Hi everyone, just five weeks left until the launch of City of Gangsters! As we’re working on the final stages of development, we really wanted to keep these updates coming, and today we’re going to talk a bit about managing the many businesses you’ll acquire over the course of the game.

Managing Businesses

Businesses are at the heart of your economy as they support the production, distribution and sale of valuable alcohol resources. Each business has a legal side (a cover), and room in the back to install an operation of your choice.

The legal side of a business will often yield valuable resources over time, for example a fruit stand might produce 8 barrels of grape juice every 7 turns, which you can repurpose for some other use.



In this way, legal businesses can be useful assets for supporting some of your more complex production chains as they generate resources without requiring input.

Most backroom operations on the other hand require a steady supply of ingredients and resources to maintain their production and sales.



You can see that this sparkling cider operation requires sugar, hard cider, and small bottles in order to refine 80 bottles of sparkling cider every 12 turns.

Acquiring businesses and setting up operations

By gaining territory and maintaining positive relationships with your contact network you’ll gain favors, and you can leverage those to learn about and acquire new businesses.



To install a backroom operation within an owned business you’ll first need money, materials, and the appropriate crew skills.



Here a backroom winery requires $3500, 10 crates of pipes, 40 barrels, and 15 crates of bricks. Your outfit must also have learned the grape presses and backroom winemaking crew skills.

Types of backroom operations

In the course of the game you’ll discover loads of different operations to unlock, and they broadly fall into 3 categories:

• Production operations - Presses, distilleries, stills, bottling and manufacturing operations which refine ingredients into valuable alcohol resources.
• Logistics operations - Garages, depots, and repair bays that support the expansion and upkeep of your vehicle fleet.
• Sales operations - Bootleggers, speakeasies, and clubs which sell alcohol resources for a tidy profit.

Managers, expansions, and upgrades

Each backroom operation can be improved by employing one of your crew members as its manager. Managers allow you to add expansions which improve production efficiency and resource yield. Some expansions require managers to have specific traits, such as intelligent or hardworking (production tracking), and talkative, friendly, or kind (more bar seating).



Upgrades allow you to improve your operations: increase alcohol production efficiency, increase the fleet capacity of logistics operations, or expand the drinks menu for sales operations, and so on. Some upgrades will require managers to have some experience in certain specializations, such as manufacturing juice when upgrading a juice press.



Update: New skyscraper models

Maybe we’re a little biased but it’s great to finally see skyscrapers appearing in-game. They are present in each of the base game’s three cities (Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit), they tend to cluster around the more urban downtown areas of each map, and they present unique opportunities that don’t happen in lower-density areas of the city - so drive around and explore!





That’s all for now but we’ll be back with another update very soon, and as always you can find us here, and on Discord or Twitter if you have any questions.

Matt & Rob
Co-founders - SomaSim