Discounts & Classes

Mk7 and Mk8 arrive for real. Every discount in the game is now a share of what you actually pay, a class is worth +30% instead of double, and your score is measured against the best anyone has ever managed on that world.

Mk7 and Mk8 arrive

Version 0.92 added two more tiers to every vehicle in the game. They are reachable now.

• Talents alone reach Mk5. Four cluster capstones in a mode, in any order, and that is the ceiling anybody can path to.
• Your vehicle class adds three tiers on top, up to Mk8. So Mk6, Mk7 and Mk8 are class-exclusive — the only Mk8 trucks in the game belong to a Roadmaster, the only Mk8 ships to an Admiral.
• Specialists ride your mode’s ceiling as they always have, so an unlocked Coal Hauler climbs with everything else.
• Each tier still arrives later on the calendar — Mk2 two years after the base vehicle, Mk8 fourteen years on. You need the talent and the year.

Discounts are a share of what you pay

Cost relief used to subtract flat points from your charter’s surcharge, which meant the same talents were worth a great deal on Hauler Hell and nothing at all on Normal. Every discount in the game is a percentage of the real bill now.

• A maxed build removes 60% on every charter. The same talents are worth the same share whatever difficulty you took.
• Infrastructure relief works the same way — up to 60% off the monthly bill for road, tram, stations, airports, rail, electrified track, signals and canals.
• Purchase rebates, construction rebates and asset preservation are capped at 60% too, so no build ends up being handed things for free.
• Cost relief no longer stops mattering the moment you take a gentler charter. On Normal it used to do nothing at all.

Why: a discount you cannot see the effect of is a talent nobody should spend points on. The number on the node is the number you get.

A class is worth +30%

Every class used to double its own speciality. That made the class the whole build rather than a flavour on top of it — nobody else could get close, so picking a class picked your strategy for you.

• Strategy classes amplify their own axis by 30% instead of 100%. An Industrialist still develops industry better than anyone; the gap is a lead rather than a canyon.
• The four vehicle classes gained the same +30% on their own mode bonus, which they never had before — they were amplified purely through Mk tiers.
• Every class still starts holding three of its signature power — three Trusts, three Bonds, three Seats, or three towns of Reach.
• Classes amplify, they never gate. Every node on the board is still something anyone can path to.

Why: so the eight classes can be balanced against each other at all. At double, one class’s ceiling was simply unreachable by the other seven, which left nothing to tune.

The board reads in real numbers

• Cost and upkeep nodes show what they actually remove. They used to display raw talent points with a percent sign, so a maxed build added up to figures like 355%.
• Your build summary lists every rebate you hold — purchase, construction, upkeep and asset preservation — which were invisible before.
• Class cards and the in-game Company Setup page have been re-measured against the live board rather than describing an older one.

Scores measured against the record

Every board used to divide by whoever was leading that session, so the leader scored a perfect 1000 by definition. That number measured position, not achievement.

• Each board is scored against the best ever recorded on that world — cargo delivered, market profits, company value, industry dividends and town dividends, each tracked separately.
• A perfect score means breaking every record. Beat one and you land on 100% and set the new mark.
• The Rankings page names who holds each record and when it was set.
• A world with no history behind it scores exactly as it did before, so nothing needed seeding.

Smaller things

• Record announcements name the world they were set on. Records went per-server recently and the announcements had not caught up.
• A town stake is counted in residents again. Town stake value is paid on the dividend rather than minted into the count, so your stake can never read higher than the town’s population.
• Town holdings scale on the same curve as industry, gauged against 30,000 residents rather than running away as a town grows.
• Worlds #5 and #6 advertise their real start years, 2000 and 2020.
• The research page shows the total you have invested in each track, in your own currency.