Posted August 16, 2019
So A lot of guides don't cover some pretty crucial info about this game. I've been doing some playthroughs recently and looking through some cracked game files and wanted to share some of my results with folks still playing this.
1. Suspicion: The Suspicion meter in the power graphs is entirely a function of legal income vs. illegal income. If you keep the suspicion meter low, you will not get arrested, and importantly it'll also impact how likely the FBI is to shut down your illegal businesses. Crimes seem to factor into illegal businesses getting shutdown as well, but they're much less important than suspicion. In a zero suspicion game you probably won't get any illegal businesses shut down, and high risk stuff like stolen goods and counterfiting will take longer to get shut down. Unfortunately if your suspicion meter rises it doesn't appear to go back down on its own, at least it won't return to zero, so ideally you want to stay at zero suspicion the entire game.
I'm not sure of the exact ratios here, but you can get about 5k in illegal income without any suspicion, and then after that you have to stay under a ratio of about 5X illegal to legal income. a 5 star accountant increases that to 16x or so (maybe more), so recruiting any accountant early is a priority.
In practice this means you should try to pickup a profitable legal business in your first week. if you don't buy a business in your first week, you shouldn't actually collect protection in your second week. Even extorting too large a territory in week 2 can put you over the limit as extortion does bring in a little money on its own.
Basically in the first 3 weeks you want to aquire as many profitable legal businesses as you can afford, if they'll make a good front or not is secondary to the businesses making a good profit.
You can make buying businesses cheaper by raiding them the turn before you're going to buy them. You can't raid your own territory, but you can raid things that are being added to the protection racket this turn and it doesn't matter if the raid order is carried out after the extort order. You can also buy businesses that are one block away from your territory so you can carry out a raid at a place that will be a block away from your territory at the end of the turn and buy it the following turn. The price to buy a place goes down by 1/2 to 2/3rds the turn after a raid so it's a big discount. 1 guy is sufficient to raid, and he can usually carry out 4 or 5 raids in a week as long as they're not too far apart. You only need more than 1 guy for large businesses like department stores. Avoid raiding poolhalls and gyms, they have inherint security and it's not worth getting your guy killed over.
By week 3 You'll hopefully have at least 3 guys in your recruitment team, which should only consist of 4 star or higher intelligence hoods and have your starting car. Send one of those guys on a priority order to recruit an accountant, and hire the best accountant you can get off that recruitment order. Later you can fire or kill that initial accountant once you have a 5 star one, and it's probably worth sending a guy out every week until you do find a 5 star accountant. Don't forget to turn on evade taxes.
So by week 4 Hopefully you have an accountant and a couple thousand in legal income. As long as you continue to aquire legal businesses staying at zero suspicion should be pretty easy from this point, just keep in mind the 16x threshold and if you see your income get near it prioritize picking up more businesses.
2. Hostility: Hostility is the most important overlay in the game. It tells you how likely people are to join your protection racket and to stay in it. The protection racket is a function of hostility and overall power (and possibly territory size) If you have low hostility, high overall power, and the largest territory, you will not lose people from your protection racket, you will get fewer squealers, and you will be able to more easily extort territory from other gangs.
So, how do we keep hostility low? Preventing crimes in our territory, committing crimes near our territory, killing and assaulting enemy gangsters in our territory, running soup kitchens, donations, bribes to clergy, bribes to reporters, lowering protection rates.
Essentially the lowest two colors (the dark green and the light green) mean your hostility is solid, anything above that and you may start to have problems.
One really usueful way to lower hositility in the early game is to assault the first enemy gangster you see in your territory. You'll want to give your gangster a go to order and wait until he's right next to the enemy gangster to issue the assault order. If you watch as the assualt order happens from the rooftop or city map, a large section of your territory will experience a significant drop in hostility after the first assault, and it doesn't seem to matter if your guy wins or loses the fight. After the first assault things get trickier, as for some reason the hostility of nearby commerical businesses seems to drop while the hostility of local tenament blocks seems to go up. Not sure what's going on there if it's working as intended or maybe a negative overflow, but the end result is if the nearby territory is dark green on hositility you don't actually want to issue an assault order.
Killing enemy gangsters also drops hostility, but not as much as assaults, obviously that comes with progressively worse and worse cop problems, so decide for yourself if you want to go that route. A trick for killing enemy gangsters inside buildings and avoiding a police shootout is to issue assault orders as an enemy gangster is entering a building that combat will always be deadly but it's pretty random if it's your guy or the enemy guy who ends up dead. Your hood having a gun seems to help. Starting around week 4 all enemy hoods will be carrying pistols. The assault order is still useful however, if you actually want to kill the enemy gangster. If you issue an assault order against an armed hood, the hood you're trying to assault will start shooting, your guy will shoot back and hopefully kill the enemy. He seems to have a much lower chance of getting wanted status here as it was "self defense" I've even seen one of my hoods pull this off in front of the cops without the cops taking any interest. It's not a for sure thing though, it just seems to be less risky.
After you get past the intial weeks, and especially if you decide to take a hands off approach to enemy gangsters in your territory, bribes to clergy only cost about 3k and they're a pretty good return on lowering hostility rates. Setting up soup kitchens is also a good long term strategy. Committing raids near your territory can also keep folks in line, it doesn't have as much of an impact as bombings, but it draws a lot less heat, and makes you some money in the process. Also, if you have low hostility levels, don't be afraid to raise protection rates, bumping protection to very high, even for a couple of weeks can be a big income boost. Conversly if your territory gets big enough that you don't want to collect protection for the whole thing, lower the rates to zero on the areas you're not collecting protection. I think it helps more to actually go collect that zero protection if you really have hostility problems, but having low rates seems to help if you're collecting or not. Holding a small territory is more difficult as rival gangs will get higher on the power graph which helps with their extortion, so I like to play pretty aggressive and kill rival gangs if I decide to stay small, preventing their extortion, exploration and crimes, and lowering my hostility in the process, but given what a headache the cops are that playstyle isn't for everybody.
1. Suspicion: The Suspicion meter in the power graphs is entirely a function of legal income vs. illegal income. If you keep the suspicion meter low, you will not get arrested, and importantly it'll also impact how likely the FBI is to shut down your illegal businesses. Crimes seem to factor into illegal businesses getting shutdown as well, but they're much less important than suspicion. In a zero suspicion game you probably won't get any illegal businesses shut down, and high risk stuff like stolen goods and counterfiting will take longer to get shut down. Unfortunately if your suspicion meter rises it doesn't appear to go back down on its own, at least it won't return to zero, so ideally you want to stay at zero suspicion the entire game.
I'm not sure of the exact ratios here, but you can get about 5k in illegal income without any suspicion, and then after that you have to stay under a ratio of about 5X illegal to legal income. a 5 star accountant increases that to 16x or so (maybe more), so recruiting any accountant early is a priority.
In practice this means you should try to pickup a profitable legal business in your first week. if you don't buy a business in your first week, you shouldn't actually collect protection in your second week. Even extorting too large a territory in week 2 can put you over the limit as extortion does bring in a little money on its own.
Basically in the first 3 weeks you want to aquire as many profitable legal businesses as you can afford, if they'll make a good front or not is secondary to the businesses making a good profit.
You can make buying businesses cheaper by raiding them the turn before you're going to buy them. You can't raid your own territory, but you can raid things that are being added to the protection racket this turn and it doesn't matter if the raid order is carried out after the extort order. You can also buy businesses that are one block away from your territory so you can carry out a raid at a place that will be a block away from your territory at the end of the turn and buy it the following turn. The price to buy a place goes down by 1/2 to 2/3rds the turn after a raid so it's a big discount. 1 guy is sufficient to raid, and he can usually carry out 4 or 5 raids in a week as long as they're not too far apart. You only need more than 1 guy for large businesses like department stores. Avoid raiding poolhalls and gyms, they have inherint security and it's not worth getting your guy killed over.
By week 3 You'll hopefully have at least 3 guys in your recruitment team, which should only consist of 4 star or higher intelligence hoods and have your starting car. Send one of those guys on a priority order to recruit an accountant, and hire the best accountant you can get off that recruitment order. Later you can fire or kill that initial accountant once you have a 5 star one, and it's probably worth sending a guy out every week until you do find a 5 star accountant. Don't forget to turn on evade taxes.
So by week 4 Hopefully you have an accountant and a couple thousand in legal income. As long as you continue to aquire legal businesses staying at zero suspicion should be pretty easy from this point, just keep in mind the 16x threshold and if you see your income get near it prioritize picking up more businesses.
2. Hostility: Hostility is the most important overlay in the game. It tells you how likely people are to join your protection racket and to stay in it. The protection racket is a function of hostility and overall power (and possibly territory size) If you have low hostility, high overall power, and the largest territory, you will not lose people from your protection racket, you will get fewer squealers, and you will be able to more easily extort territory from other gangs.
So, how do we keep hostility low? Preventing crimes in our territory, committing crimes near our territory, killing and assaulting enemy gangsters in our territory, running soup kitchens, donations, bribes to clergy, bribes to reporters, lowering protection rates.
Essentially the lowest two colors (the dark green and the light green) mean your hostility is solid, anything above that and you may start to have problems.
One really usueful way to lower hositility in the early game is to assault the first enemy gangster you see in your territory. You'll want to give your gangster a go to order and wait until he's right next to the enemy gangster to issue the assault order. If you watch as the assualt order happens from the rooftop or city map, a large section of your territory will experience a significant drop in hostility after the first assault, and it doesn't seem to matter if your guy wins or loses the fight. After the first assault things get trickier, as for some reason the hostility of nearby commerical businesses seems to drop while the hostility of local tenament blocks seems to go up. Not sure what's going on there if it's working as intended or maybe a negative overflow, but the end result is if the nearby territory is dark green on hositility you don't actually want to issue an assault order.
Killing enemy gangsters also drops hostility, but not as much as assaults, obviously that comes with progressively worse and worse cop problems, so decide for yourself if you want to go that route. A trick for killing enemy gangsters inside buildings and avoiding a police shootout is to issue assault orders as an enemy gangster is entering a building that combat will always be deadly but it's pretty random if it's your guy or the enemy guy who ends up dead. Your hood having a gun seems to help. Starting around week 4 all enemy hoods will be carrying pistols. The assault order is still useful however, if you actually want to kill the enemy gangster. If you issue an assault order against an armed hood, the hood you're trying to assault will start shooting, your guy will shoot back and hopefully kill the enemy. He seems to have a much lower chance of getting wanted status here as it was "self defense" I've even seen one of my hoods pull this off in front of the cops without the cops taking any interest. It's not a for sure thing though, it just seems to be less risky.
After you get past the intial weeks, and especially if you decide to take a hands off approach to enemy gangsters in your territory, bribes to clergy only cost about 3k and they're a pretty good return on lowering hostility rates. Setting up soup kitchens is also a good long term strategy. Committing raids near your territory can also keep folks in line, it doesn't have as much of an impact as bombings, but it draws a lot less heat, and makes you some money in the process. Also, if you have low hostility levels, don't be afraid to raise protection rates, bumping protection to very high, even for a couple of weeks can be a big income boost. Conversly if your territory gets big enough that you don't want to collect protection for the whole thing, lower the rates to zero on the areas you're not collecting protection. I think it helps more to actually go collect that zero protection if you really have hostility problems, but having low rates seems to help if you're collecting or not. Holding a small territory is more difficult as rival gangs will get higher on the power graph which helps with their extortion, so I like to play pretty aggressive and kill rival gangs if I decide to stay small, preventing their extortion, exploration and crimes, and lowering my hostility in the process, but given what a headache the cops are that playstyle isn't for everybody.
Post edited August 16, 2019 by qnameche
