The Company You Keep

Eight new marquee talents — one per class — including a town you can own outright and its exact opposite. Towns now pay every company that serves them, cities grow far larger, and the fleet has crossed ten thousand vehicles.

Eight class charters

Each class gains one big new node out past its ring road, in the same position on every wedge. They are the strongest single nodes on the board and each one changes how its class plays.

A price floor is the minimum a haul can ever pay you. It is pure downside protection — the ceiling is untouched — so a flooded market stops being able to hurt you as much as it hurts everyone else.

Own a town outright

The Urbanist’s charter is the biggest single thing in this release. Plant your headquarters in a town where no other company has a station and that town becomes your monopoly: only your vehicles may load there — its houses and every industry in it, including industries built later.

• One rival station at the moment you plant and no monopoly forms. The HQ still plants; you are told why, and you can try elsewhere.
• Once established it is locked to that first town forever. Your HQ can move on and take all its usual benefits with it — the monopoly stays where it was granted.
• One per company, ever. The renewal fees pay themselves; you are never charged.
• Deliveries into a monopoly town still work normally for everyone, and a station just over the boundary in a neighbouring town still collects. It is a strong claim, not an airtight one.

The town window and every industry in it say plainly who holds the rights, so nobody has to guess why their vehicles stopped loading.

…or throw your town open

The Magnate’s charter is the deliberate opposite. Every other company with a station in your HQ town adds +1%/yr to your Treasury Bond interest — and earns +1%/yr itself, whether or not it owns a single Bond. Two Magnates trading in one town pay everyone there double.

There is no cap. Fourteen rivals in your headquarters town is +14%/yr on your company value. An investor profits from company, so invite the competition in.

The Merchant’s Price Ring does the same thing to prices instead of interest. Every other company with a station in your HQ town raises your personal market floor by 0.03x — the minimum any haul of yours can ever pay — and raises theirs by 0.01x simply for trading there. Also uncapped, and two rings in one town pay every trader double.

Between them, three of this release’s changes now reward a shared town: the crowd bonus below, the Open Exchange and the Price Ring. A capital worth visiting has become a strategy in its own right — and one you cannot build alone.

Busy towns pay everybody

Every company with a station in a town, past the first, adds +15% industry output and +15% town growth there — for everyone, the incumbent included.

A rival moving into your city now hands you a raise. Crowded is no longer the same as spoiled — a city everyone wants a piece of is a genuinely better city to operate in, and there is no ceiling on how far that goes.

Cities grow far larger

Town growth is up by half again. Where a good city topped out near 10,000 by the whistle, the target is now around 15,000. The growth penalty for unserved needs is untouched: an ignored town still crawls, and every bonus above rides the served side only.

This first landed at double — a 20,000 target — and was tuned back the same day, because towns were growing fast enough to stop being interesting. The pace is derived from session length rather than typed, so it stays correct if that ever changes.

Towns also lay out their streets differently now — each town independently picks Original, Better Roads, a 2×2 grid or a 3×3 grid, so no two towns on a map sprawl the same way.

The fleet crosses ten thousand

GRF v95 is published — update from BaNaNaS. The buildable fleet is now 10,950 vehicles.

• The missing truck lines. Mail Van, Coal, Copper Ore, Iron Ore, Battery, Grain, Wheat, Maize, Sugar, Oil, Water, Rubber, Cola and Rock Candy trucks — all I through VII, all Mk1 to Mk8. Half the cargo list had no specialist truck at all.
• A mail specialisation at last. The Long Haul II now unlocks the whole mail road fleet — Mail Van and Post Tram, I through VII — instead of leaving mail scattered across the town wedge.
• Later generations are always better now. A III that arrives fifteen years after a II was sometimes slower or weaker than it. That affected 285 stat cells across 31 vehicle lines. Every generation is now strictly ahead of the one before at every Mk tier — 7,390 comparisons, zero inversions — and a permanent check keeps it that way.

Every cargo has a price floor

The board’s cargo supernodes went from ten to thirty-one — one for every real cargo in the game, passengers and mail included, each lifting that cargo’s personal floor and ceiling by 0.10x. If you specialise in something, there is now a node for it.

Searching the talent board also works properly now: a node’s second and third powers were never indexed, so hunting “mail” or “passengers” found nothing even though the nodes existed.

Costs rebalanced

Update, 31 Aug: station and airport upkeep were both halved again since this note went up. Stations are now 50 a tile, and the airport column reads heliport 200, country 350, international 2,100, intercontinental 3,600.

Airports cost a quarter of what they did — they were far too steep for what they do. Stations went the other way: they were priced by a curve that made a seven-tile terminus cost less to hold than a bus stop ought to, so they are now a flat 100 a tile with a small premium as your network grows. A lone heliport now costs less than a small station, which is the right way round.

Fed power stations, water towers and banks pay half what they did — a well-fed super plant was running away with the economy. All figures are base rates, before your world’s inflation era, your charter and your talents.

The climb is shorter again

Level 99 now costs 792,330 XP — a third of where it stood two days ago. As before the early game is untouched: below about level 40 the curve is unchanged to within a couple of percent, and the whole cut lands on the levels that were taking a monster match apiece.

Your level has already gone up to match — levels are always read from your total XP, so nothing was migrated and nothing was lost. Careers climbed twice over the day — the top ones by fourteen levels in total. If a saved talent tree was overspent, the extra points may well have brought it back into budget on its own.

Fixed

• Founding in the first seconds of a world could silently put you on Normal. If you founded in the instant a world opened, your saved charter was never applied — the setup page still showed your class and builds, so it looked right, and you locked in on Normal anyway. Your charter is now applied however you arrive.
• Twelve talent nodes drew a blank dot instead of an icon, including four that had done so for a month. All of them have proper icons now, and a check stops it happening again.
• Some talent tooltips printed an internal name where the node’s worth should be — “+1% openex” instead of what it actually pays. The price-floor nodes were worse: they showed a percentage where the real effect is a multiplier. All four read properly now.
• The mail tram line was gated in the town wedge where road players never walk. It moved to the mail specialisation with the Mail Van.