffic off the port by trimming frequency or raising fares on the routes feeding it.

Ferries are additional, not substitutes

A car or train ferry can be bought with a new route or retrofitted to an existing one. What it creates is a pseudo link on the surface network: a car ferry appears as a national-grade road, a train ferry as a standard railway, each with its own modest capacity and speed and its own per-kilometre tolls.

The consequences are worth stating plainly:

• Ferries carry vehicles and trains, not the scheduled route's passengers and cargo. They add zero capacity to the sailing service.
• They have their own capital cost, maintenance, depreciation and revenue, reported separately from the water service.
• Road itineraries can route straight across a car ferry; rail operating lines can include a train ferry in their path—which then makes that line a blocker against suspending the parent water route.
• For connectivity milestones, a car ferry counts as a road connection and a train ferry as a rail connection. A car ferry does not satisfy the railway milestone.

Common misconceptions

“I added a ferry, so the route carries more”

It carries more vehicles, on a parallel surface link. The scheduled route's passenger and cargo capacity is unchanged.

“Suspending a route stops its costs”

It stops the per-sailing costs. The fixed monthly fee and all port facility costs continue.

“A second route doubles the port's throughput”

The terminals are shared. Two routes through one port split its capacity between them.

“A mixed terminal is strictly better”

It is more flexible and much cheaper, but handles less of each type. Substantial flows want dedicated terminals.

The collection ends here