Unlike corner hooligans, rival outfits will keep expanding their territory and add more crew members – although hopefully not to the same degree that you do. They can get sore if you cross their territory too much, and they can pick fights with your crew members … and make your life infinitely more interesting.
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| Rival Outfit (neutral or positive) | Rival Outfit (hostile) |
Your options are basically to leave them be, enter into agreements with them, or go to the mattresses and take them out one by one. You can’t merge with them to make one big outfit, nor can you steal their crew members.
There are three types of agreements you can enter into: an expansion treaty, a non-aggression treaty, and a joint war agreement. An expansion treaty means you both agree to not expand your territories within three corners of each other. Non-aggression? You leave me alone, I leave you alone. All treaties last 180 days, unless the terms of the agreement are violated.
“Until such time as one of them is dead, it would be unwise to venture into any new deals.”
“What if the deal won’t wait?”
“A deal will always wait, and a fool will always rush in.”
For $5000 you can ask them to go to joint war with you against another outfit, or they can ask you to do the same. The good thing about this is that if they were the ones asking you, they give you $5000 and you don’t actually have to do anything in return. I’m sure they’d appreciate it if you attacked the other outfit, but there’s nothing to say you have to – especially if they’re far away. You can completely ignore the other outfit for the next 180 days and pocket the cash. No honor amongst thieves and all that.
If you want to make a deal with a rival outfit, go to the same corner as one of their crew and talk to them. If they want to talk to you about something you get a start-of-turn notification to say that someone from that outfit wants to talk to you and show you a location in neutral territory and a date for you to be there. This is usually done several weeks ahead, so to speed things up you can just go find one of their people instead and choose “I hear you wanted to talk to me?” which accomplishes the same thing.
You can whittle down the crew in more subtle ways than killing them before you make an official move. If one of them happens to know a police officer on your payroll, you can ask the cop to get in touch with their federal agent contact. This organizes a raid on one of your rival’s operations and usually leads to one of them getting arrested.
“Oh, oh, fuckin’ tough guy. You gonna shoot me for mouthing off?”
“I wasn’t going to, but you kinda talked me into it.”
If you want to go to the mattresses (war), make sure you have crew with good guns and good fighting skills. Get at least two to the same corner as one of their crew, and attack. Having more than one person doing the attack should ensure your success.
Everyone who got an attack off loses all remaining Actions and Movement for that turn. Normally only one person can take whatever is in the dead person’s car, which is usually a weapon or two and some money, but sometimes they carry actual goods too.
If you kill the rival outfit’s boss, with other crew members still living, one of them will take over the outfit and become the new boss. The outfit will take their name. If the boss was the last person standing, the outfit is eradicated, but their territory won’t turn neutral until you’ve looted their safe house. The turn after the first person loots it, the territory is neutral and you can start expanding into it, should you so choose.
Even if you’ve killed them all, don’t leave the safe house unlooted for a long period of time! It’s safe to leave it a few turns, sure, but if you leave it a few months – maybe because you have a small crew and you need half of your people to deal with an election cycle from June to November while the other half deal with the normal logistics, so you figure you’ll come back to the looting later 👀 – you might find that the safe house is no longer abandoned and the outfit you thought was dead and buried has suddenly become hostile … because someone decided to take it over and revive it.
I’ve heard it claimed that if you kill the boss and loot the safe house in the same turn, the rest of the outfit is disbanded, but I’ve yet to try that. I’ve always found that someone else takes over until you kill the last member, but I’ve also never looked at the safe house after killing the boss, nor sent someone over to be on standby for looting as soon as the boss is down. Maybe that’s how you manage to eliminate a rival without gaining a vendetta against you?