Service Is the Money

Two ideas land together: every charter earns at full rates — difficulty is now purely about costs — and holdings pay on a service slider: the better you actually serve a town or industry, the harder its dividends multiply. Absentee landlords earn scraps; operators who move the cargo get rich.

Every charter earns the same

Harder charters used to shrink your market bonus and your holdings on top of raising your costs. That double penalty is gone: the market bonus and holdings pay 100% on every charter, Easy through Hauler Hell.

Why: taking away your ability to earn just made hard charters feel smaller. Now the game is identical everywhere — it is simply far more expensive to run, and profit is the achievement. (Easy players: your old +15% bonus is folded into this — everyone earns the same now.)

The service slider

Holdings dividends used to scale linearly with how much of a town's or industry's output you moved. Now it is a slider that rewards pushing service high:

• Below 10% it scales toward zero — a town nobody hauls from still pays nobody.
• The town window shows your multiplier on the stake line: "service x1.7". Push the Serviced % and watch it climb.
• Industries read their transported % per cargo, as always — same slider, gentler curve.

Powered towns pay their patrons

Feeding a town's sinks already boosted its industries. Now it boosts your town holdings too: every sink kind fed to demand — electricity, hydration, wealth — doubles the town's dividend pool.

• One utility fed = ×2. Power AND water = ×3. Both plus a supplied bank = ×4.
• The stake line says so: "sinks x3".
• Stacks with the service slider — a fully-serviced, fully powered metropolis is the richest thing an Urbanist can own.

Unserved towns crawl again

Big unserved cities had crept up to 120–160% growth through stacked bonuses. Fixed: a town with unmet needs grows at 30% — a real penalty — and everything above it is earned by service. Fully served cities still hit the same ceilings as before (a four-demand city runs up to 260%).

Housekeeping

• Overspent talent trees (from the per-class migration) now explain themselves on the board: the tree waits as a goal build and activates the moment that class levels into it. The game never grants beyond your points.
• AI company folds no longer post to Discord.