Hey everyone! As we’re sure you know, release day is coming quickly, with just 2 weeks to go! We’ve got another update for you, and this time around we’re going to explore the role of fronts, and the importance of territory control.

Fronts and territory

Territory is key to success, and to grow it you need fronts, which are small outposts that you can set up strategically on corners throughout the city. Their location determines the area you control, enables you to hire a larger crew, and finally, it can provide an additional revenue stream through the extortion of nearby businesses.



Setting up a front

Everything starts with calling in a favor. As you grow positive relationships with NPC business owners, you’ll slowly accumulate favors with them, and one way to spend a favor is to get someone to run a front for you, out of their existing legal business. But pay attention to who you ask, because some traits will modify their willingness/reluctance to take up this offer, for example a nervous person will require a much higher relationship level, while an upright person might flat out refuse.



If they agree to your proposition, you’ll need to pay them an initial startup fee to open the front, and as a result you will immediately gain control of the corner where this front is located.



Gaining additional territory

Once a front is established, you can expand your territory to all nearby corners. Your reputation will spread organically, but that’s very slow - it’s much more efficient to have your front work on your behalf, and spread your reputation and renown through the neighborhood. It will cost you a bit of money but by doing a few things for the neighborhood, like helping out war widows or buying baseball bats for the local school team, you can get people on your side really quickly.

And then once they respect you, you can start using this to your advantage.



Use the respect overlay to monitor the current level of respect, as well as the positive and negative factors that are influencing it. The higher the level the less time it will take for the corner to join your territory.



In the example above you can see that a) close proximity to your existing territory, b) positive relationships with NPC businesses on that corner, and c) shared ethnicity with your character, are positively influencing the overall respect level, and reducing the time required to gain control. As you can see, relationship management plays an important role here in your expansion process.

Funding fronts through extortion

In order to remain in operation, fronts require regular upkeep. If you notice a red envelope icon this means that a front is running short on money, and requires additional funding to continue expanding or maintaining your control over the neighborhood.



While you can bankroll fronts out of your own money, it is much more efficient to automatically generate funding through the extortion of nearby businesses.

Any business located within your territory can be extorted for protection money. A front will gain income from extorted businesses that are located on shared and adjacent corners. Protection money will regularly appear in the form of envelopes collected by the front owner as indicated by the green envelope icon.



The more you extort, the more money you’ll collect, and the more corners an individual front will be able to support. But be careful who you extort, because this will severely harm the relationship with the associated business owners and their families - and who knows when you might need them later on!



You can keep track of how all of your fronts are doing using the fronts and territory report. Remember that you can even set up an automated delivery to have a crew member collect waiting envelopes, or fund fronts that are running at a loss.



Front subversion

You aren’t the only outfit in the city, and your rivals will also be working towards expanding their own territory through a similar network of fronts.



The danger here is that you won’t be able to do business with businesses located in a rival’s territory, so you’ll need to keep a close eye on where they expand. To mitigate this, both you and your rivals have the ability to subvert opposing fronts.



You can do this by talking to rival front owners and threatening them into compliance. Some owners will immediately cave under pressure, while others will need ‘convincing’ through bribery, and in more extreme cases, violence.

Once a front has been subverted, it’s original owner will lose control of the territory it supported over the next few turns. It is possible to re-establish fronts but be careful as relationship levels will receive negative modifiers if a rival is continuously putting pressure on an owner.

Additionally, gaining territory will not only support the growth of your crew’s size, but also contribute towards your legacy goals that wait for you at the end of Prohibition, so it’s definitely an aspect of the game that you’ll need to keep in mind.

Thanks for stopping by, and we’ll be back again soon with another update!

Matt & Rob
Co-founders - SomaSim