I would say that City of Gangsters would fall into the tycoon type of games with a small sprinkle of roleplay elements. It is turn-based and uses some different resources to reach the goal of the game: survive the Prohibition as a mob boss and get rich doing it.

The game is played on a map of a big American city like Chicago, Pittsburgh or New York. The map itself is divided into 'corners', square pieces of map connected by streets. Corners can house certain game entities the player is required to interact with. Mostly, we are talking about people buying or selling stuff. The players starts in a small explored area while the rest is covered in some sort of 'fog of war'. You can see the outlines of the streets, but you know nothing about how lives where.

Doing each turn, the player can interact with his 'operations' and move around and use his gamepieces which are his 'boss', and later his 'muscle' and his 'captains'. This uses up two of the many resources the player must master to use at best: 'movement points' and 'action points' tied to the playpieces.

Building up an ilicit booze empire in the early 1920ies requires hard cash and resources, which are other resources the player has to obtain. You will start with a small stash of cash and some ready-to-sell booze as wel as a safehouse as operations base, but you have to figure out, how to make more booze and find customers for it. And of course, procuring the ingredients for making booze. Over time you will learn about new beverages or resources and how to make/use them by talking to the many inhabitants of the map.

Once you meet the competition and have to think about defending your turf against rival outfits or bribing the police while evading the FBI the real fun starts.

So synopsis: use action and movement points in a turn-based game to earn cash and expand your influence in the city while selling booze, dealing with corrupt cops and rival outfits. Basically 'go Al Capone'.

Although this is a bit self-explanatory, the first things you do in the game is picking a map to play on and create your first gamepiece, the boss. Then the game will initialize the map and start right up.

Picking the map will determine where you will play. Map outlines are fixed so the you can be sure that e.g. in Chicago Downtown always will be at the same place and the streets will always where they are. However, 'businesses' and other entities are spawned via some kind of RNG. Regard Chicago as 'Vanilla' map to learn the ropes. The others usually have some special rules like having unique kinds of booze available there. Depends strongly, how many DLCs you own. I will regard the game as 'having the full monty' like I do.

You will be spawned somewhere on the map with your safehouse and boss. Where exactly I cannot say, but from what I reckon, it might have something to do with the ethnicity you pick for your boss.

Regarding the boss, you can pick gender, name and looks for yourself and this only has cosmetical consequences. However, picking character traits, ethnicity and gang speciality happen to have more consequences game-wise.

Let us talk about these a bit, right?

Ethnicity:
Many American cites are a melting pot of European cultures hailing from diaspora. Each entity on the map you can talk to i.e. a shop owner, a goon, a policeman etc. has a ethnicity. If it matches yours, you have a small relation bonus which means, the person likes you a bit more than others, which will be important later. Some ethnicities to pick come with a unique way of playing the game like playing as an Italian mob grants you the ability to build a Grappa operations later (unique liqor available to Italian outfts) and being able to trade with people usually hating your guts otherwise. You will reckon them as having a small flag symbol next to them. Ethnicities might tend to crowd together in certain parts of the map.

Character traits:
You might select one of the archetypes granting you 3 perks. Most of them are useful in certain situations, some are downright bad to have like 'myopic', 'weak' or 'lazy'. Study them wisely to pick a good combo for min-maxing yourself or just ignore them for the giggles. My recommendations are that you might think about the stuff your boss will be mainly doing. Scoping out businesses or talking with people - well, in this case you might want to be 'friendly', 'curious', 'talkative'' while avoid being 'unkind', 'ugly' or 'irritant'. If your boss should crack some heads or deliver his arguments via a Chicago Typewriter, you'd rather pick 'sharpeyed', 'strong' or 'cruel'. Most of the perks are self-explanatory though.

Gang speciality:
A small boost to your gang that might influence the way you are playing the game. Some outfits are better at dealing with the police or setting up extortion shemes. Choose - but choose wisely. No refunds.

After that, the game uses a seed to fill the map and get you started. If you are very content with a map, write down the seed number to recreate the experience later.

Starting the game usually puts you in a world of wonder with many many question marks hovbering over your head. Basically, the first things you want to do in the early stages of the game is (in this order):

Explore the direct neighborhood
Set up your first booze operation in your safehouse
Expand your influence (i.e. 'create and expand fronts')
Avoid early mistakes

First, let us talk about, what we start with.
Usually, your boss starts in a two-person car (very basic), a baseball bat, and 10 movement points (MP) as well as 3 action points (AP).
- Moving around your boss from corner to corner i.e. street intersection to intersection uses up 1 MP for the turn. No refunds, so be careful!
- Entering a small outfit's corner (orange borders), so 'goon territory' will cost you 3 MP
- Entering a rival outfit's turf (red border) costs 5 MP
- Entering unknown corners will cost 5 MP but remove the fog of war permanently and show you the entities (not scoped out yet) on that corner. Mostly, you find shops and their owners there.
MP can be modified by the car you are driving, your piece's 'role' as a captain or certain perks and skills obtained. Rule of thumb: experienced pieces will go farther than rookies.
AP will be used to interact with the map. Scope out a place? 1AP! Cash in a favor? 1 AP. Sell some stuff? 1 AP!. You get it? If it includes a transaction, then it costs 1 AP. Attacking someone or something costs all AP for the turn.
MP and AP are restored after taking a turn (progressing the game by 1 week)

Second, you will have a safehouse you start in front of.
A safehouse is the center of your outfit. Your very first building. Well, you do not own it officially, but have a power over it. Usually, the building will have the owner who you can talk to, a legal business acting as cover and an inventory and can house an 'operation' later on. 'Operations' can be built and upgraded later. Acquiring more buildings is key to success in the game but for starters, you have only one. Period. Deal and work with it. Operations might require a steady influx of resources to operate properly.

Third, some of the map is already explored and you already know some places and might even know what they buy and sell. This might come from the fact that they are your relatives or 'know you from ago' to give you a help starting.

As told before, you want to build and expand a booze empire like Big Al did in Chicago. For this, you need patience, tenacity but more important: Money.

Money can be obtained via three major routes:

1. Produce and sell booze
This one is self-explanatory. Find someone who will buy your stuff and Ka-Ching!

2. Extortion
This one needs fronts under your control and people inside willing to fork over money

3. Gambling
Also, you will need a front for it and probably LOTS of spare cash to set up a gambling operation

So...what exactly does this have to do with 'People'? Well...it is easy, yet complicated. You see, you are doing illicit stuff. Selling alcohol which is forbidden by 1920ies law. People buy and sell this stuff secretly and it requires trust. You just do not pop into a place and ask 'Wanna buy my swill?'. Same here. Every business owner on the map so most places you can visit will buy and/or sell stuff. This can either be legal stuff, illicit goods or a mixture of both.

Legal stuff is easy. If you know the legal resource, you can buy it from a store selling it. They have limited stock which will refill over time. Sometimes, you are shown they trade something you do not know - yet. This might either be a resource you simply do not know at the moment and will be unveiled once you do or they withhold the information, because they do not trust you enough. That is right. City of Gangsters is a game of favors and trust.

Illicit goods - alcohol, will not be openly traded. Unless you have not reached a certain relationship level (around 7 or 10 points of positive reputation), they will not tell you, what they would like to buy from you. Basically spoken: Yes, James, the owner of 'The Green Pub' would buy your Moonshine, but since he does not know you, he would not tell you that he needs Moonshine. The game just states that he deals in illicit goods or that he does not trust you enough and show you blanks.

Now, how to to build up relations to a person to unlock the interactions with them?
The easiest thing to do is having positive social traits. People like 'friendly' persons, so skills like 'friendly', 'talkative' or even 'curious' will help you uncover what is REALLY done at a place. These skills give a temporary boost to reputation you can exploit to start business with someone.

Having the same ethnicity helps as well. The game is designed in a way, that people speaking the same language trust you more.

You might have helped some direct relative of them via a quest so they have already heared of you. This is playing the long-term smart game. Helping people will open doors for you.

Sometimes, they are a tough nut to crack. In that case you might need someone that will introduce you to them. And this is, where one of the most important resource in the game comes into play: Favors.

Basically spoken: the more a person likes you, the more likely it is to accumulate favors with them. You can use those e.g. to sway a person and improve your relation to them. They won't do stuff for you if they do not like you. They do not trust you if they do not like you. Easy as it is.

So one of the biggest things to do is to know people and make them like you to get connected and finally take over the neighborhood. To make them like you, trade with them, help them, do their quests and on a regular base that is. Reputation will fade over time. Only some things like matching ethnicity are permanent. Then use the favors to learn new skills, set up fronts, get to know people or even scope out the map. Cashing in a favor costs 1 AP. Some actions with a character both need favor and a certain reputation treshold.

So as an example: You want to know, what Billy Ray buys and sells but he does not trust you. But you know Cecile, which in turn knows Bobby Ray and you have a favor with Cecile. Use the favor to get introduced and open up a new business opportunity.

We talked about selling stuff to people is doing them a favor, right? And they return favors - literally. The easiest way to gain reputation with someone is to sell them booze. You start with a small quantity but once this is dried up, you meet a problem. Where to get more of it?

This is, where your operations come into play. Each legal business under your control - and your safehouse as well counts as such - can house one operation. This can be something like a garage, storehouse or an illicit booze operations.

Basically, it is a place, that converts resources into units of booze to be sold. Each product has a production time in turns and if the bar is full, the operation checks, whether you have all ingredients and use them to make booze. So your job primarily is to procure the stuff needed for one or two batches and then load it into a car and sell the finished product to the thirsty customers.

Operations can be upgraded to more efficient ones or higher tier ones and can have managers and upgrades attached to them. Both manager and upgrades will make the operation perform better.

At the beginning of the game, you only know about level 1 alcohols - swill. These are called Homemade Beer, Hard Cider, Brick Wine and Moonshine in the game. Usually you only know to make one or two of them and have to learn how to make the others via quests and/or people owing you favors. Swill is easy and quickly to produce but sells for cheap and uses rather big amounts of thankfully cheap ingredients. There are higher tiers of alcohol which are harder to produce but more lucrative in the long run.

So you should set up an operation rather quickly to have a new source of sellable stuff. This will cost a small amount of money in the building as well as some lumber. Once given the build order, the building will be operational in some turns and then will rund down the clock for production. Watch the progress bar to check, how much time you have to feed it with stuff it needs to make more booze. If you miss out, production will be stalled and progress forfeit as the clock starts anew.

Now keep in mind, that you should not just plop down anything. Ask yourself first: do I have buyers for that kind of alcohol? Can I buy everything I need to make it? For example, Brick Wine sells for more than Homemade Beer, but what if you cannot find a dealer selling grape concentrate to make it but have a good source of Malt Syrup at hand instead? Better make Homebrew Beer then, until you find ways to get the other stuff, right? So knowing your neighborhood is essential. Do not produce stuff noone nearby is buying unless having your own bootleggers/speakeasies selling it for you.

Your outfit learns to make new drinks via favors over time and you want to scope out the map ASAP.

Businesses on the map are you primary buying and selling points. If you take a closer look, you will notice, that these businesses will come with their own symbols attached which can give you a clue on what they buy and sell without scoping them out (which costs AP). Let us talk a bit about what we can expect.

First, we might find car dealers, junk yards and garages.
These primarily sell cars (duh!) and can restore damaged vehicles which otherwise would break down and become useless for some cash. Some of them but rather few also will buy random low-level alcohol.

Gastronomy Buildings
We are talking about cafés, bowling halls, dance halls, restaurants. They usually want to buy booze.
Small enterprises like cafés will usually buy small amounts of two different level 1 alcohols and maybe some tier 2 stuff. They fulfill the same role as the bootleggers or corner speakeasies you can buy later. These are those you will go for first to expand your fledgling empire since you can build up favors and money rather quickly here. Bigger ones like the restaurant usually want larger quantities of level 2 stuff at least with the chance of buying some level 3 stuff as well. Hotels accept level 3 stuff only and are important to sell this kind of stuff in the mid- to late-game. You find these in city areas with much residental population.

Hardware Stores/Industry
We are talking lumber mills, masons, hardware and furniture stores selling building materials for you. Every operation needs a combination of money and one or more construction material or even containers to set up. Lumber mills usually sell lumber in bigger amounts, Masons sell bricks and hardware stores sell sheet metal and or pipes as well as tools like crowbars. Furniture stores sell furniture you will need to build speakeasies later. Some of these also will sell some containers like barrels or even accept alcohol

Merchants
We are talking Grocery Stores, Fruit Stores, Bakeries. In this case expect to buy basic containers like stoneware crocks, bottles or unrefined foodstuff like Barley, Grapes or Apples. Some Merchants will buy legal stuff like apples or small barrels from you, so keep check on your surplus. Some stuff cannot be sold. Ice Houses sell Ice (Duh) and also some kind of fruit. These are the places to check out for ingredients for your operations. Most of the times, Merchants are legal stuff only.

Packers/Warehouses
These sell bulk items like barrels or raw materials like malt or corn syrup, paper or other miscellaneous stuff. The gas station - at least some of those - sells gasoline. Some of those will buy alcohol. Usually, the stuff they sell is useful for level 2 or 3 alcohol. So keep in mind, what you have in the neighborhood as time is money (translated into AP and MP)

Some buildings do not fit into the aforementioned types. They fulfill another role:

Political Building
If you own the proper DLC (I recommend to have them all for the full experience), these Buildings can be used to check, who is governing the district and fund candidates in elections to influence the city.

Longshoremen/Worker's associations
They will buy barrels of booze for premium price, which is very useful later on, once you learned to make barrelled booze. Useful later, useless at the beginning.

Railroad stations
Those can offer you quests to get weapons or booze or be able to sell surplus booze for a good price. To use them is a bit difficult. They have to be inside a friendly front, they must like you and the cop of the precinct they are in, has to be bribed. Increases truck capacity by 2 if within your fronts.

Police Buildings
These will show you the cop responsible for the relating precinct. It will show you whether you bought the cop and for how long. Precincts can be shown on the overlay map and will be represented by a color. Each precinct has its own cop.

Safehouses
Gons and rival outfits will have those. You cannot interact with them unless their owner is dead or the rival gang has been exterminated. During a limited time-window however, you can loot them for stuff inside. Lootable safehouses have a red icon.

You guessed it: you are doing something illegal in the game. Selling booze is a crime. Luckily, in the 1920ies even cops did not like the Volstead Act. Enough of them felt repressed themselves and were willing to look away for a price and keep their noses out of your business.

How do the cops work in the game?

Well, at first, they are playpieces like your boss or your muscle that drive around the map. Each cop will stay inside the borders of his precinct. Where they are, they prevent business with shops at the same corner. People are just too scared with the cops around. Workaround: bribe him/her.
Now for the more problematic issue: Cops are attracted by 'heat'. Every time you sell booze or do other illegal stuff at a corner, heat rises and will decay over time again. Cops will more there, stay there and if you are unlucky, raid there thus arresting gang members staying there and take their stuff or maybe worse: arrest them permanently. Your buildings there will be cleared out and you will lose, what is inside. Gambling houses might get their money confiscated and might lose attractions.

So...if you have a lucrative district because you are doing your mafia thing there, be sure to bribe the coppers.

How to bribe them? Well, earn their trust, which works via favors usually. Get introduced to them and offer them a bribe. While bought off, they will turn a blind eye to you and ignore actively, what you are doing. Mind the small yellow police icon popping up, once their bribe expires. You will have two or three more weeks to renew the deal or have them default to not having reputation with you.
The mouthpiece role captain can blackmail cops via sheme option to get a permanent relationship boost causing them to shut up for a year and be willing to listen to you without anyone helping you.

Having a cop bribed, can have benefits, however. Some will give you a weapon for a favor or even know the FBI agent which they can unleash upon your rival outfits once they know them as well and you are at war with them.

WARNING!!! Check out relations of a cops to know his or her family and under almost NO CIRCUMSTANCE kill one of his family members or extort them. The minus 30 relationship penalty you get will cause the cop to become uncooperative towards you meaning that you should rather stay clear of his precinct. Can happen, when killing a goon or rival ganger to get rid of problems but causing bigger in their wake. I can frankly say, that killing family will burn a character for the entire game. The penalty will decay, but the game has not enough turns for that.

Synopsis: Cops mean trouble. Bribe them, if you plan to do business in their precinct. Watch their family!!!

The FBI agent
This insufferable guy blocks off a corner but is more dangerous than a cop as he is not restricted to a single precinct and is incorruptible. Where he strikes, things get ugly. Stay clear of him, send him towards your competition via cop connections or your Jailbird role captain and do not have all of your assets in one basket.

Being a boss is cool. Being a boss without outfit however, will make it difficult to rule a city. You need more muscle - literally as this is the rank of your new goons.

Muscle and Captains (Muscle with special roles) are additional playpieces acting almost like your boss. They have their own AP and MP. Logically, they can be used to drive around and buy and sell stuff. This can happen manually or using the route creation tool automatically. Every character in an outfit has a rep sheet which remembers all things, the character has done. You can even change their clothes. Muscle have their own set of skills and ethnicity so they can to some roles better then others and get interaction boni for talking with the right persons.

All muscle earn XP from things they do and will level up accordingly. At level 7 they can get the captain promotion wich will make them electable for roles, if they meet the proper prerequisites.

Muscle can be used in three ways:

1. Get into a car and be used like a boss. Talk to people, visit places, buy and sell stuff, attack rival outfits

2. Become a building manager. Basically, the muscle learns how to operate an operation properly. Inside an operation he mostly boosts production in time and product amount as well as reducing the required ingredients.

3. Run a Casino. Assigned to a gambling house the muscle takes care of milking the customers.

The XP earned seem to depent on how much a character does something so it is a good idea to give an on-map character extra APs first so he can build up XP faster. Managers profit from the Production manager skill most if they are in an operation requiring lots of ingredients (mostly level 2 ops) or if a certain ingredient becomes scarce. Giving them the booze production skill makes them reduce the time needed for the next batch thus this translates in an XP boost. Imagine a manager gets XP every 4 turns because producing homemade beer. After promotion he produces beer every 3 turns - this is an increase of 25%. The last skill is tied to a certain kind of booze and increases the amount made per batch. Speeding up things that take up many turns might not be worth it if it is beyond 8 turns per batch. Saving ingredients is always nice and that way the muscle character mights jump between productions to influence them.

Grape presses, Distilleries for neutral alcohol or apple juice offer a different skillset called fermenter or juice manufacturer. These are needed to expand an according ops beyond level 1.

Speakeasies Managers make money faster and sell more alcohol with their skills

Gambling house skills are only useful at gambling houses. Pit Boss makes people risk more money, mechanical minded lowers chances to win for the customers and house manager level 3 is mandatorily needed to upgrade to large gambling house.

Once in a certain role assigned, do not swap to burn a promotion on an unfitting skill.

If a muscle is experienced enough i.e. reaching his 7th promotion, he is eligible for the captain promotion and thus can be groomed to fulfill a specialist role in your gang. Most of them come with a special mission type called 'sheme', which can be used from time to time to give you benefits.
To be eligible for a role, the captain must have done certain actions in his past.

General rule of thumb:
- if the sheme needs money, or resources, they have to be at your safehouse and not anywhere else thus your STARTING BUILDING
- the captain needs to be mobile so assign to a car first
- schemes can fail and sometimes the captain is arrested by the FBI. Bail him out quickly or you lose him to Walla-Walla.
- You can have multiple captains of the same role
- only one scheme at a time

Let us talk about the roles a bit:

The Closer
The closer is specialist for procuring booze and making shady deals. His sheme offers a chance of getting a bigger quantity of booze for reasonable prerequisites.
To become a Closer, the captain needs to make 50 transactions (buy/sell actions), cash in 20 favors, attend to 3 social events and having made business deals with goons 4 times

The Accountant
One of the most important roles in the game - you want one of these ASAP! An accountant can be used to get you new buildings for your operations. While the first ones can be gotten rather cheap and easy, later on they become ridiculously expensive. The captain will scout out a possible location for an operation, use some cash, swill and lumber/bricks to give you a new building after a while.

The Lookout
Scout role captain. The captain gets +5 MP upon promotion to his role and can set up fronts at remote locations for rather cheap money. Since fronts translate into more crew, this is a good thing although his ridiculous movement range makes him a great delivery guy. To become lookout you need to drive 750 corners, unveil 25 corners and scope out 50 businesses so using AP and MP extensively. Easy to get role although it deprives you from a guy helping to deliver the goods for some time. Having one, however, is awesome.
The Intimidator
The intimidator has a strange power. He can force goons to tell us what they have in their safehouse. When we ask them about a business deal, they will sometimes gift us one item of their stockpile. Useful. To become Intimidator, you need an operating gambling house. You need to extort 5 gamblers, pardon 5 gamblers in debt (cash on hand required), threaten 5 people and extort 15 businesses to pay protection money.

Let us continue with the roles...

The Mouthpiece
A guy who can blackmail cops via scheme to shut them down for a year and then making it easier to renew bribes. Also he seems to get a discount when establishing fronts. Some parts of the prerequisites are easy to obtain, like having to have 100 conversations (just talk to people, which costs no AP, but mouseclicks), establish 4 fronts and bribe 4 cops (takes some time). The scheme uses a little money and one small arm and rewards you with either a more malleable cop or some rare cars.

The Enforcer
The enforcer can offer you a scheme to heist a location. To become an enforcer, you need a rival gang at war, since you need to subvert their fronts twice, attack some of their buildings and loot safehouses for 6 times. Hint: if you encounter a destroyed small outfit and their derelict safehouse, just send your aspirant there and loot it 6 times evn if you get nothing else of it. Loot 6 safehouses seems hard, but isn't (bug/intended feature?)

The Jailbird
The jailbird can rat out a rival gang to the FBI via scheme and make them raid their stuff. Useful but hard to obtain. You need to fight 6 times, kill two people and have ot be arrested once.

The Operative
Political animal that can help you with getting politicians into your criminal network. I regret that I never tested that scheme yet. But it is a rather quick to get role. Just cash in 3 favors and attend 2 Events. Since there are more jucier roles, I forgo it most of the time. Need to focus on the political play it seems.

A boss with no turf will stay a lonely boss. Expanding your crime empire requires you to set up fronts.
Fronts serve in many ways.

First, they project your influence and prevent other gangs doing business with people there
Second, every full 5 corners under your control will open up one crew slot to expand your outfit.
Third, you can extort money from businesses inside the front. Money will be collected by the guy having the front. You can ask him for it from time to time. A green envelope will show that he has something for you.
Fourth, fronts give unique ways to cash in favors like scoping out the vicinity or opening a gambling house (one per precinct allowed)
Fifth, they hamper enemy movement and expansion.

Fronts can be subverted by brute force (RNG check modified by some perks) or bribed into giving up their role. That way you can decimate an enemy outfit. Protect them.

You can order your frontmen to expand their turf. It can expand in a cross-shaped way so ideally, a good front has 5 corners and houses lots of businesses. To expand, you need some money. Basically, The front will begin to bleed money to expand and hold the new turf. To counter that, you might extort people inside. Even empty corners have their use as ther can be stuff hidden or at least they count for crew limit. It takes some time to expand, but I have figured out, that it will go quicker, the more you do there so buying and selling stuff helps.

A lookout can open up new fronts for you via scheme and some perks influence the front game. Aggressive muscle will have a larger success in extorting money, confident ones can open new fronts easier.

Mind: religious (and upright?) people will not open fronts for you. You need a favor and some relation first before they consider doing stuff for you. Opening new fronts will get more expansive with each expansion and fronts cannot expand territory, while another front is doing it.

New buildings seem to be only allowed to exist in your own fronts so losing a front can lead to lose a building. Be careful!

About the crew limit. Crew size is capped in the game. For each 5 corners you control, you can have one person more. Each business under your control gives +1 crew limit. Each gambling house as well. You cannot hire more people, if your do not meet the limit.

Once you have fronts, you can extort their inhabitants for money. 25$ each month to be precise.
This is a nice boost to income in the early game and rather meh in the late game as you make more money with selling booze.

How to extort them? Well, talk to them and click ont the option about taking control over the corner. You will notice, that the attitude depends on how they like you. As nobody wants to be extorted, you will get a hit to reputation with them and having some treats like vintictive make this even worse. It can lead to a situation where someone does not want to do business with you for a maybe long time.

If you have relations above 20 positive however, they will help gladly and fork over the money. So you might need to make yourself a bit more likeable.

What helps with it? Well, aggressive musle have higher chances, friendly guys raise their relations, doing trade with them helps greatly. Cashing in a favor to get the +20 relation raise also helps. And also the protection racket gang specialization helps with them forgetting being extorted.

Extorted people sometimes request you to be released if they sell you a building. Since buildings cost a metric crapton of money in the long run, you might ignore it. Things only get difficult, if you extort vindictive persons or persons related to a cop. They REALLY do not like it!

It might happen that a front costs more money then it makes either because you neglect the extortion game or it has not enough businesses to extort to cover the expansion. In that case, each month a red envelope appears telling you to give them money or lose territory eventually.

You can also automate front mainenance.

Corners and the control over them is crucial to play the game properly.

Each corner houses some entities either ouvertly or hidden. The most obvious things are businesses acting as buyer or seller as well as special buildings. Besides the safehouses, they are permanent.

Each corner seems to have one slot reserved for a business to be obtained by the player. These are hidden and only appear if you buy the building from a business via favor or fulfil the scheme of your accountant.

Each corner also has a social event hidden inside to be uncovered. These can be of the type 'Dinner Party', 'Poker Night' or 'Business luncheon'. You discover them by using up a favor for asking about 'interesting events'.

I need to confirm it, but I think the business luncheons can spawn new businesses at a corner.

A corner can hold 0-3 businesses and some special buildings.

At one corner per precinct, a gambling house can be opened. Talk to a frontman about it. You will need 2 favors though.

Summary: strive to take control over corners. It is usually beneficial to you. Raise respect there by doing stuff there in the name of your outfit. You lose respect, if an enemy outfit does stuff there or even disrupts your plans by subverting or destroying places.

From time to time, people you know offer you quests that will cash in rewards in multiple ways.
If a purple hat appears, the person to talk with offer you to trade a favor with teaching you new stuff.

Learning new stuff is crucial. Your whole outfit will profit from stuff learned and some skills are prerequisite to build certain upgrades or operations.

Just talk to the person and he will tell you, what he wants to teach you and then what he requires. Mostly a combination of money and items. Bring the required stuff to him and voilá - instant knowledge.

Interesting stuff learned by experience:

- truck driving skill enables you to buy delivery vans from car dealers. Best thing until then are pickups.
- to upgrade a basic resource operation, i.e. the apple press, the grape press, the backroom still or the malt extractor to its level 2 you need a manager with the skills fermentation (malt and neutral alc) or juice manufacture (grapes and apples) inside. Train one manager accordingly to operate and upgrade these buildings.
- there is a limit on how many quests can be open simultaneously. Do not clog your slots if you cannot make them.
- delivering quest items does not cost AP and can be done multiple times a turn.
- some quests appear, when you have not discovered a business that sells stuff you need to produce swill. You trade some small items or cash for a moderate amount of stuff you need. The quest is recurring but will vanish once you have learned to cope with the problem. E.g. a recurring quest appears providing you with malt syrup. Upon learning to make malt from barley you will lose out on this quest.
- some recurring quests want a specific amount of a certiain alcohol for cash. Nice way to sell bulk or surplusses.

Quests raise the relation with people. Sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanent.

The UI - if properly used, can help you greatly. Much information can be looked for while other, important stuff might be hidden.

At the upper left corner of your monitor there are some buttons of which the three on the left are important. The most left one summons up a map where you can see, where to get which resource or where to sell them. Rule of thumb:
Green icon - you can sell something there only
Brown icon - you can buy something there
Grey icon - both buys and sells stuff

Just remember to update the map once you have encountered new stuff. Play a bit with this feature. You can summon up the map by pressing 'z' key.

Second from left shows useful overlays like precincts, heat and other stuff

Third button shows stats like which outftts do you know or revenues. This is also, where you can find your captains and talk to them about schemes or can look for new members with certain perks.

In the 'your outfit' page you can talk with your captains about schemes or assign them permanently to a role.

Hint: click on each button and see what it does. I have called out the most important ones already.

On the right side of the screen you can have your crew and operations sorted. Frankly, you should do this from time to time. There is a small button in the upper right corner looking like a '=' - click on it and sort stuff. Not intuitive to find but useful.

You will encounter those pesky orange gangs quite often. They have their own turf but do not expand. Mostly, they are an annoyance but with the right treatment, they can become useful or even valuable.

What do they do? Well, they harrass shops and close them so you cannot trade with them for a while. To counter it, you can talk to the goon and tell him to 'stop harassing businesses' which he will do either after payment of 100$ or RNG result of a 'threaten' option. The latter might get him not compliant but defiant and even upset him so he will attack your outfit members or operations he knows. If your outfit is big enough, he will fold as you are a 'serious outfit' and he does not want trouble.

To deal with shops on his turf you have to pay some money to be allowed to do so.

Entering a goon territory costs 3 MP and will upset him unless you have the kind perk on the trespasser.

Goons come in two variants: Brawlers and Business. Brawlers can be used to harass enemy outfits. Be at war with someone he knows and pay him money. Business goons will offer deals from time to time exchanging some money for some items after some time. If the deal i through, visit the goon to make him deliver. Stuff seems random but sometimes there are goot items or even booze being offered. Making deals with a goon raises your relation with them.

Goon favors can mostly only be used for influencing people.

If you have crew slots free, you can hire a goon by paying him money. His safehouse will disappear but you have a new muscle with experience who will rather quickly level.

You can also get rid of a goon by either attacking and killing him (not recommended most times) or buy him out. If he likes you enough, you can make him retire for cash. The corner will be freed at once. Costly, but effective.

Beware of goons in the early game as they tend to injure your guys. Later, subjugate them.

Your intimidator captain role does a strage thing to them. He unveils, what they have in stash and those will give you gifts sometimes.

Operations can be built into controlled buildings.
This costs some money and resources and takes some time to build. Buildings can also be converted into warehouses, which have a huge inventory but cannot be used for anything else permanently.

There are some types of building types and most can be upgraded at least once to improve them.
Some legal businesses produce a small amount of items every few turns for free. Useful, but can also clog up space. Buildings have limited storage which is to be kept in mind when opening operations. If the building is too small, you cannot produce stuff as the ingredients needed won't fit in.

Resource Buildings
These produce basic resources needed by your productions. Apple press, Grape press, Backroom stills and Malt processors produce resources for level 1 alcohols in adequate amounts if no vendor is available. The Ice House converts gasoline into ice, which is needed for higher tier stuff. Need a special manager skill to improve.

Production Operations
Those come in tiers depending on the alcohol type.
Homemade Beer -> Backroom Beer -> Beer Kegs
Brick Wine -> Counterfeit Wine -> Champaigne
Hard Cider -> Sparkling Cider -> Cordials
Moonshine -> Bathtub Gin -> Gin

Tier 1 Alcohol poduction
These make swill from basic resources and containers like stoneware crocks or apple juice. They produce a quite large batch of swill in reasonable time but tend to be hungry in terms of containers. I have seen many playthroughs where Stoneware Crocks were the limiting factor as the production needed more than could be bought at vendors. A manager with the production manager skill copes with this problem. Each level of PM saves 10% of the items needed to make a new batch.
Level 1 alcohol is your mainstay in the early game and a good form of income and also needed to placate your fronts. You might find many places that buy it. Later, dump it ito one of your corner speakeasies to have a constand flow of cash.

Tier 1.5 Alcohol production
These convert swill produced elsewhere into something more valuable by adding some more sophisticatd stuff and bottling it. E.g. Take some homemade beer, add hops and small bottles and - presto! - backroom beer.

Tier 2 Alcohol production
Basically also producing level 2 alcohol but without using swill but more raw materials. More difficult to run, but a bit more lucrative since you can sell the swill you do not need on top. E.g. take apples, sugar, small bottles to make sparkling cider from scratch or corn syrup, spices and small bottles together with neutral alcohol to make bathtub gin from scratch.

Tier 3 Alcohol production
Usually has 2 recipes to either convert level 2 alcohol into level 3 or make it from scratch/using barrels of alcohol

There are Productions that will upgrade into stills which make barrels of alcohol. We are talking whiskey, brandy, vodka or rum. Either use lots of bottles and raw materials or grains/sugar or fruits together with small amounts of barrels to create stuff to be either sold for $$$ at longshoreens or filled into humonguous amounts of bottles using counterfeit labels at a botteling ops.

Tier 4 Alcohol
Some of the spirits and drinks mentioned above can be refined into the 'good stuff' sold at hotels and high-end bars. Aged Whiskey, Gin, Cordials or Champaigne are selling for $$$ at selected spots on the map. This is also, where you will sell these normally.

Garages
Increase your vehicle limits and may repair damaged vehicles

Bottling Ops
Uses Bottles, counterfeit labels and alcohol barrels to produce a large number of bottled stuff.

Counterfeit Label Production
Makes Counterfeit labels from paper and neutral alcohol. Only works in a bribed precinct.

Ethnic Speciality Buildings
They produce a special booze or good to be sold. Italians can make Grappa or Germans can do Schnapps while English folk can produce Cigarettes.

Bootleggers/Speakeasies
Those sell alcohol for you. While the lower tier only sells 2 sorts of swill at a limited rate, the higher tiers sell premium stuff in reasonable amounts. Will become backbone of your empire.

Frankly, these are annoying. They block corners and sabotage your plans by subverting corners, attacking and killing your crew, sending the FBI your way or force businesses you buy at to close down or have exclusive deals with them. You should cope with them or at least plan for it.

Open war with killing people is bad for business because of the rather permanent opinion penalty you get which lasts the whole game. Let them tear at themselves and mop up the remains. Frontdisruptions help as well. If the outfit is reduced to one, go for the kill and liberate big swathes of corners.

Certain police interactions only work if you and them know the rival gang (at war). Same goes for favors from fronts (get lethal weapons).

You can try and negotiate peace, non-aggression or limit mutual expansion for a limited time period.
Outfits have agendas and react differently to expansion, outfit size or are reluctant to go to war or are aggressive.

Once you kill their leader, another muscle of them steps in. The outfit is renamed and your relation towards them is reset to zero. If the leader was the last member, they are vanquished from the map.

If your boss is killed, it is game over.

Fun fact: having an armored car reduces damage in 'armed negotiations' resulting in your crew member to be able to survive an one-on-one encounter.

Synopsis: You want to get rid of them. Use the FBI or go nuts on their fronts is a good strategy. Also attacking their ops with 3 guys simultaneously takes out a building of theirs greatly disrupting their abilities to thrive.

Be aware: the AI cheats. Rival gang members have weapons earlier than you.

Once you have been around for some time and grown a bit - I guess it is 10 corners on each map and 3 on Atlantic City - you can cash in a big favor (2 to be precise) to ask a frontman for opening a gambling house in his front.

Gambling houses somewhat work like an operation without storage that will produce - or lose, if you are unlucky - cash.

Now, they work a lot more different than other operations. First of all, they mandatorily require a manager to work. Anyone will do, but organized and intelligent ones are the ones you are looking for. Second, you may only have one of those in a single police precinct. Third, they need a certain amount of money available in the operation or their features won't work. Fourth, they can have and will need upgrades to work and those have an upkeep cost. Fifth, they can be expanded to house more attractions. Last, but not least, they offer their managers unique level-ups only usable in gambling houses. Also, as each operation, they open up a crew slot for you.

How do they work? And how to set them up?
Well, the first thing to do is to ask one of your frontmen to open up a gambling operation in his front. This will cost 2 favors. You will be shown suitable locations around with an estimated number of walk-in customers. Choose one and then decide, how big the operation will be (needs money at character speaking's inventory). This influences the number of attractions and upgrades in there and then you are done. You can upgrade a gambling house to a larger one with more expansions later thus it requires skills learned and the last one requires a manager with the level 3 house manager skill.

You assign the manager and speak with him via the discussion button next to his picture when opening the gambling house's window. Ask, how much money he has and deposit money. You can also withdraw money from here. You can now pick features for your gambling house and they fall into 3 categories:

- walk-in customer attractions
Your small casino will attract people from the hood to gamble for small amounts of money. How many are possible depends on the size of your casino and the location you picked. Your attraction like slot machines or policy games will have them play for a random amount of money within a threshold stated with the feature like 'serves up to 50 people and bets are between 0,50$ and 1,50$'. Each game has odds to win. You will get the money that people lost and pay out people who won. Certain upgrades influence the way the feature works.

Pit Boss skill raises the minimum and maximum amount people will bet so you will likely gain more money with the risk to take a bigger hit when losing.
House manager reduces the running costs of the feature and saves money
Mechanically minded tinkers with the odds reducing the chance to win for all customers tilting your chance towards winning.

- regular customers
These attractions serve characters playing regularily at your den. They come with a stash of money and do the high-roller games with limited spots. Interestingly, they can go into debt. Usually, after they lost around 500$. After that, they pop up on the map as entities to be visited. Send your muscle to intimidate them to pay up or else...
Now, these are VERY valuable assets. You WANT them. You see, unlucky gamblers can be made to pay back the money. Send your muscle, give them 14 days to scrounge up the money and then return to pick it up. Well, sometimes, they try to give you less and you can threaten them to fork over the correct amount, but this could get a rep hit with their family, so decide, whether some cash is worth angering people you need because they buy and sell stuff you have and need. More interesting is the fact, that they might ofer to pay in a different way. We are talking cars, parking spots, booze, connections and BUSINESSES. Yeah, that's right! You get a chance at a free operation. Chance, because, they might run away leaving you with nothing, but IF they offer 'business opportunities' as repayments, go nuts for it and gamble. One thing I reckoned but need to test out: If the debitor has an ethnicity of the 'big ones' you get a shot at learning their trade. This is maybe a way to do unique stuff without being part of that ethnicity. I had it only once and the guy ran away, but I think, this is a way to learn otheriwse locked skills. Like making cigarretes as an Italian, which usualy is English only.

- upgrades
Cost money, but enhance the effectiveness of others like having more regular customers, decreasing debt treshold or raising respect/attracting more customers.

Fun fact: The Dice Game upgrade does not cost you anything. Players compete with each other. You just can extort the losers so rather safe way to get people in debt.
The Rouleeet tables are risky. You can win a fortune, but pay out is 1:36 with high stakes so you WILL lose big from time to time. No money means, features shutting down. Beware the police, they will take your money and destroy features. Do quests to learn more games, upgrades and stuff.

While doing stuff, your crew gets XP for each and every thing they do. Some times, you are informed, that they made a level and can pick a skill.

You can see that by looking at the yellow book icon in the news tab. Now...lets not be hasty! First, the skills offered, depend on what they are doing currently. This means, someone with a car on the map will usually be able to pick from more AP, more MP or better combat stats (damage/to hit chance)
Somewhat later, you can also get delivery dash and alley ace and I believe this is available for people driving a truck-type vehicle i.e. pickup or delivery van. The two skills give a relation bonus when interacting with vendors or give less heat, when doing shady stuff.

Operations managers have access to the production manager skill, which lowers the number of items needed for a batch. Also, if they do not have organized, they can get a skill emulating it thus opening another upgrade slot at the operation. Useless in my book. Just have one manager with organized, move them into a building to upgrade, do the upgrade and reassign. The third upgrade disappears, but do not panic, the bonus still applies.
A second skill reduces time for booze to be produced by a week per level. A third option is to increase output per batch via skill. Now mind, that not all are available and which ones you get, depends on the building you are at. Producing more homemade beer only works on operations making this type of swill. Assigning a still master boosts ops doing barrels of booze but do not help at a swill production. You won't get them there.

A manager in a building producing raw materials like neutral alcohol, grape concentrate, apple juice or malt syrup, can get the fermenter/juice manufacturer skillset enabling him to make more raw material per batch but also unlocks upgrading these buildings.

Gambling houses have their own ones but you might want to have at least one guy with house mamager level 3 to move and upgrade medium to large gambling houses

Speakeasies have unique skills raising the amount of booze sold and raising prices.

On level 7 they can get the captain skill which will enable them to take special roles. You don not need them with all of your guys, so feel free to forego them if not useful.

Rule of thumb: Production manager skill is useful for almost anyone in an operation. Cutting resource demand is always useful. Swill productions profit most, I guess, especially, if you are hard-pinched for bulk items like crocks and do not get enough of them. Speed up production is also nice as it speeds up XP gain. But ensure you have the means to procure the stuff needed for a batch, otehrwise it is just a lost skill. Also, cutting time for a thing taking up 12 turns like top tier booze seems to be a moot point. Better produce more stuff.

For drivers, level up smart opportunist first. More actions per turn means more XP and faster leveling. Enforcer and Jailbird roles might be better off with Brawler as they need to fight and Lookouts or drivers required to travel big distances might profit from efficient driver.

Oh yeah: Intelligent characters level up faster, slow ones really slower, so avoid this perk. You do not want dumb people in your outfit.

Once a front is established - using a confident crew member or the according captain role it becomes cheaper - most frontmen will come up with a mission shortly after this. It happens to be one of the following two:

- Neighborhood Knowledge
Just give them 5 bricks and 15 small barrels and a good batch of swill will be delivered to your safehouse or whatever location you deem suitable. If I can recall the numbers correctly, you will get either about 90 brick wine, 80 hard cider, 80 moonshine or 120 homemade beer. Best delivered to either a corner speakeasy or storehouse.

- [insert correct name]...something something cars
Give them 1000$ and 5 crowbars and you are presented with a new car or money (repaid with interest). Whether you need a new car is up to you. Mostly, you get a 2 seater, which is pretty useless later on but at the early stage it is ok, I guess. I mostly take the money.

About front growth I felt that it goes faster, the more business you do in the front. So observe closely, what the businesses buy and sell and trade with them often. Think yourself as a missionary of booze so save a stack of it to sway people towards your outfit. If inside your front, extort them easily.

Gambling is your friend, right? Well, first of all, to set up a gambling operation you will need a lot of money. This is a scarce resource at the beginning of the game, so you would not manage to build up one very early. Like in real life, you should only gamble with money you do not need. The parlors will make decent cash over time and you can milk them but due to their random character results may vary.

The more valuable resource they have is producing those people going in the reds with you. After a regular reaches a bank account of -500$, they pop up on the map and can be spoken to. As told above, you can send a mobster to them and demand a form of payment.

Demanding cash is staightforward. After 14 days you can collect usually a part of the money as they are mostly fiddling around with 'having not been able to scrounge up enough dough'. You may now either take the money or threaten them to make them sell a family heirloom to get even. Problem with that is that it angers their family members and might hit your ability to conduct business in the near future. If you have an Italian outfit, you have a bit more leniency over that. You can force people to trade with you, even when relations are in the reds.

Interesing are the alternative things you get from them. They come in three tiers. Tier 1 is available at once and can make them offer a car, a parking space for a truck, improve relations with one person they know, help you getting introduced to a goon, a pickup or - very valuable - offer you a new business. Last one is a no-brainer. Go for it, if offered. In the early and mid-game you want to expand your parking spaces a lot. My current outfit with 2,5 years on the clock to go till game ends is about 50 strong and you want many delivery vans.

Sometimes you might want something better out of the deal. You can have that, if your muscle visiting the gambler has money on hand. You can forgive them their debts and cover them with your money and extend their credit to 1000$ or after another run into the reds to 2000$.
It is a gamble. They might win and leave your house unscathed or have to offer you more valuable rewards.

Tier 2 has getting a delivery van (nice!) and getting to know ALL of their family together with a relationship boost. Great to scout the map faster. Time is money after all. You can also get exclusive deals with all their family if they have businesses.

Tier 3 has an opportunity to get some bottled drinks or even fancy bottled drinks. Jut make them intercept a truck full of quality booze heading to town.

Certain ethnic groups offer you their unique skill as payments so you might happen to learn something you do not know yet and expand your operations further. Regardng the business opportunities I think the chances getting a new building are smaller each time you try but I would go for it anyways. At my stage of the game new buildings cost 400k+ so I always get them with my accountants or from gamblers.

After your outfit gets bigger, you might want to automatize trade so you can focus on important things and preventing the game from becoming a clickfest. You can assign drivers to custom delivery routes so they automatically drive around to sell booze or buy stuff for your ops.

However...the AI behaves a bit stupid so you can end up with routes not working anymore because at one place they were not ready to buy something so you still have the items in the van and whatnot or no money to repair the car.

There are some routes worth setting up and automatizing however.

1. Front support.
You just need one guy with a car of your choice (sports car is the best choice in my book) and make them care for the fronts in a certain range. They will pick up money from extortion and give money to red ones if they have money on them. Pick a place to dump the cash they collect and do not forget to repair them cars before that. However: do not overstretch. Fronts get money every month and most drivers will cover 2-3 fronts per turn so it is not the best idea to have them responsible for driving around on the whole map covering 20 fronts.

2. Collecting stuff from productions.
While it is a rather bad idea to assign a car to a house and make it drive around to buy the resources to produce booze as it leads to the ops overflowing with goods bought in excess, it is healthy, however, to clear ops out of produced legal and illegal goods. Just use one building in the center of some of your ops as a warehouse. It will not house any ops anymore but has a whopping 200m³ of space. Make this a central delivery point and make your muscle drop stuff there.

3. Resource Run
From time to time you should assign a driver temporarily to get a single type of resource and drop it into a warehouse. So you procure stuff for multiple batches like buying 100 grape syrup and then take away the driver but keeping the route. Distribute the stuff manually instead. That way, you avoid overcrowding your operations.

4. Container Procurement
Some items are consumed at a rather ridiculous rate and even production manager 3 does not work wonders to that. Imagine the homemade beer ops. It needs 100 stoneware crocks every 4 turns to produce 100 beer. Now guess you have other swill-type ops running and their managers getting promoted to produce faster. You will BURN through the crocks. And the shops mostly have only 20-40 a pop and need time to restock. So you might have multiple guys taking some money and drive to 2 or 3 businesses, buy their stock, then drop off at warehouse then go to 2-3 other businesses until you cover around 12 businesses with one route. Same is true for small bottles and bottles. Trust me, you need those. These routes can be switched on permanently. Just do not forget to have enough money, let them repair after a full run and if they have a pickup or van, give them delivery dash skill to make shopkeepers happy.

5. Excess Swill Sale
Making more swill than needed? Can happen with certain stuff that even your corner speakeasies cannot deal with. Well, assign a guy and let him stock up on excess swill and distribute in the neighborhood. Either sell small portions like 5 crocks/bottles per customer or sell on bulk to get rid of the stuff - both are fine. It will help raising your respect and getting money faster. You do not forget to drop off the money, repairs and keep the cops bribed. Alley Ace also is a good skill for the drivers and goes well with short, strong and cautious skills. Also helps with getting favors

Fun fact: businesses get a relation bonus (+5 methinks) if part of an automated route. Just do the other stuff manually. The UI and way automatization works makes this the better choice.