Game Mechanics Overview?

[Knifie_Sp00nie]

Could we get a rundown on how the game rules work?

Some examples:

• What factors influence industry/mail/passenger production?
  
• What factors influence token scoring? Is it just material delivered+ extension bonuses, or is time/distance counted?
  
• How do stations work? Can you use a central hub, or do deliveries have to come directly from an industry?
  
• Do cities grow? Does city size matter for any sort of industry demand? Do production chains just end at the final industry (toolworks)?

[Kciredor]

I know i have a station out in the open i use to drop of wood planks then have another train take those to my toolworks station.

[Kjeldor]

In this EA alpha version is:
1. Industry is influenced by upgrades, cities grow in the instant of coming of new age.
2. Former, distance and time does not matter at the moment.
3. I believe you can do main hub and order all trains to unload there. But for me it was easier to create good chain. It is not just wood -> planks -> tool factory-> wood token or coal -> tool factory -> coal token, as saw can get steam saw upgrade, or mines can get upgrade to accept planks in order to make faster mining.
4.Cities grow in the instant of coming of new age. When you get to "last age", you get ore mines and foundries, their chain is ore + coal -> foundry -> steel ingot -> tool factory -> steel token (used for best upgrades, wagons and bridges.

[jan.zeleny]

Thank you Kjeldor for answering!

The only think which is already in the game but not easily visible is distance factor: Due to board game rules, I cannot simply put different number of tokens if train delivered from bigger distance, so instead, when generating for example sawmil, it checks surrounding are and find closest forest. If this forest is far from sawmill, it offeres more wodd tokens in its basic rule. You can see taht some times industry buildings offers a bit more - thats because they do not have resources close enough.

[HonzaMatousek]

Cities actually grow when you provide them with passengers, not in the wake of new epoch. You can see city growth progress by clicking on a city to open that city's information window - there you see how many more passengers must be delivered to advance city "level". (You might need to scroll the window a bit, or enlarge it.)

The economy is completely different, sort of board-gamish (or RTS style), so it is no real-life model of supply and demand. Every industry building (including every house in cities) has several processes that are ticking (designated by arrows that periodically turn green as time progresses). Every process, when their timer fires, takes required amounts of required materials from station and converts them to another materials or tokens and puts these back to the station. If there is not enough input materials, said process won't fire. The result is that every industry has limited capacity (how much it can process) and to increase it, you build expansions that add more processes; so it doesn't happen automatically, there is no halving/doubling as known from TTD, but you are the one who is forming industry "supply" and "demand" and you are doing it directly. Making money from passengers is a process too (click on a house to see it), so it doesn't depend on distance. But you cannot haul tons of passengers betwen only two close cities, because the cities have limited capacity too and passengers are produced and converted to money slowly, house by house.