A shipping line that nobody has heard of is not a cheap line — it is a line with a smaller pool of customers. Awareness is measured per port, from 0 to 100, and it decides how many of the businesses booking cargo out of that harbour will even consider you when they compare rates.
Awareness is not a discount. It does not make your space cheaper or your costs lower. It changes who is in the room when the choice is made.
Not everyone. The five kinds of customer weigh a brand very differently:
| Customer | Does awareness matter? |
|---|---|
| Spot shippers | No. They compare rates and nothing else. |
| Contract shippers | No. They compare departure days. |
| Retail importers | Yes — most of anyone. They have thirty carriers to choose from. |
| Long-standing accounts | Very much — this is the group awareness is really about. |
| Time-critical shippers | Less than the retail importer. Few carriers can take their cargo at all. |
This asymmetry is the whole reason a discount strategy works as a shortcut. If you sell purely on rate you can skip brand building entirely, because the people you are selling to were never going to care. The price of the shortcut is that the customers who pay the most are exactly the ones you are invisible to.
Sailing builds it. Every voyage that arrives raises awareness at both ends of the lane, and the gain shrinks as the level climbs — the first thirty points come quickly and the last ten barely come at all. There is a daily ceiling on how much traffic alone can add, so running the same crossing eight times in an afternoon does not buy you a brand.
Silence takes it away. A port where you have not completed a single sailing in the last week loses ground every Monday. Your own port offices have a floor and never fall below it, because you are visibly there whether you sail today or not.
A campaign commits a weekly budget at one port for a number of weeks — a port in your network, meaning an office or one of your lane ends. Awareness pays off where your lanes go, so that is where campaigns run; open the lane first, then market it. The money is not taken when you start it — it comes out of the Monday settlement, along with everything else the company owes. If you cannot pay the whole marketing bill that week, none of it is paid and none of it buys anything, and the weeks still count down. Money you do not have buys nothing.
Three things are worth knowing before you commit:
Every port has a champion: the line with the strongest presence there, counted as the number of trade lanes touching the port. Reputation breaks a tie. The title is recalculated every half hour as the world moves, and it is worth five points of awareness at that port and one point of reputation, awarded once a week for as long as you hold it.
Two things follow from this that are easy to miss:
Alliances add their members' titles together, and the alliance table on the market screen ranks them. It costs no new mechanic and gives an alliance something to be about beyond the demand bonus.
There is no advertising minigame, no creative agency, no billboard placement and no brand health score. Awareness is one number per port, it goes up when you sail or when you pay, it goes down when you go quiet, and it decides how many customers were willing to look at you in the first place.
Start your shipping line