- Rent for units you have not let out arrives in blocks now instead of a trickle every minute. Over time you get the same money, just in fewer and larger payments: every minute for a normal portfolio, every five minutes once you are past a thousand units, and once an hour while you are offline. Condition and occupancy are worked out from the clock the moment you look at them, so the inspector always shows the current figure

- Occupancy is exact now. A unit used to get stuck up to 1.7 points short of its target because the value was rounded every minute, which paid slightly too much rent on some units and slightly too little on others. Across a whole portfolio this shifts rent by well under a percent

- The server tick is about twice as fast on large portfolios, so buying, selling and renting stay responsive when a lot is going on

- Events now run through a news ticker along the bottom of the screen instead of stacking up in the corner and disappearing after nine seconds. Every line carries the time it actually happened, the last five minutes keep scrolling past, and holding the mouse over the ticker stops it so you can read. The News button on its left opens the full list

- When more than two alerts are waiting, the line under them now names them one after another instead of only counting how many there are

- The alert cards in the top left take up about a fifth less room. An alert with a single action now carries its button next to the reason instead of on a line of its own

- Contract slots keep growing with your company level, and the research Contract desk and Board of trade add four more between them. There is a ceiling of sixteen so the list stays readable

- The credit line grows more slowly above level 5, by less than a quarter per step instead of a quarter, so borrowing does not become the cheapest money in the late game

- The route limit starts at 25 and grows by 50 per company level, instead of 6 and 6. It counts every route, and almost all routes run through the freight network rather than your own lorries: at 6 plus 6 the three biggest hauliers had no free route left the moment the limit arrived. Nobody lost a route, the limit only bit on the next one

- The ground is rebuilt from scratch. Every land use has its own surface now: ploughed furrows on a field, standing rows on a crop, mown stripes on a lawn, vine rows in a vineyard, leaf litter on a forest floor, ripples in sand, cracked stone on bare rock, puddles in marshland, gravel yards, paving and asphalt in town. Before that, all of it was the same grass texture in a different colour

- Hills are actually lit now. The terrain always had height, but every patch of ground was lit as if it were flat, which made whole landscapes look like painted paper

- Farmland is a patchwork instead of one colour: each field is ploughed or standing on its own, and the mix follows the season, more standing in spring, more bare after harvest

- Neighbouring parcels of the same kind now differ slightly in shade, so a stretch of fields no longer reads as one carpet

- Ground colour follows the season more carefully, and less so near the equator, where there is no autumn to speak of

- Trees come in two shapes, broadleaf and conifer, in colours that vary tree by tree and follow the season. A forest used to be one spiky green mass

- Fewer draw calls on the ground: eight meshes per chunk became two

- Land no longer ends with a knife cut. Fields, meadows, woods and every other kind of ground now fade out over their last few metres into the open land around them, with a noise in it so the boundary is ragged instead of dead straight. Turn it off with Edge blend if you liked the hard edges

- Tiny leftover scraps of land are not drawn any more. Between houses, paths and rail yards the map data is full of slivers a metre wide and patches of a few square metres, and drawing them turned town ground into broken glass. Land you can actually buy always stays drawn, only the trimmings go

- Parcel borders are readable again. They used to be a strip of ground tinted yellow, which faded into the ground once the ground itself had texture, and went dark at night. They now sit a little higher, are a bit wider, and light themselves like the ownership frames do