Routes and the Exchange
Resource routes, the Exchange's universal $5M fence, binding provision contracts, and what actually changes when your counterparty is a real commander.
Resource routes
Every flotilla founds owning 3 of the ocean's 26 base resources, rolled at random — you get one free swap every 30 days if the roll doesn't suit you. On top of what you own, you can connect up to 4 trade partners (3 resources each), pulling their resources into your own pool. Pool enough unique resources together across your own holdings and your partners' and you start unlocking bonus combo resources with their own effects — there are 11 combo recipes in the catalog. Founding never leaves you self-sufficient by design: your route topology, who has what and who you can actually reach within the 4-partner cap, is a real strategic question, not busywork.
A route with an AI rival opens with one click. A route with a real, live commander is a two-party proposal — you propose it from their dossier, they accept or decline it from theirs, and either side can end it later. Routing through a commander who's chosen Peace Mode pays you an extra +10% on that connection's effect.
The Exchange
Two-party trade offers for infrastructure, platform, technology, and workers — you send an offer, the other side (AI or a real player) answers it. You have 4 exchange slots, shared between AI-market deals and live offers to real commanders. A few hard limits apply everywhere:
- $5,000,000 per deal, everywhere. The same fence caps a single Exchange deal, a single provision contract, and a single live P2P offer's cargo value — no surface lets you move more than $5M in one transaction.
- Per-unit quantity caps derive from that fence and keep every deal under it by construction: infrastructure caps at 100 units/deal, platform and technology at 50, workers at 500 — priced so the maximum quantity of any one of them always lands at or under $5M.
- 7-day cooldown per counterparty on live deals. One settled live trade per pair of real commanders per rolling week, in either direction — you can't spam the same partner daily.
Provision contracts
Food and water supply contracts run for a set duration at a set rate per tide, up to the same $5M total value fence. Selling is a binding delivery, taken off the top of your own production — a sell contract subtracts its per-tide amount straight from your food or water production before your own people ever see it, clamped so it can never go negative but very much capable of running your own stores into a real deficit if you sell more than you can spare. A buy contract is the opposite: it adds straight to your production for the life of the contract, already paid for at signing. Know your own margin before you sell — a supply contract doesn't care whether your own decks are hungry.
Trade with live commanders vs. the market
Trading with a real player works exactly like trading with the AI market on the surface — same Exchange slots, same $5M fence — but two things are genuinely different. First, a live deal requires the other side to actually respond; nothing settles until they accept, decline, or the offer expires (with an automatic refund either way). Second, a live commander's fleet is private — only their civic stats (size, wealth, technology, government, reputation) are visible up front. If you want to know what they're actually shooting at before committing to a strike, you need a Recon Sweep first (see War). None of that applies against the AI market, whose composition is always an open book.