Your first port and water routes

Four things, easily confused

Port

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

Terminal

The capability unit, and what you actually buy. Passenger, cargo or mixed handle people and freight.

Scheduled route

The sailing service between two ports, with a 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. It carries vehicles and trains, and adds nothing to the sailing service.

Terminals decide what you can run

One rule governs every water build: a mixed terminal satisfies any route type, a single-purpose terminal serves only its own type, and a mixed route needs both passenger and cargo capability at each end.

The trade-off is worth seeing as numbers. At the entry level:

So a mixed terminal is less than half the price of a passenger and a cargo terminal together, and gives you roughly 60% of each. Build mixed when a corridor carries a modest amount of both; build two dedicated terminals when either flow is substantial. Passenger capacity is the expensive resource in every comparison.

Ferry ramps are separate facilities again, bought with a ferry, and they contribute nothing to passenger or cargo handling.

Creating a route

Both ends must sit near navigable water, and a water path must actually exist — the game searches for one and refuses the route if it cannot find it. A settlement close to the sea but not on it gets a small port settlement created for it automatically.

The path is found for you and its length sets the travel time. Every trip also includes port handling time on top of the sailing, which is why short water hops rarely beat a road.

One thing to read carefully: the preview is computed at one sailing per day. The capacity and monthly cost shown are for that minimum service, not for the frequency you intend to run.

Frequency and fares

A route has four controls: whether it is running, sailings per day (1 to 30), and a passenger fare and cargo fare that you set yourself as per-distance rates.

Beside each field is a suggested value. The suggestion sizes the service to about 80% utilisation, it reads unmet demand rather than what you already carry, and it reads the busier direction rather than the average. So a suggestion well above your current frequency is direct evidence of a shortfall.

Frequency does more than add capacity: travellers feel a waiting cost that shrinks as you sail more often, so going from one sailing a day to four can win a corridor outright even if the extra seats were not needed. Raise frequency first, then revisit fares — not the other way round.

Two traps worth knowing now

Suspension does not stop the bill

Sailings stop, but the fixed monthly route fee continues, and the terminals keep their maintenance. Worse: a suspended route no longer protects its terminal, so the terminal becomes closable — and once closed, the route cannot be resumed until you rebuild it.

Ferries are additional, not substitutes

A car ferry appears as a national-grade road and a train ferry as a standard railway, each with its own cost and revenue. They carry vehicles and trains — the scheduled route's passenger and cargo capacity is unchanged.

One more for later: port capacity is shared. Every route through a port draws on the same terminals, so a second route divides the existing capacity rather than adding to it.

Next

Part 6 is the money — what flows into the fund, what flows out, and the check to run before every build.

For port congestion, terminal levels and the full ferry model, see Waterways: ports, routes and ferries.