This page explains how money works in the game — what drives demand up and down, what you pay for, and where margin comes from.
It does not give you the coefficients. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining why before you read further.
The single most important decision in this game is which lanes are worth driving, and the way you find out is by paying for a survey. If the demand formula and the underlying terminal data were public, you could compute demand for every terminal in the game in an afternoon, and the survey — along with the entire question of where to expand — would be worth nothing.
So the model is server-side and stays there. The raw traffic figure behind each terminal is not exposed by the API at all; try to read it and the database refuses.
What you get instead is a guarantee: the model is consistent and physical. Diesel consumption is computed from rolling resistance, air resistance and engine efficiency, then checked against real fuel figures — a European tractor at 31 litres per 100 km fully laden, an American one at 38, a road train at eighty. Distances follow real roads through real border crossings rather than straight lines. CO₂ is a real combustion constant. Nothing is fudged to nudge you toward spending. If an old tractor loses to a modern one it is because the fuel numbers say so, and if a lane disappoints there is a reason you can find.
The diesel price is the one number that is synthetic rather than sampled: there is no live commodity feed behind it. What it is not is arbitrary. It moves the way road diesel moves — drifting, reverting towards a long-run mean of about $1.45 a kilo, occasionally overshooting — at a scale calibrated against real fuel statistics, which is what makes hedging a judgement instead of a coin toss. Diesel and CO₂ covers the market and the contracts.
The rest is yours to work out. Run the experiment, read the forecast, keep notes.
Demand is calculated per lane, per direction, in pallets, and split across the three cargo classes: dry, reefer and special. It is modelled by the week, because a lane is sold as a weekly loop, and each day's share is the pot that day's departures draw from.
What pushes it up: how much freight both terminals already handle. Big industrial regions trade heavily with other big industrial regions. This is why the busiest lanes in the game are the busiest lanes in reality — Chicago to New York carries something like 115,000 pallets a week in each direction, Dublin to Rotterdam around 11,000.
What pushes it down: distance, hard — the sharpest difference between road freight and every other mode. Beyond a thousand kilometres the railways start taking the cargo, beyond three thousand the sea does, and a lane of six thousand kilometres keeps only about half of what one of a thousand would have earned it. The world's road freight is regional, and the model says so.
What kills it: distances under 80 km. Below that it is not a lane at all, it is city delivery work — courier vans below the resolution of this game. That floor sits deliberately low, because the short haul is the truck's home ground.
Reefer and special demand grow with distance and with the size of both terminals. Special cargo — transformers, machinery, turbine blades — exists only between terminals with industry and cranes enough to handle it, and it does not appear on short lanes at all. Survey a 300 km regional lane and the Special column will read zero.
Everything on a truck is cargo. There are no passengers on the road in this game — the three classes are Dry, Reefer and Special, and the customer is always a shipper rather than a traveller. What varies between lanes is the MIX, not whether anybody is aboard.
The day's demand is shared between every departure you run on that lane. Two departures a day each see half the pot. Add enough frequency and the marginal run carries too little freight to cover its own costs. Finding where that line sits is one of the better puzzles in the game, and it moves depending on the rig you use.
There is a physical ceiling above that: a lane bears only as many departures a day as the round trip allows, so a two-day haul cannot run four times a day however many slots you place.
Every lane opens at its reference rate — the rate at which roughly 85% of your capacity sells. That is the number the sliders start at, and it is a base charge of about $22 a pallet plus five and a half cents a pallet-kilometre — the base charge being the terminal's, since loading, lashing and the consignment note cost the same over 300 km as over 3,000. Reefer pays 2.6 times the dry rate but occupies two slots; special cargo 5.5 times on four. Both earn about a third more per slot than dry does, and that margin is the whole reason to chase them.
Move away from reference and the trailer responds. Raise the rate and you book less freight; drop it and you fill up with cargo paying less than it might have. The three classes are not equally sensitive: dry cargo reacts hardest to price, special cargo barely at all. Reefer sits in between.
Underneath the classes there is a second layer, and it is the one that decides whether a rate works. Your rate is not read by an average customer — it is read by five different kinds of shipper who happen to share a trailer. A spot shipper walks away from an increase that a long-standing account never notices. A time-critical shipper will pay well above the reference rate for a firm that delivers and will not book at all with one that does not. A long-standing account is choosing you before they choose the departure.
Which of them are on your lane is what the survey sells, and it is why the same rate fills a trailer on one terminal pair and half-fills it on another. What you carry describes all five in detail.
You do not have to guess at any of this. The forecast beside the sliders is computed by the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so what it predicts is what you get. Move a slider, watch the fill and the result, and you will map the curve for yourself in about a minute.
Note that low rates cannot summon freight that does not exist. The trailer fills only as far as the market and your capacity allow.
Six things are charged against every run:
| Cost | Driven by |
|---|---|
| Diesel | Burn per clock hour × hours on the road × the market price when you departed |
| CO₂ quota | Diesel burned × a real combustion constant × the quota price |
| Driver | Clock hours and the size of the rig |
| Maintenance and road charges | Clock hours and the size of the rig |
| Terminal fees | A call charge per departure, plus a handling charge per pallet |
| Cargo service | Pallets carried and distance driven |
There is no separate line for tolls, ferries or passes, and that is on purpose. The game charges every one of them as equivalent kilometres built into the road itself: a ferry that measures 190 km counts as 780, because seven hours on a deck is seven hours the driver is not driving and the ticket costs about what 600 km of diesel costs. Charging the crossing in kilometres makes both the time and the fuel come out right.
Clock hours are the driving time plus a fixed half-hour for the gate and the weighbridge, with one to three hours at the ramp on top. A clock hour already contains the rest period: the driver works nine hours in every twenty-four, so a rig cruising at 85 km/h advances 32 km per clock hour. A short lane pays all of the fixed charges over very few kilometres, which is why very short lanes struggle even when demand exists.
Terminal fees come in two parts. The call charge is paid per departure and scales with the rig and how busy the destination is — it lands on you whether the trailer is full or empty. The handling charge, about seven dollars, follows every pallet the forklifts actually move, so a half-empty trailer no longer pays for freight it never carried. Small terminals are cheap; they simply have less cargo to sell to.
Leasing, offices and yard staff are company-level costs and are not charged per run.
At reference rates, a well-matched rig on a decent lane returns a healthy margin — considerably better than a real haulage firm manages, because a game needs room for good decisions to compound.
It collapses in four situations, and every one of them is something you chose:
There is no hidden fifth thing, and no random penalty waiting for you. If a run disappoints, one of those four explains it.
Start your haulage firm