Your first hour

What you are starting with

Money — 20% of national GDP

Your Transport Fund starts at a fifth of the country's annual output. It is generous once and never again.

Network — nothing

No roads, no railways, no routes. Every connection on the map will be one you paid for.

Development — low everywhere

Settlements start poor and grow over decades, not months. Nothing you do will look dramatic in the first year.

The one habit: build where demand already is

It is tempting to look at the map and connect what looks unconnected. Resist it. Every road costs money to build and then costs money every month for the rest of the game, whether anyone uses it or not.

Demand exists between settlements before you build anything. It rises with population and development at both ends, and falls sharply with distance. Your job in the first hour is to find where it is densest and serve that — not to make the map look tidy.

Three ways to see it

Drag A → B on the map

Release on another settlement and a small A → B panel offers Roads, Railways and View demand — or just press D. The fastest check, and the same gesture builds the road on the next click if the numbers are good.

Demand panel · second tab

Select two points for demand details. Click any two settlements to study a pair properly, swap the direction, then reset and pick another without leaving the panel.

Demand panel · Demand list

Every pair ranked by the traffic that wants to move, with a Served column. This is where you find corridors you had not thought of.

The panel itself opens from the top-left toolbar. At the start of a game the Served column reads No connection all the way down — sort by passengers, and the top few rows are your opening move.

Use the drag constantly and the list occasionally: the list tells you where to look, the drag tells you whether to build.

Two things bias which pairs sit high on that list, and both are worth knowing:

• Your capital pulls hardest. Administrative status is a demand multiplier — the national capital carries 1.5×, a province capital 1.25×. Corridors touching them run heavier than their population alone suggests.
• Big cities dwarf small ones. The multiplier is a thumb on the scale, not the scale. A large ordinary city still generates far more than a small provincial capital.

So province capitals are a good thing to keep an eye on — not a checklist to complete.

Your first session, in three moves

That loop — read the table, build one thing, let it run, read again — is the whole game in miniature. Everything else is refinement.

What not to do yet

• Do not spread thin. Several half-served corridors earn less than one properly served corridor and cost more to maintain.
• Do not build railways yet. Track alone carries nobody; a railway needs an operating line on top of it, and it is an expensive thing to get wrong early.
• Do not chase milestones. Their one-time cash is small relative to your starting fund. Build for demand and the milestones arrive on their own.
• Do not expect visible growth in year one. Development moves on a scale of decades.

Next

Part 2 covers building that first road well — choosing lanes from the quote's own forecast, reshaping the route to cut its cost, and what the toll settings are already doing on your behalf.

If you want the reasoning underneath any of this, Travel demand, traffic and capacity is the full account of where demand comes from and what the model does with it.