The upcoming update will remove emails from the game and replace them with a similar, but different, concept of contracts. As much as we liked the whimsy and storytelling of the emails, in practice they have some issues in Iron Roads:

• Accepting an email is busywork for a player We had a system of on one email for every task. We had reasoned that more than one email for a task is unnecessary reading, and no email leading to a task is confusing. However testers noted that the process of clicking through even this single mandatory email to view the task added nothing, and became especially irritating the second time through a scenario
• Hard to refuse In principle you can ignore an email or not accept that task. However the personalised nature of an email nudges players to accept each associated task. This has led the scenarios down a more linear direction than we intended, and it has inhibited us from adding really challenging optional tasks
• Emails don't display the task list they link to very well This could be solved by improving emails rather than removing them, but it is an issue. Conversely, there is no way to associate a task with the story text that led to it

Our proposed solution to these issues is to merge the emails system and the tasks system into a single contracts system. The old email screen becomes the contracts screen, showing a list of contracts available to the player at that point in time in the left column. Clicking on a contract will display the contract details in the right column, showing the tasks associated with that contract, the reward, and contextual text for those who are interested in the narrative aspect.

With this UI we can show a choice of contracts that a player may want to accept and, critically, it allows a player to opt out of a contract they are not enjoying. The more optional nature allows larger groups of contracts, specialising in specific areas of the game, and including harder challenges for advanced players.

All of this links back to the observation in our previous post that Iron Roads seems to play best when it is viewed as an optimisation game. Setting up the network and getting the first few passengers moving is rewarding, and helps us tell a story, but the mechanics seem to be at their strongest when you are improving your network Contracts place more emphasis on this phase of each scenario.

Dare I say it, this update is proving to be easier to implement than the cargo update, so if all goes well it will be in your hands within the week!

As always, if this interests you, join us on Discord to give it a try.

Duncan