Colonization · Terrain
Sea lane
2 food · the route home
The open Atlantic. Sea lanes are the squares a ship sails east from to reach Europe — the artery every cargo of rum, cloth and cigars travels along.
What it does
Yields 2 food as fish and no commodities. Its real function is navigational: sailing east off a sea lane square sends a ship to the European port, and returning ships arrive on one.
Key details
- Food
- 2 (as fish)
- Movement cost
- 1
- Defense bonus
- +0%
- Commodities
- None
- Function
- Route to and from Europe
About terrain in Colonization
Every square grows food and, usually, exactly one raw commodity — tobacco, cotton, sugar, furs, lumber, ore or silver. A colonist assigned to a tile harvests one of them, an expert in that trade doubles the take, and rivers, plowing and roads add more on top. Forest tiles hide open ground beneath them: a Pioneer's plow clears the trees permanently and leaves the terrain listed on each entry.
Strategy — Read a colony site by what it can specialise in, not by its food alone. You want one strong food tile to grow on and a cluster of squares yielding the same commodity — three prairie tiles of cotton beat six tiles of three different crops, because only concentrated output is worth a master planter, a weaver and a warehouse.
