Two of this game's costs were invisible. You agreed a price, bought the thing, and a month later paid more than the price you agreed. Both are gone.
On a hard charter your costs inflate from the day you founded. That reached new vehicles and newly funded industries as well, and in those two places you could not see it coming. The buy menu quoted one price. The bill arrived a month later.
It was worse than a surprise. The charge landed through a transfer with no check that you could afford it, so a run of aircraft you could comfortably buy on Tuesday could put you in the red on Wednesday. One company we looked at had paid 47.9 million in surcharge across a session against a deficit of 14.8 million. Take the surcharge away and it was solvent.
The obvious repair is to show the real price in the buy menu. We cannot. That menu draws one number for everybody on the server. Nothing in the game can make it draw a different number for you. So the charge had to go rather than be explained.
Funded industries had a second problem. Their surcharge was never scaled by difficulty at all, so an Easy charter paid it exactly as hard as a Hell one. It is off.
What still carries it: operating costs, infrastructure upkeep and new construction. Those either recur, so you can watch them, or land on the price you were quoted. Terraforming never carried it.
The cost inflation you can see got steeper instead. One step of difficulty used to add about 1.030 per cent a year to what you pay. That went to 2.060 on 21 September. It is now about 3.118 per cent.
It compounds from your founding date, so it is the back half of a long game where you notice. Measured at eighteen years in:
Normal and Easy are untouched. They were neutral before and they are neutral now. Only the charters that asked for a harder game feel any of this. Your income is never inflated to match - this reaches what you spend.
Local authorities are permissive on every world now. A council will not refuse you a station, a depot or a demolition because it dislikes your company. If you can afford the ground, you can build on it.
Airports are the exception, deliberately. They still answer to noise. A big field near a small town is still a real decision, and moving further out still helps.
Type /time in chat and the server tells you how long this match has left and how far through it you are.
3h 30m left of this match - 12% complete
Matches are four hours. !time does the same thing. Every other slash command you type is ordinary chat and still reaches the room.