Yesterday I wrote that Town Plans was the next big job. It's done, and it's in the game now.
The short version is that research has gone, and so have the graduate programmes. There is one tree instead, with 70 plans across seven branches. Homes and Living, Industry and Materials, Transport, Utilities and Green, Services and Culture, Tourism and Character, and the Region. You open it with F2, or the little bulb on the left of the screen, which gets a dot on it when there's a plan you can afford.
Why one tree
The old game had six separate ladders to climb. Population milestones, research for each era, graduate programmes, landmarks, district levels and achievements. Each made sense on its own. Together they were a lot to keep in your head, and someone playing an early build told me that late in a big city they'd simply run out of things to aim for.
So now nearly all of it points at one place. Plans cost Ideas. Schools, the university, the Great Library, the observatory and data centres make Ideas every month, and the things you do anyway hand out more. A milestone is worth 6, a new landmark 4, a district going up a level 2, and a Voxie's request or an achievement 1 each.
Every plan in the tree can be made in a single city. Nothing is a trap and nothing is lost by picking the wrong one first. The only real choice is the order, which turns out to be quite a nice choice to have, because it's about what your town needs right now.
How it reads
Each plan is a card in its branch's column. Click one to read it, double-click to make it, and right-click to save up for it. A saved plan shows how close you are on the card. Some plans cost materials as well as Ideas, so Glassmaking wants 40 bricks on top.
Then there are eurekas. If you've already got the thing a plan builds on, it costs half. A concrete plant standing in town halves Glassmaking, for instance. It's a small nudge to follow your own city rather than a guide.
The plans come in bands, one for each era. The fog on a later band shows the plan names so you can see what's coming, but not what they cost yet. At the bottom of each band is the era step, a wide bar with a short checklist, things like two plans from this band and 200 bricks in store. When it's all ticked, you plan the step and the next era opens.
The first time you open the window it suggests three plans to start with, so it isn't a wall of choices. When you make a plan you get a quiet note in the news with a Build it button, and any build tile that's still locked now says which plan opens it and takes you there.
What stayed where it was
The everyday basics still come from population milestones, as they always have. Nothing you need early on is locked behind a plan, so a new town plays the same as before for its first hour. Town Plans starts to matter once there's a school making Ideas.
Everything that used to talk about research now talks about plans, in all 26 languages.
The Region branch was the last bit to go live, and it gets its own post, because surveyors and mining claims needed a whole new window.