The cargo network was counting the wrong thing. It counted the units a network delivered, so a hub feeding eight banks scored no more than four lines feeding two each, and a network that let cargo choose its own way earned nothing for it. Reach counts now, it pays, and it spreads a brand. Around it: the story book explains its own arithmetic, answers while the month is being settled, and every town has a name somebody can say.
A cargo network's score has two halves now. The base is what it was: every unit delivered, once, at the quality of its route, which is 100 per cent for a straight run with one change and a tenth less for each change after that. The new half is reach. Every place your web connects beyond the first, whether cargo comes from it or goes to it, lifts that web's base by 25 per cent, to a ceiling of x4.00 at 13 places.
Updated later on 10 September: passengers and mail have a town at every stop, so for them a place counts at one twentieth of a freight place. Twenty-one towns in one web lift a passenger web by 25 per cent, what one extra power station gives coal.
A place is a town or an industry, counted once however many stations you have there: four stations round one power station are one place, and a dozen bus stops in one town are one town. Each connected web counts only its own places, so this is what the same gold, hauled the same distance, is now worth:
| Layout | Webs and places | Lift |
| Four mines, each feeding two banks of its own | 4 webs of 3 | +50% on each web |
| Four mines, each feeding the same four banks | 4 webs of 5 | +100% on each web |
| One mine feeding four banks | 1 web of 5 | +100%, on a quarter of the gold |
| One hub joining four mines to four banks | 1 web of 8 | +175% on all of it |
| One hub joining four mines to eight banks | 1 web of 12 | +275% on all of it |
Under the old count the first, second, fourth and fifth layouts all scored the same, because only units were counted. Serving both power stations, the near one and the far one, from the same web is worth more than either alone, and a bank fed from four mines in one web is richer than the same bank fed from one, because the cargo has more ways to get to more places. Separate webs do not lend each other their reach. Join them and the places add up.
Reach is paid as well as scored. 50 per cent of the lift goes out as a premium on every unit you deliver of that cargo, at the unit value the market bonus uses, on the revenue line of the vehicle type that carries most of it. Serve the near power station too and the far one earns more on every load. The premium is charter scaled like the market bonus and is paid at the monthly settlement.
The whole lift also speeds that cargo's brand awareness, so a wide web spreads the name, and the score still multiplies your TRANSPORT board on the rankings, which sets your XP. A good network is worth money, rank and reputation at once.
There is no manual, so the book has to be one. Every row on Your Network is now the formula, in reading order:
Coal: 380 units/month x 87% route quality (1.2 changes on average, 91% direct) = 331 x REACH 1.50 (3 places in one web) = score 496 | reach premium $1,240 last month
Each row ends in THE LEVER, the one thing the numbers say to fix, in the order that matters: a split web, a winding route, too many changes, cargo left waiting, one place, low volume. A line above the rows says what the score is worth on the board, against the best network the world has seen.
Your Brands gained a money flow line under every brand, with your own numbers: units moved x unit value x brand value = the pot, and where the pot went. A new section lists other companies' brands you hauled and what you kept of them, and HOW BRANDS WORK now walks the flow in order, from delivery to the finance line it lands on. The Balance Sheet carries the same brand and network figures by cargo and by vehicle type, and its infrastructure block now shows the charter levy on its own line with a true monthly total, this year and last, beside it.
Around the first and the fifteenth of each month the story book's buttons went quiet for about three days while the settlement and the brand pass ran. The server was not slow; it was suspending the script for one game tick on every window it repainted. Repaints are queued now instead, and a click is answered between the companies being settled rather than after the whole pass. A five company world's monthly pass ran twenty-nine seconds; the same work now takes a few, and research can be bought at any time of the month.
Opening Company Setup and choosing a class before the page had finished building could scramble the page. It cannot any more.
Towns are named from a recorded pool of 250 world cities, historical and living, shuffled per session, so Melbourne, Manila, Giza and Kyoto turn up where the generator used to invent something nobody could say aloud. A world holds ninety towns, so no two worlds read alike and the broadcast can name them.
A dock tile now pays 5 times the station tile rate and a ship depot's four canal pieces weigh 5 times inside the canal curve. Neither ever had a category of its own: a dock was two ordinary station tiles to the upkeep bill and a depot was four pieces of canal.
A distant destination used to get exactly no demand until a source's supply cleared a distance bar, which is why a far town could never be served and a relay could not help. The bar is halved (demand_distance 50), so a source reaches roughly twice as far for the same supply. Payment still scales with distance as it always has.