The ordinary trams stop being one-trick vehicles: cargo and mail trams now carry general goods, mail and food, and the passenger tram tows a small mail car so one line can do both. A monopoly becomes public, permanent and impossible to game — and every AI on the farm now knows to leave your towns alone. Added since publication: the AI builds three-platform stations with ladder throats, depot queues, path signals and balloon loops.
The rule that keeps a specialist honest — the coal truck just carries coal — was written about specialists, and it quietly swept up the ordinary trams with it. A tram is a road vehicle, so Cargo Tram ended up hauling goods and nothing else. That is fixed, and the guard is now which cargoes rather than how many:
| Line | Carries |
|---|---|
| Cargo Tram I & II | Goods, Mail, Food |
| Mail Tram | Mail, Goods, Food — plus Rock Candy, Sweets and Fizzy Drinks on Toyland |
| Tram I–IV | Passengers (+ a mail car, below) |
| Every specialist tram | its own cargo, exactly as before |
The general set is finished consumer goods only. Every raw material and every valuable stays specialist-only, so the ore, coal, tanker, timber, steel and bullion trams each keep a cargo the base line can never touch — and a specialist still wins on capacity and speed wherever the two overlap. Gold and the other valuables are not on the list, by design.
Running a separate mail line for a handful of bags was never worth it, so the passenger tram now tows a small mail car of its own:
| Tram I | Passengers | |
|---|---|---|
| as you buy it | 39 | 3 |
| refitted to passengers | 45 | — |
| refitted to mail | 39 | 3 |
Three things follow, and they are all deliberate. It is a hybrid the moment you buy it, so the lazy option works with no setup at all. You can refit it back to pure passengers and get the full 45 seats — the mail car becomes seats, so opting out costs you nothing. And you can never make it a pure mail tram: the front car refuses mail, so a mail refit simply leaves you the hybrid again.
Tram IV is the exception and stays a pure passenger express: it is a single-car model with nothing to tow. Tram I, II and III are two-car sets, which is why they can carry a mail van at all.
The Monopoly Charter locks a town to you, and until now the only place that showed was inside the town window — which is private to whoever opens it. Rivals had no way to know, so they laid track, paid the bill and collected nothing.
A monopoly now establishes only after your class is locked in, about five minutes after founding. That closes a hole you could otherwise drive through — take the charter, plant the monopoly, then respec into something else and keep it — and it also fixes a race where a headquarters planted in the first seconds of a world could miss its own charter and never get another chance.
If the first attempt cannot be granted, moving the headquarters and trying again still works, exactly as before.
Every Cargostrife AI now understands exclusive rights and will not propose a route into a town somebody else holds — road, rail, sea or air.
This is worth knowing because the engine does not refuse the build, it refuses the cargo: a station in a town you do not hold collects nothing at all, of any kind, while still charging its owner upkeep every month. The AI used to walk into that; now it goes somewhere else.
Record candidates are now filed per difficulty. An Easy giant sharing a world with you no longer erases a Normal player's best mine — each charter keeps its own book, and every category you work will start filling in with your own baselines.
Finishing records are worth +2% each for a monthly record and +5% for an all-time one, scaled by your charter's XP rate.
Until now every AI railway was a single platform with one train queueing behind another. The Rail Baron now builds the whole thing:
Every piece is an upgrade rather than a requirement, so nothing is lost on tight ground: no room for three platforms and both ends fall back to one, no room beside the junction and the depot is simply skipped, no room for a loop and it stays a terminus. You will see the difference on any world with a Rail Baron in it — and if you like the look of it, the same shapes are yours to build.