Steam Ahead

A quality-of-life patch about the things around the game: sign in with the account you actually use, found a company on any world without the runaround, tell the bot to stop talking to you — and a couple of economy dials that were priced wrong.

Sign in through Steam

The talent board and the device page now offer Sign in through Steam beside Discord. Tie your career to whichever account you prefer — or both; they can point at the same career.

• Same flow as Discord: sign in, get a code, type !link CODE in game. Machine recognition, record protection and everything else work identically.
• No more refresh-roulette: after you type !link, the page notices by itself and unlocks your name, class bar and tree within a few seconds.
• Steam sign-in uses Steam’s own OpenID — we never see your password and there is no app to authorise.

One company per player, farm-wide — the new founding wins

Until now, founding on a second world while you still had a company elsewhere bounced you to spectators with a message telling you to go back and !reset — every single attempt. That was the wrong way round.

• Found wherever you like. Your new company stands, and your old company on the other world is wound up automatically within seconds. One line in each world’s chat, no Discord noise.
• Only you can trigger it. The migration only fires from a machine linked to your name — someone borrowing your name on an unknown PC still gets the old refusal. And a company with anyone aboard is never touched.

A quieter chat

Two things at once — a bug and a mute button.

• The record-fanfare spam was a bug, and it is fixed. Your own records could re-announce every few minutes: the badge in front of your company name changes when you level up, which made the same holder look like a new one and defeated the 2-hour anti-repeat cooldown. The cooldown holds now — a record announces when it is set and when a rival takes it, not every time you improve your own number.
• New command: !hide. The bot now delivers its announcements to each player individually, so !hide simply takes you off the list — records, hourly boards and announcements stop arriving, on every world, until you type !hide again. Replies to commands you type always come through.
• Side effect of the delivery change: bot lines now arrive as private messages rather than [All] chat.

Airports pay by size now

Airport upkeep was a flat monthly fee per airport — a heliport cost the same to hold as an intercontinental hub. It now uses vanilla’s own per-type weights, at a tenth of vanilla’s rate:

Base rates, before your world’s inflation era, your charter and your talents — like every holding cost. Station tiles also eased from 500 to 400 a tile. Small strips stop being relatively expensive; big hubs become the commitment they should be.

Update, 30 Aug: airport rates were later cut to a quarter of the figures above (heliport 500 … intercontinental 9,000), and station upkeep was rebuilt as a flat 100 per tile with a small size premium.

Update, 31 Aug: both were halved once more — airports to heliport 200 … intercontinental 3,600, and stations to 50 a tile.

Light ships

The micro canal runners — Water Taxi, Canal Post and Canal Trader, every generation and Mk — are their own class in the market now: 3 service units each, against a ferry’s 5 and a cargo ship’s 10.

Why: a swarm of tiny canal boats was flooding the sea share and crushing the sea scarcity bonus for everyone — including their owner. Same logic that already priced helicopters at 2.

Research climbs gentler

Each research level now costs +40% over the last instead of +50%. The wall is still exponential — it is the whole limiter — it just bites later:

Before inflation, per track. Expect to push two or three levels deeper in a session than before.

Also fixed

• The town window’s HQ line counts reach now: a town you govern through HQ reach reads “HQ: 3 companies, 1 via reach” instead of leaving you out. The growth bonus always included it — only the count was blind.