Before we start, a quick explanation to what the options are and what they do:
| Buy/sell resources | Choose the type of item you want to buy/sell in the dropdown. |
| Storage pick up/drop off | Choose the type of item you want to pick up/drop off in the dropdown. |
| Ensure cash on hand | Cash only. Will top up a place until it has the specified cash amount, but will ignore anything above it. |
| Collect from or support a front | Cash only. You can’t specify an amount, it picks up or drops off as much as it needs to. |
| Repair your vehicle | Repairs your vehicle if it needs it. Requires enough cash in the vehicle to pay for repairs. |
(Select the business on the map instead of the dropdown, it’s much easier.)
| All | Picks up until the vehicle is full/drops off everything in the vehicle, sells (up to) everything in the vehicle, buys (up to) as much as the vehicle can fit, depending on how much there is available. |
| Quantity | Specify exactly how much you want to buy/sell/pick up/drop off. |
| All but | For a pick up, it leaves the specified amount in the building, For a drop off, it leaves the specified amount in the car. Doesn’t apply to buy/sell. |
| Until | Sell/buy/pick up resource until vehicle has specified amount, or drop off until the building has specified amount. |
You can use auto-routes to automate a whole host of things and make the game a lot less micromanage-y, but you can’t use it to interact with rivals or hooligans, pay off cops, interact with indebted gamblers, explore territory or open new fronts. You still need to do those manually.
Click the button in the right hand column that says Click to set up a new route. Start by assigning a driver to it. Get one of the ones where you can press the button to “Select”; the others are either already assigned to routes or they’re managing your operations. Why start with assigning a crew member? Because if you name the route and then assign a crew member, the name will reset.
Today, I’m in Brooklyn, New York, and I want to set up a route that buys Bottles, so I’ve picked a crew member in a small delivery truck, because they’ll be able to carry the most amount of bottles at the same time (60).
Buying routes
Add next step. The default is to Buy resources: Apple juice, but I want to start with picking up cash, so I’m changing this:
to this:
Because I’ve placed the map where I want to go, I can click the corner speakeasy I want to start from to set that as a location before changing the rest.
Why do it this way? Because if I change to pick up cash, it normally defaults to the safe house. This isn’t a big problem here, because the safe house is on an adjacent corner, but it gets very annoying when you’re ready to start clicking on the other side of the map and it moves the screen back to the safe house.
I’m going to change it to pick up cash until the vehicle has $3050. It gives the driver $3000 for buying bottles and an extra $50 to fix the car when needed. It also means that the next time the route begins, if there’s any money left in the car, the driver will only top up to make sure they have $3050.
What do these buttons do?
Highlight over them. The one on the left will save this step and bring us back to the list of stops. The next one (+) will save the step and give us the same screen we’re on now to make it easier for us to add more stops quickly. It keeps what you want to buy, which is very handy. The next one (X) is the cancel button, if you’ve changed your mind about this step. The trash can will remove this stop from the route. I’m going to use the + option here, because I know it will give me my speak at River Metal Co. as a starting point.
I want step 2 to be fixing the truck. This step will only trigger if the car needs fixing. If it doesn’t, the driver will drive by without using an action.
Now I can see all the places where I’m able to get a vehicle fixed. My speak on the right-most corner is hidden behind the wrench sign, but there are plenty of options for me to choose from.
Because I have an Upgraded Truck Repair Bay nearby, I’m going to use that, so I click on the location and save the step.
Swell! My driver now has money and a way to fix the truck so I won’t have to worry about taking them off the road when I get a notification that the truck needs servicing. It will happen automatically, so I can happily ignore the notification when it comes up.
We now need to send them out to buy bottles, so let’s Add Next Step and change the Apple Juice to Bottles. Now I can see all the places on the map that sell bottles. I want to focus on this section to start with:
It’s a bit south of the truck bay and the speak and should make a good circuit. I select the grocery store on the top left hand side, and I want to buy all the bottles they have.
If they have more than I can carry, I buy as many as I can (60) and leave the rest. Maybe they only have 45 available, then I buy 45 and move to the next one. Maybe they only have 10 this turn, then I buy 10 and move to the next. If they’re out of stock, it doesn’t use up an action, it moves to the next stop and so on, until it finds someone on the route with bottles in stock.
The checkbox next to the business name means that if your truck is full, the step is skipped. Instead of driving past it, it will ignore it completely, as if it wasn’t a part of the route. Keep it checked, because if your truck is full, you’ll want it to head straight for a drop-off point so they can unload and get back to buying.
I’m clicking the save and add (+) button now, so it knows I want to buy bottles and my last stop was Blue Valley Food Store.
As you add more steps, you’ll start to see a route forming. The route you see isn’t the route that will be driven, it’s a bird’s eye view, but that way you can see if it makes a good circuit or not. It automatically adds a line from the last stop on the list to the first (the corner speak).
I have set the route to buy bottles from three places nearby. Maybe it’s time to add a drop-off, just to make sure.
Now I see all the buildings I own, because they’re all options where I can choose to bring the bottles. I’m going for a pool hall. It’s a place I’m planning on turning into another truck repair bay. It only has 1250 ft³ space, but it’s centrally placed and will make a good distribution centre.
The route now has six stops, and it’s a start! If we want to, we can now tell our crew member to hop on it. The first button here allows you to start the route, meaning “Saint” Marie here will mosey on over to the corner speak (step 1) from wherever she is on the map, and start the route.
The second is useful if you need to stop the route from running. Maybe the distribution center is filled to the rafters and you need the distributor to make some space before the buyer can go back on the road.
A crew member on a stopped route can be used as normal, but unless you remove them from the route (third button) you won’t see them in the list of available drivers, so it’s harder to see where they are and how much movement or action they have left.
Let’s get back to buying bottles! It’s a repeat of the previous step. Buy bottles from a few places, then drop them off at the pool hall. In the end, we have a route of 16 steps, which buys bottles from 11 businesses and drops them off three times.
See all 16 steps
- River Metal Co. (Corner Speakeasy)
Pick up: until vehicle has $3050 - Schmidt Storage (Upgraded Truck Repair Bay)
Repair your vehicle - Blue Valley Food Store
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Gray Family Dairy
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Forest Farms Dairy
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Drop off: Bottles, as much as possible - Winter’s Variety Shop
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Yellow River Meat & Grocery
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Kovalev & Son
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Drop off: Bottles, as much as possible - Southern Storage
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Pellegrini Company
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Southern Market Italian Grocers
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Green Valley Market
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Park Creamery
Buy: Bottles, as much as possible - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Drop off: Bottles, as much as possible
If the truck is filled up at the first stop, it goes directly to the pool hall. If it fills up again at the first stop after the pool hall, it goes back. Next circuit, the same thing might happen but on the second step.
I could choose to expand this route further, but that might mean I need to change how much money is picked up in the beginning. I’ll start with this and see if I need more bottles.
And because I don’t want to have to set up the route again, I’m going to save the game before I forget.
Supplies distribution routes
It’s all well and good we have “Saint” Marie buying bottles, but we need to get those bottles out to the nearby operations who need them: a backroom winery, an amaretto still, a grappa production, a pot still (a.k.a. NY Moonshine) and a bottling operation. Bottling operations are thirsty.
Let’s see what we can turn “Delivery Route #29”, soon to be “Drop: Bottles 1”, into! So let’s click on the + on the person, assign ourselves a driver in a small delivery truck, and figure out where to start.
Lucky for us there’s a corner speak near the pool hall, so let’s go pick up some cash. Because the only thing this driver is going to use money for is to fix the truck, $50 should do.
I’m going to move straight to picking up bottles from the pool hall next. We’ll pick up as many [crates of] bottles as we can carry.
We’ll figure out where to fix the truck later.
Unfortunately it doesn’t just show you the operations that use bottles here, so we’ll have to pick the ones we know. Let’s start with grappa. It’s only a 1000 ft³ space, and every grappa ingredient uses a lot of space. Because it needs 38 bottles every 12 turns, I don’t want to necessarily drop all 60 bottles off at the same time. There are thirstier and quicker productions we need to stock up, so let’s settle for this:
That means the route will drop off enough bottles to ensure the production cycle can complete twice, so it should never run out of bottles, even if the bottle distribution lags behind.
Now, when creating this route the grappa production only has 13 bottles in store, and it wants 76. The 60 we’re adding means we’re going to be 3 bottles short, and won’t have any bottles left to drop off at the counterfeit winery. This is fine. Next time the circuit takes us back to the grappa production with a fully loaded truck, it will only drop off 3 before it can deliver the rest to the winery. It will balance itself out once you get it going, so don’t worry about it.
I want the winery to keep 144 bottles in store (72 bottles every 10 turns), enough for two production cycles. It currently has 140 bottles in store, so when the truck comes by on the second time around, it will only have to drop off 4.
Regardless, after the winery drop I want to go back to the pool hall to restock just to be on the safe side. We’ll set it to picking up “all”, even though that might only translate to 7 bottles. Just pick up as much as possible and then deliver them to the amaretto still.
Amaretto wants 54 bottles every 5 turns, so let’s see if we can get it up to cover three production cycles. There are currently 0 bottles in store there, so it’s going to take a few rounds to even out.
When an amaretto still completes its production, that will take nearly a full truck’s worth of bottles to replenish, so let’s have it go back to the pool hall again to fill up.
The pot still uses 32 bottles every five turns to make Moonshine, so let’s have enough bottles to cover three cycles here as well. It currently has 53 in stock.
Then, finally, we’ll drop whatever’s left over at the bottling plant. If it’s 60 bottles, that’s cool. If it’s less, that’s cool too, as long as it drops stuff off – and it will drop off a minimum of 28 bottles every circuit, so that should keep it nicely topped up. It’s currently got 154 in store, but it uses 90 bottles every four turns, so it gets through them.
But wait! What about the truck repair? Let’s look at the map and see which one’s best to add in. It looks like they’re all a little out of the way, but the best option is still our friends at Schmidt Storage, our upgraded truck repair bay. I can fit that in between the pot still and the bottling plant.
To move the new stop from step 11 to step 10, I can either type “10” in the box where it says 11 and press enter:
or I can use the ⬆️ on Schmidt Storage or ⬇️ on Lake’s Soda Fountain to get the steps where I want them to be. As long as you have a repair stop on the route, it doesn’t matter where you put it in the list. Just do it in a place that doesn’t require a big detour so you don’t waste movement points.
Tip: If you can’t see the route (it becomes visible after 2-3 stops), use ⬆️ or ⬇️ on one of the steps and you’ll see it again. Just make sure you put the stop back in the correct order!
If I make the pool hall into a truck repair bay, I can click on the “Repair your vehicle” step and choose the new location, and then move it in the list to where it makes more sense – probably at step 2, because it will then repair the truck before picking up the first load of bottles.
But hey, that’s it! We now have a route that will buy bottles for us for these five operations, and another that will distribute them to where they need to go.
See all 10 steps
- Jesse’s Fruit Co. (Corner Speakeasy)
Pick up: until vehicle has $50 - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Pick up: Bottles, as much as possible - Green Cone (Grappa Production)
Drop off: Bottles, until location has 76 cases - Hughes’s Irish Tea Store (Backroom Winery)
Drop off: Bottles, until location has 144 cases - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Pick up: Bottles, as much as possible - Prairie Hardware Supply (Amaretto Still)
Drop off: Bottles, until location has 162 cases - Local Pool Hall (spare building)
Pick up: Bottles, as much as possible - Eastern Market American Grocers (Expanded Pot Still)
Drop off: Bottles, until location has 96 cases - Schmidt Storage (Upgraded Truck Repair Bay)
Repair your vehicle - Lake’s Soda Fountain (Bottling Operation)
Drop off: Bottles, as much as possible
This route doesn’t have a lot of steps to it, so it should get the operations stocked up to full in a reasonable amount of time, especially as the crew member assigned to this route has 6 AP and 18 MP.
Should we start the distribution route straight away? Probably not. We need to give “Saint” Marie a chance to buy some bottles and put them into the pool hall first, or there will be nothing for “Big” to pick up and distribute! So let’s save the game again, and leave this route on STOPPED for a few turns.
Now you know the basics of how routes work and should be able to adapt them to whatever you need for your outfit. Every buying and distribution route works off the same principles, but crocks require less money to be kept in the car, because they’re cheaper. We’ll briefly discuss other options as well so you feel confident in setting up other kind of routes as well.
➡️ See detailed examples of different types of auto-routes
Selling routes
Similar to buying routes, except you pick up goods from your operations and choose which businesses to sell them to. Small delivery trucks will allow you to sell up to 120 crocks or 60 bottles, and pickup trucks up to 90 crocks or 45 bottles.
You don’t need to pick up any money at the start, just put the repair stop near the end of the route, so you have the money from selling goods to pay for repairs.
Finish the route by dropping off all the cash at a point that’s convenient for you. I usually choose a nearby speakeasy or the safe house. That the latter has money is especially important if you have dead crew members whose families you pay a stipend to every turn.
Speakeasy stock-up routes
This is basically the same as the supply distribution route above, except you pick up goods you’ve made and drive it to a speakeasy. You can either avoid filling up the speaks by limiting how much you drop off each circuit, or how long the circuit is.
See how much they sell of each type of alcohol per round and make adjustments according to that. You could drop 30 of each kind of T1 alcohol every time you go past, but that’s not the rate they’re sold at. It’s better to adjust accordingly, so you’re not constantly understocked on homemade beer and wildly overstocked on moonshine, for instance.
T2-T4 are slightly easier to predict, because as long as you have enough of each of them, they do sell at a consistent rate depending on their type, e.g. all T2 sell at the same rate, all T3 at the same rate, and so on.
Front pick-up routes
As soon as I have a crew member I can spare, and enough fronts to warrant automating the process, I create a route to pick up cash from fronts. Huge time-saver! The crew member is only going to be carrying cash, so this is where you put all the two-door passenger cars to work when you’ve started to get a few trucks.
I usually put a billy club on the crew members doing this, just in case they happen to encounter someone who decides to get uppity. At least then they have a way of defending themselves if they get attacked, and if their weapon gets confiscated in an arrest, you probably have plenty more billy clubs available anyway, whereas losing a Winchester rifle or a Tommy gun is inconvenient.
Unless you know the first few fronts are always going to be profitable, start by picking up some cash, maybe $250 or so, to cover any losses and so you can afford to fix the car when you need to. Put in a repair stop somewhere where it’s convenient.
If I start the route by picking up money, I normally end it by dropping off all cash at the same place. If I start off without picking up money (because I know the route will pay for itself as well as any car repairs), I drop off “all but $200” at a speakeasy (or the safe house) when I happen to pass it. If I don’t have a nearby speak, but I have some other kind of operation or spare building in the area and want to have a source of income there, I drop it off there.
You don’t want to keep accruing money in the car. Partly because it’s annoying to lose it in the unlikely event of them getting arrested or killed, but mostly because if you drop it off somewhere you can actually use it to buy stuff, or to put on people who go out and buy things for you.
The only option you use for this type of route is Collect from or support a front. It will automatically pick up all the money waiting for you, or drop off the amount they need to not get sore over running at a deficit.
Unlike all the other types of routes, front routes have a deadline to stick to. You need them to have made a full circuit in about a month’s time. Not because there is money to be picked up once a month, but because any fronts that run on a deficit need to be given money once a month or they will shut down and you lose territory. Some fronts aren’t profitable but you still need them where they are, and some are only temporarily not profitable while they’re working on expanding. Either way, they need someone to regularly stop by and give them money.
Depending on your crew’s MP/AP, it should probably keep to 20-25 steps at a maximum. You’ll notice if a front route runs smoothly or not. If you need to remove steps, you can always do so. I have to re-work front routes now and then as I add more territory.
Fronts that run on ±$0, perhaps because you’ve only just opened them and they haven’t had a chance to expand yet, need to be visited manually once a month or they will also shut down. Auto-routes don’t interact with them, because there’s no money to pick up or drop off, which means if you don’t go there manually to “pick up” the $0 once a month, they end up feeling ignored and shut down. So you need to remember to visit them manually. Hopefully only for a short while. As soon as you start to expand territory from them and they end up with a deficit, or have businesses paying them extortion money so they’re in profit, the auto-route will start visiting them properly.
Bottle rack routes
Picking them up can be done as part of picking up money from fronts, or you can have a separate route that only makes bottle rack pick-ups. You only need a two-door passenger car, because the bottles are automatically delivered to your safe house, not the car. All you need for the route to run smoothly is to pick up a little money to cover any car repairs.
To move the small bottles from your safe house to where they need to go, all you need is a normal supply distribution route (see above).
Gambling top-up routes
If you want to ensure your gambling operations always have money, you can set up a route for that. Put someone in a two-door passenger car, as you’re only carrying money. Like the fronts, I normally have them carry a billy club for protection.
Pick up a few thousand $ from a speakeasy, just in case you really do need to top them up.
Choose “Storage drop off” and “Cash” (although “Ensure cash on hand” would also work for this) and pick your first gambling house. How much money do they need to have on hand in order to run? Aim for about $1000-1500 above it as a buffer, so if it goes over by $200 it will still function until the route has had a chance to stop by.
In this case, required cash on hand is $5000, so I’m setting the first stop to drop off cash until the location has $6000.
If the place has more than $6000, it will ignore this step. If it has less, it will top it up.
You can either choose to ignore any profits above this, perhaps you want an easy way to save money if you want to expand, then set the next stop to be another cash drop. If, instead, you want the excess to be collected, either because you want the money elsewhere or you want to avoid losing money in a potential raid, your next step will be a storage pick up from the same location as the drop off:
Picking up “all but $6000” means that your driver will pick up anything above the $6000 mark. It’s sitting on $7234? It will pick up the $1234 surplus.
If you had to drop off money to make $6000 in the previous stop, it will ignore this step and move to the next.
Put in a repair stop somewhere along the route, and finish off by dropping off all the money in the same place where the route starts.