A cross is produced every turn by each colony in Sid Meier's Colonization. Like liberty bells, crosses can be considered a kind of good but cannot be bought, sold, or transported. Instead, crosses represent the religious fervor of your colonists and inspire faster immigration from your homeland in Europe.
Each unit from the immigrant pool costs more gold to ship than the last, but crosses inspire them to come of their own accord and fund their own passage. Additional crosses lower the price of the three units in the immigrant pool until one of them offers to pay for their entire voyage and is provided free. (At first, this unit is selected randomly but you are able to choose the immigrant after William Brewster joins your Continental Congress.)
The crosses of all four nations are identical and work identically, although they notionally represent the Anglican and Puritan Churches for England, the Reformed Church for the Netherlands, and the national Catholic churches of France and Spain. In each case, every colony automatically produces a single cross per turn by existing. This is doubled to 2 when a church is constructed and increases further when units act as preachers in it. The expert form are firebrand preachers in the mold of Cotton Mather. These can immigrate randomly or be hired from Europe but require a university like Harvard or Yale to train in the New World. When a colony reaches size 8, its church can be expanded into a cathedral. All cross production from all sources is increased by 50% after William Penn joins your Continental Congress.
Because churches require resource and time-consuming construction (unlike town halls), because crosses do not produce productivity bonuses like liberty bells, and because all immigration from the mother country is blocked during the war for independence, cross production is generally given a very low priority in most games of Colonization. A dedicated focus by an English player with a port close to deep water can, however, be very productive in some games.
See also[]
- Crosses in other games