>>536831031
It is undoubtedly the hard mode. It's not even the coal cost/heat requirements that rape you, it's the sheer amount of steel that heating pipes take. I'd be well on track to getting a steel mill up if I didn't have to bury hundreds of tons of steel into the ground. Not to mention that your heating plants can now be neither too close nor too far from the city, because either the pollution gets you or you won't be able to maintain an adequate temperature no matter how hard you try. It's incredibly punishing.

As things stand, my game has been running for 26 years and I'm only now starting domestic coal production. With clothes, chemicals and electronics for money, here's hoping this will give my accounts enough of a boost to crawl out of the debt pit and maybe finally head towards steel smelting.

>station length? what's station length?