A terminal is a place, not a three-letter code. The world holds 525 real freight terminals across 40 road networks. Click one — on the map or in any list — and you get its page: who runs there, who the shippers there have heard of, and what sort of terminal it is.
The facts. Name, city, country, size class and weight limit. The weight limit is the hard gate: a terminal rated for 36.3 tonnes gross will never take a loaded high-capacity rig, whatever you are willing to pay. The limits run from 36.3 tonnes up to 153, and that spread is the geography of this game — it decides where a road train can work and where it turns around. The size class is a coarse 1–10 hint about how much freight the terminal moves.
What you will not find is a tonnage figure or a demand estimate. Those exist, they drive the whole model, and they stay on the server. Working out which routes are worth running is the game; a survey is how you buy the answer.
Your presence. Your awareness here, the routes you run through it, your leased dock if you have one, the staff load if it is one of your own bases, and any campaign you are running. See Awareness and campaigns for what those numbers do.
Who runs here. Every operator serving the terminal, how many routes each of them runs through it, and whether it is one of their home bases. Counted from routes rather than from departures, so computer-run operators appear too. What any of them earns is not shown, because it is not something you could find out by standing at the gate.
Who they have heard of. Awareness at this terminal, highest first. This is the one competitive number that is public, and deliberately so: a brand nobody outside the company can assess is not a brand.
The climate, in words rather than a score:
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Nobody serves it. There is usually a reason — check the weight limit. |
| Quiet | One or two operators. The freight is mostly theirs, for now. |
| Contested | A handful share it. There is room, and somebody will notice you. |
| Crowded | Six or more, or a very dense network. Money is made here, but not at list rate. |
This is derived from two counts anybody could make: how many operators run here and how many routes they hold. It is not a difficulty rating out of a model, and there is no number behind it to optimise against.
Some terminals carry a visible label:
The character sets the mix, and the mix is what you can earn on. Express parcels leave the big hubs overnight and nowhere else, perishables need cold storage before you may take them at all, and valuables only move to a destination of size 8 or above, where there is a secure compound to unload into.
The label is public and it tells you which way the mix leans. How far it leans is not published, and it is not derivable from anything on screen — it is part of the demand model, and a survey is still the only way to find out what a specific terminal pair actually holds.
A route between two labelled terminals carries both characters. Rotterdam to Milano is a consumption route and a transit route at once, and it fills differently before Black Friday than after it.
Every six weeks a host terminal is announced, and the announcement comes fourteen days before the games open. During the week of the games, every route with one end at the host carries 50% more demand.
The warning is the mechanic. Everyone is told at the same moment, in the same news feed. Whether you have a base within range, a spare truck, and the nerve to open a route on the strength of an announcement is the entire decision. Nothing stops you from opening one on the last day either — you just catch less of it.
The skilled computer-run operators read the announcement too, and you will see them move. That is intentional: a world that does not react to its own news is scenery.
Start your haulage firm