A server patch on top of v0.993. Station upkeep used to be charged on how many tiles you owned. It is now charged on the ground each station covers, measured on both axes, so a compact stop pays exactly what it always did and a city welded into a single station pays many times over. Joining still works and still shares a catchment. It is simply expensive now. There is a full guide to building a network below, because this change rewards a shape rather than a size.
The base rate is $50 a month for every station tile, before your world's inflation era and before your charter. That has not changed. What is new is a surcharge on how far the station is spread, worked out separately for each axis and then multiplied together.
Take the width of the station in tiles and the height in tiles. Each gets a factor:
| Span in tiles | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 18 |
| Cost factor | 1.00 | 1.06 | 1.12 | 1.18 | 1.25 | 1.40 | 1.70 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 3.00 | 3.50 | 4.00 |
A one tile span is never surcharged. Between the marked points the factor runs in a straight line, and past eighteen it keeps climbing, so there is no width at which sprawl becomes free again.
The two axes multiply, and that is the whole rule. A station that is long in one direction pays its one factor. A station that is long in both pays both, one on top of the other. A ribbon eighteen tiles down a single street pays four times the going rate per tile. Eighteen tiles in both directions pays four times four, which is sixteen times per tile.
Every figure below comes straight out of the game's own arithmetic, at the base rate, before era and charter.
| Station | Footprint | Tiles | Per tile | Per month |
| A single bus stop | 1 x 1 | 1 | $50 | $50 |
| A row of four truck bays | 1 x 4 | 4 | $59 | $236 |
| A tidy two platform station | 2 x 3 | 6 | $59 | $354 |
| A long seven tile terminus | 3 x 7 | 21 | $86 | $1,806 |
| A town station with a bus loop | 5 x 5 | 25 | $77 | $1,925 |
| A ribbon down one street | 1 x 18 | 18 | $200 | $3,600 |
| Two districts welded together | 10 x 10 | 40 | $200 | $8,000 |
| A whole city as one station | 18 x 18 | 60 | $800 | $48,000 |
Two things in that table are worth stopping on. The seven tile terminus pays more per tile than the twenty five tile town station, because it reaches further on one axis, and reach is what is charged rather than size. And the ribbon down one street and the two welded districts pay the same rate per tile, four times, from completely different shapes. One is long, the other is wide, and the arithmetic does not care which.
This is the question the change exists to answer. Below is the same network priced the old way and the new way. Every one of these owns a similar number of tiles.
| Network | Tiles | Was | Now | Change |
| Forty separate one tile stops | 40 | $2,187 | $2,000 | -9% |
| Six tidy 5 x 5 town stations | 150 | $8,906 | $11,550 | +30% |
| Three 10 x 10 district merges | 120 | $6,937 | $24,000 | +246% |
| One 18 x 18 city wide station | 60 | $3,328 | $48,000 | +1342% |
If you build tidily you are slightly better off than you were. If you have been welding a whole city into one station to share its catchment, that station is now the most expensive thing you own. The old charge could not see individual stations at all, so it billed a company with forty neat bus stops the same premium as a company with one forty tile monster. It taxed having stations. This taxes sprawling them.
Two rules already governed how far a station could reach, and both are unchanged.
Those limits were always about geometry. What has changed is that staying well inside them is now worth money.
The short version: many small stations, joined by vehicles, beat one large station joined by tarmac. Here is why, and how to build that way.
A single station has one catchment, one name and one set of orders. Weld four districts together and every bus in the city can serve all of them without you thinking about routing. It was the lazy answer and it was the cheap answer, because the old bill only counted tiles.
The other half of this release is that a genuine routed network is worth more than it has ever been. Your TRANSPORT board is multiplied by up to three times by the cargo network you actually run, measured from what the game's own distribution system routes over your lines rather than from what you have built. Splitting one network into two disconnected halves is punished. Joining them into one is paid.
What the network score counts is places you can DELIVER to. Not stations, and not the mines you collect from. A destination is somewhere the cargo is actually consumed: a power station for coal, a factory for steel, a town building for passengers. Each one counts once, however many of your stations touch it, and it is worth the amount of cargo the game plans to consume there.
That is the important part, so here it is the other way round. Running a second coal mine into a power station you already serve does not add a new place to deliver, it only changes how much arrives at the one you have. Running that same coal to a second power station adds a whole new term to your score. The game has already paid you for the extra mine in ordinary coal revenue; what it had never paid you for, until now, is reaching somewhere new.
Worked through. One coal mine, power stations that each burn 100 units a month, every one of them reached in a single hop on a straight line. The multiplier is always measured against the best cargo network anyone on that world has managed, so assume the leader there reaches four:
| Power stations served | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Network score | 100 | 200 | 300 | 400 |
| Share of the best | 25% | 50% | 75% | 100% |
| TRANSPORT multiplier | x1.50 | x2.00 | x2.50 | x3.00 |
| Paid on TRANSPORT | +50% | +100% | +150% | +200% |
So a company at the top of the cargo board scores 150 of a possible 300 on TRANSPORT with one power station on the end of its line, and 300 with four. That is the difference between a good hauler and a network, and it is why the ceiling moved: a perfect game is still 1000, a perfect game with a perfect network is 1500.
Distance is not what scores, and a tidy route is worth more than a rambling one. A destination keeps its full value when it sits one hop from the source on a straight line. Every extra hop keeps nine tenths of what is left:
| Hops to the destination | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| Value kept | 100% | 90% | 81% | 72% | 65% | 59% |
Directness is charged the same way. Two hops covering 100 tiles in a straight line keep 90%; the same two hops made to wander 150 tiles keep 59%, and 200 tiles keep 45%. Distance itself is never scored, because a longer haul already pays more in ordinary revenue. What is scored is reaching more places, more cleanly.
Those two changes point the same way on purpose. Spreading a single station is taxed. Connecting many stations into one network is rewarded. The shape the game now wants is a lot of small, tidy stations with vehicles running between them, which is also what a real transport network looks like.
Before you join two stations, ask what it does to the box around them. If it makes the station reach further on either axis, you are about to pay that surcharge on every tile the station already owns, for the rest of the session. Usually the cheaper answer is a second station and a vehicle.
The board that scored company value has been renamed CORPORATE, and it now shows its two halves rather than hiding one. It has always been company value plus what you have spent on research, because research spending leaves your balance sheet and the board has compensated for that since it was added. The name and the balance sheet now say so, and your balance sheet spells the sum out.
TRANSPORT is cargo alone, and carries the network multiplier described above. A perfect game still scores 1,000. A perfect game with a perfect network scores 1,500.