Wagons & Industry

Thirty specialist wagons, one for every cargo in the game. Industry development now multiplies your output instead of capping out early. And the top three charters ask a great deal more of you.

Specialist wagons

Rail finally gets rolling stock of its own. Every cargo in the game has a specialist wagon behind a talent unlock.

• 50% more capacity than the ordinary wagon it upgrades, for twice the price. That is the whole trade.
• Thirty of them, one per cargo, from coal and iron ore through to bullion, diamonds, toffee and fizzy drinks.
• They cost nothing to run and carry no speed limit of their own, exactly like the wagons they sit beside.
• A wagon upgrades every train you already own. There is no new locomotive to buy and no Mk ladder to climb.

Unlocked at eight nodes across the board, grouped the way the tram and barge lines already are, so the talents you took for trucks and boats pay out on rail too.

Industry output rebuilt

Development used to be one bonus among many, and it stopped counting once you passed a certain point. It is a multiplier now.

• Output is base times development, then everything else. Population, your HQ and every sink you feed multiply that product.
• Development no longer caps. Every point you earn past 200% is worth something for the first time.
• Hooking up power is worth hooking up. A developed factory that connects electricity now moves substantially, where the old sum barely noticed it.
• The industry window tells you when you have hit the engine's hard ceiling, so you know when to build the next factory instead of feeding this one.

Worked example: a factory at 208% development with an HQ, a town behind it and power connected goes from 3.5x its base output to 5.2x.

Charters worth the name

Talents, research and holdings have all grown a great deal. The top three charters have grown with them. Running costs and infrastructure both scale, while holdings keep a gentler curve of their own.

• Easy and Normal are untouched. If that is where you play, nothing changes.
• Running costs and infrastructure move together. The same multiplier applies to both, so a sprawling network is a real commitment on the hard charters.
• Holdings get their own, gentler curve. Dividends keep 80% on Hard, 65% on Nightmare and half on Hell, so building an industry or a town empire is still worth doing at the top.
• XP rates are unchanged, so the hard charters pay the same and ask a great deal more.
• Cost reduction talents still work, and now they have something worth reducing. A fully built cost specialist used to walk Hard for free.

Smaller things

• Research shows what you put in. Every track now lists the total you have invested beside what is banked toward the next level, so a level purchase no longer looks like money gone missing.
• Armoured vans and trucks haul gold on temperate maps, and can be loaded straight from the depot.
• Vehicle rebates appear under New Vehicles in your finance window rather than folded into running costs, so operating costs read as operating costs.
• Town holdings rebalanced. Dividends per resident come down, which puts the payoff on developing a town deeply rather than on town size alone.