Iron Roads Beta 3 playtest

If 0.6.7’s Quality of Life fixes were the crowd pleasers of Early Access patches, then the update we’ve been working on recently could be thought of as Iron Roads’ difficult second album.

In the biggest set of gameplay changes since Early Access launch, we have changed Iron Roads' default play mode from scenarios to the new Endless mode. Endless mode represents a new, randomly-generated play mode, in which you start with just three towns needing connection. If you serve them well, they expand and you are rewarded with R&D tokens that you can exchange for map expansions to add towns and systems to your map. Start small, end devilishly complex!

If you'd like to try Endless mode, we'd love to hear your feedback. We have pushed a build to the beta branch - there are notes on how to try that here

What if you really liked scenarios, I hear you cry out? They are all still there, along with the time-bounded monthly challenge - we just don't expect players to be playing these by default and as the main gameplay.

Why we made these changes

Feedback from players revealed a few issues we wanted to address:

• Iron Roads had 4 modes of play, which was too many for a minimalist management game. Worst of all, no single mode contained all the best content. So we've merged what we believe are the best elements of Iron Roads into the new Endless mode

• We want players to be able to start simple and scale up to something complex. Scenarios are fixed in scale. They are either too small, limiting how much you can develop your network, or they are too big, and risk overwhelm. The map in the new Endless mode grows with your network

• Scenarios have limited replayability. In Endless mode games are more randomly generated. The player shapes the game and the map through their choices when playing, rather than our choices when building the scenario

Other gameplay changes

• A new 'Issues' screen lists things that are stopping your network from flowing or expanding, such as stuck trains, towns with insufficient connections or arrivals, platforms that are too short, and long waits. This list should act as an active to-do list to help network optimisation

• The old Free Play mode is gone, but Infinite Resources can now be turned on at any time from the preferences. Cheat at will! (except in challenges)

• In the Endless mode perfume is now needed to grow towns beyond a certain size

• Star unlocks for scenarios are gone. You can now play any scenario at any time

• The old sandbox mode has been removed in favour of Endless mode

UI improvements

• We've added a help button to all build modes. Click it, and it will show a small help screen with a link to the tutorial when appropriate

• We've added an Undo button at last. Click it to revert your last construction/deletion

• The currency indicators have been moved from the toolbar to the left hand side. This obscures less of the map with UI, and makes it clear that they are there

• The speed selector has been split into 3 separate buttons, so there is no more toggling through speed modes!

• We have overhauled the visual style of the research and graphs screens

• We have worked further on the town screen to improve information messages

Fixes

• Deselect completed contract (don’t keep showing it)

• Disable the growth button when not viable

• Stations snap to horizontal/vertical when building at all times, rather than the behaviour before where they would sometimes fail to build at angles

• We have fixed a large number of text overlap issues