The Trucking Tycoon — Wiki

How the game works: what drives demand, what you pay for, and how to read a freight lane before you commit money to it.

What you will not find here are the coefficients. The demand model runs on the server and stays there, because working out which lanes are worth driving is the game. The same goes for the shares each kind of customer holds on a given terminal pair, and for what any particular decision on your desk will actually do — those are things you find out by paying a survey or by deciding and living with it.

What is guaranteed is that the model is consistent and physical — real trucks, diesel computed from rolling and air resistance, real road distances through real border crossings, no fudged numbers pushing you toward a purchase. The wiki publishes principles and trade-offs, not the arithmetic. The rest you discover on the road.

Pages

• Getting started — your first hour, on this page
• The economy — what drives demand, how freight rates behave, where costs come from
• What you carry — dry, reefer and special cargo, and the five kinds of customer
• Lanes and operations — opening lanes, surveys, rates, gates, slot charters, dispatching
• Fleet — choosing trucks, load plans, fleet commonality and specialist rigs
• Wear, hours and overhauls — how trucks actually age, and what the workshop costs
• Diesel and CO₂ — the market, the depot tank, and hedging with contracts
• Terminals, HQ and staff — depot levels, moving the head office, yard staff and overtime
• Decisions on your desk — the judgement calls with no right answer
• Reading your numbers — satisfaction, complaints and what was really on the trailer
• Terminals — the terminal page, what a terminal's character means, and the World Games
• Awareness and campaigns — how shippers come to know you, and how terminal championships are won
• Result and cash flow — where each line of the income statement comes from, and why they differ
• The weekly schedule and competition — running while you are away, spot loads, seasons, streaks
• Facilities — the buildings that cut your costs, and how they wear
• The stock market — float, A- and B-shares, votes, selling your own stake, takeovers
• Truck reference — every type, generated from the live game data
• Image credits — the photographers whose work appears in the game

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Getting started

You begin with $3,000,000 and one home terminal. That is enough for roughly two tractor-and-trailer rigs and a small handful of lanes, which is deliberate: the first decisions you make matter more than any decision you make later.

1. Pick a home terminal that suits how you want to drive

Your home terminal is where every truck begins and ends its week, and every lane you open must start there. Three things about a terminal decide what it is worth to you:

• Size — the 1–10 class shown next to every terminal. Bigger means more freight on the lanes leading out of it, and higher handling charges. It is a coarse hint, not a number you can calculate from.
• Weight limit — the maximum gross combination weight the terminal admits, and the hard gate of the whole game. Europe runs at 40 tonnes, Britain 44, Sweden 64, Finland 76, the United States 36.3 because eighty thousand pounds has been federal law since 1982, and the Australian outback anywhere from 120 to 153. A terminal that permits 40 tonnes will never see a laden road train, whatever you are willing to pay.
• Position — which of the world's forty separate road networks it sits in. A home terminal in the middle of a dense one has many short profitable lanes. One on the edge has fewer, but less competition for them.

The big European and North American networks are the forgiving choice. An island network reached only by ferry is a harder game and a more interesting one.

2. Buy diesel before you buy anything else

You cannot run without fuel in the tank. Diesel prices move every 30 minutes, and the spread between a good buy and a bad one is a large slice of your single biggest operating cost.

Buy CO₂ quota too. You can drive without it — the uncovered emissions are simply bought on the spot at a hefty premium and added to that run's cost sheet. Nothing breaks; you just pay more than you needed to.

3. Buy one truck, not three

A single rig on a good lane earns more than three on bad ones, and you learn the game faster with a fleet you can hold in your head. Pick something modern: the figures in the truck reference are computed from real physics, and a current tractor genuinely beats a 1990s one per pallet-kilometre.

4. Open one lane and survey it

Opening a lane costs a fee that scales with distance and with how busy the destination is. Once it is open you can see it on your network, but you cannot see its demand until you pay for a survey.

That is not an inconvenience, it is the game. You cannot compute demand yourself — the model is not published and the data behind it is not exposed — so every survey is a bet on whether a lane is worth knowing about. A survey on a lane you then abandon is money burned, and that is the cost of finding out.

5. Set your rates, then plan the week

Every lane starts at the reference rate — the rate at which about 85% of your capacity sells. It is roughly $22 a pallet plus five and a half cents a pallet-kilometre, so Rotterdam to Milan comes out near $85 a pallet, about $2,800 for a full 33-pallet rig. Move the sliders and watch the forecast: raising the rate above reference empties the trailer faster than it fills your bank account, and dropping it below fills it with freight that is not paying enough to cover the run.

Then place the departure in the week grid. Driving takes real time, and the driver's hours are the clock: nine driving hours in every twenty-four, which is 765 km a day for a rig cruising at 85 km/h. Rotterdam to Milan is a day and a half each way. The money settles when the truck arrives; close the browser if you like.

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6. Let the schedule run, but keep coming back

The weekly schedule drives for you while you are away, hour by hour. What it cannot do is react — to a demand peak, a rate war, or a rival opening the same terminal pair. The schedule keeps the lane alive; being here is what makes it grow.

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The loop, in one paragraph

Buy diesel cheap, put trucks on lanes that suit them, price so the trailers fill without giving space away, and put the profit into more trucks, more lanes, and the facilities that make all of it cheaper. Everything else in the game — wear, reputation, surveys, the diesel market, the rivals on your terminal pairs — is a pressure on one of those decisions.

Start your haulage firm