When Russian Rails came out, we had to make a small change in how we compute the payoffs for remote cities (also known as "dingles"). We had been reducing the bonus for delivering to a remote city if that city produces one or more goods. The bonus is reduced by less (that is, the bonus is larger) if the goods are also available at more accessible cities. On the Russian map, the city of Murmansk offers three goods, so even though each of the three is also available elsewhere, Murmansk was considered less of a "dingles" than, say, Tibilisi.

To give Murmansk a bonus large enough to make players even consider building to it, we made two changes. One was to ignore Leningrad when considering how close a potential "dingle" is to the major cities. (Indeed, Leningrad itself gets a small "dingle bonus".) The other was to downplay the significance of goods that are more readily available from closer cities, by cubing the ratio of the access metrics of the preferred source city and the proposed dingle city. This latter change has a small effect on other maps, generally for the better, by adding $1 to various payoffs. But these $1 changes were enough to change the way the demands get combined into cards (with three demands per card).

If you generated a deck prior to this change going into effect, you can no longer reproduce the same deck (as either cards or a text-only listing) because the newly generated deck will use the new dingles calculation. For nine years the form included a klunky way to request the older payoff computation, but we finally removed that in release 2.3.