PLAYER GUIDE

01GETTING STARTED

02THE MARKET - SCARCITY PAYS

Every delivery pays normal vanilla rates plus a bonus driven by two live markets:

• Cargo market: each cargo's share of everything moved (12-month window) is measured against a target share. Under-hauled cargo pays up to 2.5x; flooded cargo pays plain vanilla.
• Transport market: road, rail, sea and air each target 25% of the server's weighted service points. One vehicle is not one point - the weights are road 1, train 10, plane 10, cargo ship 8, ferry/hovercraft 5, light ship 3, helicopter 2, so a hundred trucks and ten trains count the same - and a chopper or ferry fleet no longer floods its mode's share. Rare modes pay up to 2.5x.
• They stack: a rare cargo on a rare mode compounds - capped at 5x total.
• You can never earn less than vanilla. The bonus is paid monthly straight into your train / road / ship / aircraft income lines - always income, never a charge.

The live board is in-game: Story Book → The Market, including PRICES BY TRANSPORT - the full cargo x mode rate card. Premium rows are money waiting for a route.

03TOWNS - GROW THEM, THEY PAY YOU BACK

• A town wants every cargo from its first house. Mail, food, goods and a bank start as a trickle - a tenth of the full rate - and reach it at 800 people for mail, 2,000 for food, 4,000 for goods and 8,000 for a bank. Bigger towns also want more per head: a town of 10,000 wants twice as much per resident as a village. Water is wanted by desert towns only, and a climate with no food cargo or no bank skips that row.
• Passengers and mail count both ways. A town counts the passengers and mail delivered to it and the ones picked up from it, so you can ship them in from other towns as well as carrying its own away. A delivery counts for the town its station is named after. For scale, a town of 10,000 wants about 1,600 passengers, 600 mail and 132 goods a month.
• Every row multiplies growth. A cargo you supply in full keeps all of the town's growth above its floor, one nobody supplies takes 30% of it away, and partial supply counts in proportion. A town short on one cargo still grows, only slower. Growth above the floor also scales with how much of the town's demand is supplied overall, so a town nobody supplies sits on its 30% floor. A cargo the town cannot accept yet is listed in its window and never counted against it.
• Towns keep stores. Food, goods and water stock up to 24 months of need, and 4% of what is stored spoils each month.
• A fed town pays its stakeholders more. Every cargo at or under half supplied takes 20% off the holdings income of every stake in that town, never below x0.3; a town with every cargo over 80% supplied pays +50% on top.
• Growth runs double while Fund New Buildings is running, which does work here.
• Growing towns earn brand-new industries: the first at 250 population, then at 500 / 1,000 / 2,000 / 4,000 / 8,000 and on up - and past 16,000 a town is granted several at a time, up to six. The map starts near-empty and is built by play.
• Town size boosts industry: every local industry's output climbs with the population around it, up to +300% at 50,000 people.
• Desert towns (Tropic) need WATER and FOOD delivered or they cannot grow - every desert town is guaranteed a Water Tower to deliver into.

04INDUSTRIES - SERVICE IS PRODUCTION

• Keep an industry's transport rating high and it grows: the odds rise from nothing at a 50 rating to full at 100, where a serviced industry gains about 2.4 points of development a month before any talent, class or HQ bonus (three times the original pace, so a 20-year session actually builds something). Abysmal service (below 30) risks shrinkage - but never below natural output.
• Development runs to 500% and multiplies output: 200% development is twice the natural cargo, 500% is five times, before population, HQ and powered-utility bonuses multiply that again (every industry opens at half its vanilla output, and the engine caps it at 16x that start). It is also the number the holdings dividend is paid on.
• POWER a town: deliver into its power station, water tower or bank and every industry in that town gains output - up to +100% per sink kind, pro rata with how much of its demand you actually cover, and a town can run two kinds at once for up to +200%. Stop delivering and the bonus decays with it.
• Sinks now hold a stockpile like any other industry, so they consume from a buffer instead of swallowing deliveries whole - and they earn you holdings for feeding them.
• Everything above stacks additively and then hits one hard engine ceiling of 8x an industry's base output. Industry windows show it all live: output %, service rating, what its cargo pays right now, POWERED and Town bonuses.

05BUILDING A NETWORK - SHAPE COSTS MONEY

Every station tile costs $50 a month to hold, before your world's era and your charter. A dock tile pays two and a half times that, and a ship depot weighs two and a half times plain canal in the canal bill. On top of that there is a surcharge for how far a station is spread, worked out for each axis separately and then multiplied together. A compact stop pays the plain rate. A station stretched across a city pays many times over.

• Take the station's width in tiles and its height in tiles. A span of up to 4 tiles costs nothing extra, 5 costs 1.25x, 10 costs 2x and 18 costs 4x, running in a straight line between those and still climbing past that. A small town network of short stops pays the plain rate.
• The two factors multiply. A ribbon 18 tiles down one street pays 4x per tile. A station 18 tiles across in both directions pays 4 times 4, which is 16x per tile on every tile it owns.
• It is reach that is charged, not size. A 2 x 9 terminus pays more per tile than a 5 x 5 town station, because it reaches further on one axis.
• Adding a tile inside the footprint you already have costs the going rate. Adding one that stretches the box costs on every tile the station owns.

Joining stations together still works and still shares a catchment. It is simply expensive now, and the old charge could not tell a company with forty neat bus stops from a company with one forty tile monster.

Two limits are unchanged. Every tile of one station must fit inside an 18 by 18 box, so stops further apart than that cannot be joined at all. And a single station may span 5 tiles of gap in total; stretched past that it is warned in your company news, and if it is still split after three monthly checks the stranded parts are removed.

How to build instead. One compact station per thing you are serving, and let the vehicles do the joining. Two stations a few tiles apart with a short route between them cost far less to hold than one station stretched across the gap, and they carry the same passengers. If a station has to grow, keep it thin: length is one factor, length and width is two multiplied.

The reward points the same way. Your TRANSPORT board is multiplied by up to three times by your network health, measured from what the game routes over your lines rather than from what you have built. Every web - a set of your stations cargo can move between - earns a health from three things multiplied together: demand met, the cargo its links plan to carry against the cargo left waiting on its platforms; destinations, 4 places a freight web delivers to or 20 stops for passengers and mail, however far apart; and distance, how far its cargo can travel, with full marks at 25% of the map's average side. Going bigger keeps paying, by less and less: a web that reaches more places than it needs, or carries its cargo further, goes on climbing - so a network spanning a dozen places beats a small one however well served that small one is - but each further place is worth less than the one before, so size can never stand in for cargo you are not moving. Meeting the need is where you start, not where you finish: a perfect web reaches about three times the destinations and distance of one that merely meets the need, with nothing left waiting. Your health is every web's health weighted by the cargo it delivers - an average, not a sum - so a sprawl of separate routes does not add up. Splitting one network into two disconnected halves is punished; joining them is paid.

Every place a web connects pays. Each town or industry a connected web reaches beyond the first - for passengers and mail, every 20 houses in its catchment - lifts that web by 40%, up to four times. 80% of that lift is paid on every unit the web delivers, and all of it speeds the cargo's brand awareness.

06YOUR HQ - AND THE MONEY THAT IS NOT HAULAGE

Build a company headquarters and it starts governing the town it stands in. This is a whole income stream that has nothing to do with running vehicles, and a company without an HQ earns none of it.

• Any HQ gives its town +10% growth, industry output, storage and trade before a single talent. Reach talents extend the whole package to the nearest towns as well (a town another company holds a Monopoly Charter in is skipped, so the slot is never wasted) - up to a six-town region.
• Growing a town or an industry earns you a permanent stake in it, measured in residents added or development points built. Stakes pay a monthly dividend and last the whole session - they keep paying even after a rival takes over the route.
• Stakes accrue by weighted lottery, not by entitlement: the more activity and the bigger your HQ presence, the better your odds each month - but never a guarantee. Every company that serves a town shares in a base pool, HQ or not.
• Anything you take from or deliver to an industry builds holdings there, so a power station or a factory you feed pays you as well as the mine you collect from.
• Money carries its era. Inflation runs as it does in vanilla: a world opens with prices already inflated from 1920 to its start year, and costs and payments keep climbing through the session. The flat figures on this page - upkeep, dividends, bonuses - follow the same index, so a stake keeps its value in that world's own money.
• See it all in-game: Story Book → Your Holdings, plus a stake line in every town and industry window.

07CLASS AND TALENTS

Three choices sit on top of ordinary OpenTTD play. All three are set from the Company Setup page that opens when you found, or in advance on the website.

• A class amplifies, it never gates. Every talent can be taken by anyone; your class is worth +30% on its own specialty, and starts holding 3 of its signature power. The four vehicle classes are the only route to Mk6–Mk8 tiers in their mode. All eight classes →
• The talent board is 592 nodes and you spend one point per level. It unlocks uprated Mk vehicles, market bonuses, capital, cost relief, HQ facets and more. Plan a build at cargostrife.com/talents, save it, then load it in-game with !loadbuild.
• Your charter is your difficulty, chosen per company. It raises what it costs you to run and to own, never what you earn, and pays up to 5x XP for it. The five charters →
• Your build freezes about five minutes after founding. Respec after that and it applies to your next company. Plan before you found.
• A company runs on its founder's build. Join a friend and you play their class and talents - never both stacked. Crew still earn session XP, contracts and achievements (diluted 10% per extra member); records and leaderboard points stay with the founder.
• One company per player per server, and one across the farm - found a second and you are moved back into your first.

08YOUR CHARTER - THE DIFFICULTY DIAL

Every company is founded on a charter. It is the only difficulty setting in the game, it is picked per company rather than per player, and it changes exactly one thing: what it costs you to run and to own. It never touches what you are paid.

• The multiplier hits running costs and upkeep. Every vehicle's running cost, plus the monthly bill for the road, tram track, stations, airports, rail, electrified rail, signals and canals you own. It does not touch purchase prices, construction, or the rate cargo pays.
• Earning is identical on every charter. The market bonus and your holdings dividends pay the same on Hauler Hell as on Easy. Two companies hauling the same cargo at opposite ends of that table are paid exactly the same - the whole difference is the bill.
• Talents claw it back. Cost-relief talents remove up to 60% of your operating costs and 60% of your infrastructure bill, so a maxed relief build turns Hauler Hell's x10.00 into x4.00. A charter is something to build against, not a wall.
• XP scales with the charter - your session award, your contracts and your records all multiply by it. Achievements are the exception and are always flat.
• Records pay more on a harsher charter. Each record you set this session adds to your end-of-session multiplier - 2% for a monthly-book record and 5% for an all-time one at Normal - and that percentage is itself scaled by your charter, so on Hauler Hell the same records are worth five times as much.
• Any charter can win. Your score never sees your charter, and podiums and the champion crown are decided within it - an Easy player is never ranked against a Hauler Hell one.
• Pick it when you found, on the Company Setup page that opens automatically - or change it with !difficulty while your build lock is still open (about five minutes). After that it is fixed for the life of the company.

09SCORE, RECORDS, FAME

• FOUR boards, not one. MARKET is market profits. TRANSPORT is cargo delivered. CORPORATE is your company value plus everything you have spent on research, added together - so researching never costs you rank. DEVELOPER is half industry dividends, half town dividends, so both halves of the HQ game matter. OVERALL is the mean of the four, and that is what drives the ladder, podiums and records. Each board is scored against the best ever recorded on that world, not against whoever leads today, so a specialist can top a board without leading overall.
• A healthy network multiplies what you haul. TRANSPORT is cargo delivered times your network health - up to three times as much for a perfect network, where every web meets its demand, reaches its destinations and carries its cargo across the map. You can score perfectly well without one; you simply score far higher with a healthy one. It multiplies deliveries rather than replacing them, and it is an average over your webs rather than a sum, so stacking separate routes does not raise it. A flawless game scores 1000; a flawless game on a perfect network scores 1500.
• Stations are priced on their footprint. A station tile costs more the further that station is spread, measured on each axis: up to four tiles across costs nothing extra, five tiles across is a quarter more per tile, ten across is double, eighteen across is four times - and the two axes multiply, so an 18×18 station pays sixteen times per tile. Joining half a city into one station still works and still gets you the catchment; it is simply expensive. Compact stations, and several separate ones, pay the plain rate.
• Diversity is not scored. It used to be; spreading yourself thin is now punished by the market alone - a flooded lane pays less - rather than twice over.
• Rankings are per charter. Podiums and the champion crown are decided within your own charter, so an Easy player is never ranked against a Hauler Hell one.
• Records are forever, and each world keeps its own book - eras and vehicles differ too much between servers for one shared list to be fair. All-time and monthly books for the biggest road / train / ship / aircraft incomes, the biggest monthly market bonus, the highest session score, and the biggest town grown. Break one and every server hears about it. The biggest-town record goes to the town's dominant stakeholder, not to whoever happens to serve it.
• Your private Annual Report and Balance Sheet (Story Book) track bonuses, rank, holdings and your bonus-by-fleet breakdown; THE RANKINGS page explains exactly how your score and your end-of-session XP are built.
• Every session ends with a full recap - company cards, balance sheets and top vehicles - kept at cargostrife.com/recaps.

10YOUR CAREER - IT NEVER RESETS

Sessions last 4 hours. Your career lasts forever - one persistent profile across every server, no account needed (your player name is your identity).

• XP and 100 levels: finishing sessions, podiums, wins, records and contracts all pay XP, and each level is a talent point. Levels also grant real in-game perks next session: a starting capital grant, a credit rating worth up to +20% borrowing power on top of the server maximum, vehicles up to 12 years before their public debut, and veteran stars on the standings.
• Achievements across eleven categories. The bigger ones hold several goals that you check off over many sessions, and you earn the rewards when the last one is done. Every world has one of its own. The full set demands wins, podiums and records on all four climates. Achievement XP is flat: never scaled by charter, never diluted by crew.
• Quarterly contracts: every quarter of a session (one hour) rolls 5 contracts, the same 5 for every company - haul this mine's coal to that power station, carry passengers between these two cities, hold 40% of an industry's stake, deliver coal to four power stations, serve five named cities... Unfinished ones fail when the quarter ends and five new ones arrive, so a match holds up to 20. Each pays 120 XP x your charter and +15% on your finish multiplier; a haul or city-pair contract also opens a vanilla subsidy on that exact route, paid to the first company to serve it. All five of one quarter earns Full House. Story Book → Session Contracts.
• Finishing well multiplies the lot: your end-of-session XP is scaled by how many companies you finished above on each board, plus every contract done and every record set.
• Check anyone's profile at cargostrife.com/players or type !career in-game.

11THE SEASON - A LADDER EVERY QUARTER

Every server feeds one seasonal table, and a season is a calendar quarter. Entry is automatic: finish a session anywhere and you are on it. The live standings, every challenge and the full points ladder are at cargostrife.com/season.

• Your charter does not change what you score. An Easy player and a Hell player earn the same season points for the same result - difficulty already multiplies your XP, and the two ladders are deliberately different things. A new player can lead the season table in their first week.
• Points reward turning up, not just winning. You score for finishing a session at all, for every company you finish above, for the podium, for every contract completed, for every record set, for each hour you play, and the first time you finish on a world you have not played this season. A month of steady play beats one enormous afternoon - that is the shape on purpose.
• Objectives: seasonal challenges. A fixed set runs all season and each pays the moment you reach it - finish so many sessions, reach the podium, complete contracts, set records, play all four climates, finish on every world. They reset when the season does, so they are things to go and grab before it ends.
• Rewards are status, never power. Challenges and finishing places earn titles and crests: a title is worn under your name on the season table and under your CEO name on the broadcast, a crest frames your company mark on air. They are permanent - a title won in one season is still worn in the next - and nothing you earn makes your company stronger. A season cannot be bought and it cannot be inherited.
• Where you finish is written down. Champion, Gold, Silver and Bronze are recorded against your name when the season closes, and the final table is kept. The top of it are invited to the season final; what that final is worth is announced before the season ends.
• Before the first season opens the table runs as a preseason - everything counts visibly so you can see exactly how it works, but nothing earned then is kept: not the points, not the titles, not the crests. A season proper starts from an empty table.
• Type !season in-game for your rank, your tier, and the challenge you are closest to finishing.

12CHAT COMMANDS

13SIX TIPS TO NOT BE POOR