Otto Pilot has been let go

Grow one district at a time

Dale’s Dial-Up served three districts, so that’s where you start. The rest of the city is on the Map from day one, but nobody there can sign up yet.

Click Expand… on a district and you see the whole price before you pay anything: a local dial-in number, which costs more the farther the district is from your exchange, and launch ads to every household in it. The ads sign up some homes on day one. Everyone else uses the flyer as a coaster.

Expanding isn’t cheap. In New York you start with enough cash for one more district, so pick it well. Its launch signups pay it back within months.

Your rivals don’t wait for you. Each one opens wherever it likes, and a district you leave alone fills up with their customers. Where to go next is the opening’s big decision now.

Bigger kit

Two new projects arrive once your DSL takes off:

• The DSLAM Chassis: four DSLAMs in one shelf, for the price of three.
• The T3 Line: 29 T1 lines’ worth of upstream, for the price of 14½.

The modem rack went the other way: it holds 24 modems now, one T1’s worth, instead of 48. At a dial-up company’s pace, a rack of 48 lost money next to banks of 8, so my playtester never bought one.

The NOC learned two new chores. It keeps spare DSL ports, the way it keeps modems, and it keeps a peak speed: it orders T1 lines when the busiest hour gets slow, and cancels them when it doesn’t need them. You can set it to 100%, 90% or 75% of the speed you promise. 75% oversells on purpose: slower speeds and angrier gamers, for a smaller bill.

Free trials end

The free-trial CDs used to be all upside. Now they bring trial users, and trial users leave when the free hours run out: while the CDs run, a few more of your dial-up customers cancel each month, twice as many with CDs in cereal boxes. They’re still worth it. They just aren’t free anymore.

Retuned pacing

I time the game with a bot that plays carefully. It now plays like someone who uses what they buy: it runs the CDs, builds street cabinets and lets the NOC keep spare ports. That made it faster, so most milestones now come later and every project but the first two costs a tenth more.

Then a playtest of the new numbers stalled. Angry customers held the company under 2,000 subscribers for a year and a half, with the cash for DSL but not the subscribers to unlock it. So DSL now comes at 2,000, and every change is also checked against a bot that plays like that playtest: no milestone may wall a player whose customers are furious.

The clock runs at half speed

1× is now one day every two seconds, so a month lasts a minute. 2× is what 1× used to be. 1× is for learning the ropes; the game is paced for 2×. The demo takes about an hour at 1×, or half an hour at 2×. 4× still comes with Accelerated Depreciation, for when you’d rather not watch.

Smaller things

• The Feed scrolls back through the last 100 posts, about a game year, so you can catch up on what people said about you. It has 43 new posts in each language, too.
• The desktop has files now (on computers), the kind a small company leaves lying around. Dale left two. The rest show up as your company grows, and some of them change as it gets worse. Dale’s Notes.txt says: “The customers: be nice to them. They’ve got nowhere else to go.” Buy the Legal Department and your lawyer adds a note in the margin: ”‘Nice’ is not a binding term.”
• The mouse pointer is a Windows 98-style arrow, and it grows with the UI scale.
• No more notice avalanches. If you left a Monthly Report open, months of new-project notices piled up behind it and came out all at once. Now they come up on top of it.

For Android players: a one-time move

The app’s id changed to its final one in the last update. If your copy is older than that, the new APK installs as a separate app, next to the old one, so you might see two Bandwidth Barons icons. Your saves stay in the old app. Finish your game there if you like, then uninstall it.

We’ve moved you to a new account. Your old account’s data is not transferable.

The game also needs Android 7.0 or later now.

About Otto

Without a manager, the second era keeps your home city in your hands, with every window. The chores he’d have done come from things you buy: the NOC looks after the modems and the DSL ports, and a purchase order speeds up the tickets. To go regional, you use the same Expand… button you use for districts, on a bigger map.

It’s in the full game, and the Steam page is coming soon.

Leave your feedback in the comments. Refund requests go in the folder on the desktop.