DOCK
D
ocks allow trading by water, by providing a place for ships to offload their goods and stock up with new goods.
There are limits as to where docks can be built: they need waterfront along one side, which means you have to find a straight stretch of river wide enough to fit a dock. The building is placed half on land and half over the riverbank.
Docks employ workers. Some of these operate cranes to haul goods on and off each ship; others take those goods in a cart to a nearby warehouse, or collect goods for export from the warehouses where they are stored. These cart pushers will walk all over your province, if they must. As you can imagine, that would take a long time, and all the while the ship is sitting in your dock, idle.
Dock
A dock really should have a warehouse nearby, therefore, to accept imports and to provide it with exports. (For more on warehouses, see page 116, Storage and Distribution).
scribe's note:
Once a ship moors at the dock, it remains tied up there until it has o ff-loaded all the goods it is selling to your city, and has received all the goods sitting in warehouses ready to be exported by sea. That can take a rather long time, especially if the warehouse with the goods for export is a long way from the dock. Building extra warehouses near the dock can speed this process up, and thereby allow you to do a lot more trade.
Only one ship at a time may moor at a dock. If you are planning to do a large volume of trade by sea, you may need to build several docks. Docks make highly undesirable residential neighbors.
Next: Shipyard and Wharf