A haulage company is not a fleet of trucks; it is a fleet tied to places. Every truck you own begins and ends its week at one of your terminals, every lane has to touch one, and every terminal needs people on the ground to run the departures you schedule from it.
That is what stops a company growing in a straight line. Trucks can be bought in an afternoon. The ability to operate them has to be built.
A terminal is a place where you have a presence: trucks can be based there and lanes can start there. Your first one is chosen when you found the company, and it is also your head office.
Terminals have levels, one to seven. A higher level carries more of everything — more trucks, more departures, more staff — and each level costs more than the last: twenty thousand dollars for the first step, rising by 45% at every level after it. Levelling a terminal is one of the few purchases in the game that never expires and never wears out.
One terminal is your HQ, and it carries 20% more staff than the others do at the same level, as well as taking a tenth off the price of every facility you build. That is not a bonus for its own sake: it means the shape of your network matters. A company built around one strong home terminal is a different business to one spread thinly across four countries, and the game should let you feel the difference rather than reading it in a table.
You can move the head office. It takes time — the move is not instant, and while it is in progress you are running a company whose centre of gravity is somewhere between two towns. That delay is what makes moving a decision rather than a free optimisation. If your network has genuinely outgrown its origin, move; if you are chasing a small advantage, the transition will cost more than the advantage is worth.
Every departure needs people behind it: planners, traffic office, loading crew, the ones who re-book a consignment when a truck goes off the road with a turbo. The game models this as a load on the terminal the departure leaves from.
The load is not per truck. It is per departure, plus an amount that grows with the length of the leg, plus a surcharge when the leg crosses a border. Two consequences follow, and both are intentional:
Each terminal has a capacity that grows with its level — 450 points at level one and 640 more for each level after it — and the head office carries more than a regular terminal of the same level. So does a big terminal in a big freight town: the labour market there is deeper than in a small one, and the capacity reflects it.
Going over capacity does not stop anything. Your trucks keep running and your customers never find out. What happens instead is that you pay overtime at $150 a point, every week, for every point of load above what the terminal can carry.
This is on purpose. A hard ceiling would turn terminal levels into a gate you unlock; a running cost turns them into a judgement. Overtime for a few weeks while you save for the next level is a perfectly reasonable way to run a haulage company. Overtime forever is a slow leak that a growing company stops noticing, which is exactly how real companies end up paying for it.
The upgrade pays for itself against the overtime it prevents, eventually. Whether "eventually" is soon enough depends on how hard you are running the terminal — which is the decision the mechanic exists to create.
See also Fleet, Facilities and Lanes and operations.
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