Route planning: Fast vs Normal vs Economic
Every mission in Drive Your Way asks the same question before you roll: how do you want to drive it? The three route strategies — Fast, Normal, Economic — look like a speed slider, but what they really set is your risk appetite.
What each strategy changes
| Strategy | Time | Accident & damage risk | Use when… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast | Shortest | Roughly double the baseline | Cargo is cheap and sturdy, or the schedule is worth the gamble |
| Normal | Baseline | Baseline | Default for almost everything |
| Economic | Longest | Roughly half the baseline | Fragile or premium cargo, worn vehicles, rookie drivers |
The risk multiplier applies to both of the per-kilometre rolls the simulation makes against your run: the chance of an accident (a sharp hit to both vehicle condition and cargo integrity) and the chance of gradual cargo damage (small hits that add up over distance). Halving or doubling those odds over a 30 km route is not a detail — it is often the whole margin of the contract.
The other risk inputs
Route choice is the multiplier you control per mission, but it multiplies a baseline set by two slower-moving factors:
- Driver skill. A low-skill driver raises the base rate of everything going wrong; a high-skill driver lowers it. The same fast route is a different bet with a 30-skill rookie than an 85-skill veteran.
- Vehicle condition. Wear raises accident chances. A fresh vehicle tolerates a fast route; a worn one turns it into a coin flip.
The mission panel does the honest math for you — it shows accident and damage chance per kilometre for the actual driver, vehicle, and route you have selected. Read it before you commit.
When Fast actually pays
Fast routes buy time, and time is money only when something is waiting on it. Good fast-route candidates:
- Cheap, sturdy cargo — general freight has plenty of integrity headroom, so a single knock rarely drops you a payout tier;
- Short legs — risk is per kilometre, so a 4 km sprint has little room to go wrong;
- A skilled driver in a fresh vehicle — the multiplier is doubling a small number.
When Economic pays
Economic routes shine exactly where Fast fails: fragile and electronics loads, whose premiums evaporate the moment you slip below the 90% integrity tier; long hauls, where per-km risk has dozens of chances to bite; worn vehicles limping to their next repair; and rookie drivers you have not learned to trust. Slower money that reliably arrives beats faster money that sometimes does not — a delivery that slips from full pay to the 80% tier has usually cost more than the time you saved.
Per-leg routing on combined runs
Combined multi-stop runs let you pick a strategy per leg, and that is where routing becomes a real craft. A sensible pattern: run empty or cheap legs fast, and switch to normal or economic for the legs where the expensive cargo is on board. The drag-and-drop planner previews each leg, so you can shape risk across the whole run — hustle to the pickups, baby the goods home. See contracts & payouts for the combine bonus math.
Three rules of thumb
- Normal is the default — deviate for a reason, not a mood.
- Never Fast with fragile, premium, or special cargo unless the vehicle is fresh and the driver is excellent.
- Economic on any run where a failed payout tier costs more than the extra minutes — which, with premium cargo, is almost always.
Thinking about it without the slider
The three options are presented as a choice about speed, which is why most players treat the decision as “am I in a hurry?”. That framing produces bad routing, because you are almost never in a hurry in a way the game rewards.
A better question is: what happens if this run goes badly? If the answer is “I lose a little”, the fast line is nearly free money. If the answer is “I lose the reason I took this contract”, you have just talked yourself into the economic one regardless of how the schedule looks.
That reframing also explains why the same route is a different decision on two consecutive jobs. Nothing about the road changed. What changed is what you are carrying and who is carrying it.
A decision you can make in five seconds
Look at three things, in this order, and stop as soon as one of them answers you.
The cargo. Anything fragile, refrigerated or special has already made the decision for you. These loads exist to punish impatience — that is their design purpose, and the premium they carry is the compensation for handling them carefully.
The vehicle. A worn vehicle is a different vehicle. Condition feeds directly into how likely something is to go wrong, so the same route you ran happily last week is a worse bet in a van you have not maintained since.
The driver. Skill is the quietest of the three inputs and the easiest to forget, because it does not show on the map. A driver you do not yet trust turns every multiplier against you.
If none of the three raises an objection, take the fast line. That case is more common than nervous players think, and consistently choosing economic to be safe is its own kind of loss — you are paying real time for insurance against a risk you never had.
The mistake almost everyone makes once
Setting a strategy and forgetting it. Route choice is per mission, not a global preference, and the fleet you had when you last thought about it is not the fleet you have now. New vehicles arrive fresh, old ones wear down, drivers get hired and fired, and the cargo mix on the board shifts as your capacity grows.
If you have not consciously changed a route strategy in a while, the odds are good that you are running yesterday's decision on today's fleet.