New game strategy

➡️ tl;dr

You’re the new kid in town, huh? Let’s run you through a few steps to get your new empire up and running as smoothly as possible.

How easy a game is depends on the seed you’ve got. Some are more difficult than others, and there’s no real way of knowing which one’s “good” or “bad” beforehand. If you don’t like where you’re starting out, quit to main menu and try again with a different seed number.

Priority one is to raise enough money to build your first back room operation. You usually start with two skills. Which operation you should choose out of those two depends on which ingredients are readily available on the map. First you will need to explore the map to discover this.

What does your safe house passively produce? If it’s something you can use to make a T1 (Tier 1 = lowest level) alcohol you already have the skill for, that’s amazing. (A safe house that gives a steady supply of Malt Syrup to fuel a Home Brew Operation? Jackpot!)

All T1 alcohol operations require Stoneware Crocks, so see where you can buy those. Be on the lookout for any of these that you already have the skill for:

What you want to make	What you need
Brick Wine	Grape Concentrate
Hard Cider	Apple Juice
Homemade Beer	Malt Syrup
Moonshine	Neutral Alcohol1

1. Moonshine can have different recipes that require ingredients other than Neutral Alcohol (or even crocks) if you’re on one of the maps from DLC (or Irish with The Irish Outfit), but Neutral Alcohol is the base game recipe. ↩︎

Your first front

Another way of raising funds is through extortion. For this you need to create your first front.

On your starting corner, choose a business with a Favor. As long as the business owner isn’t Religious, Upright or Nervous, you can ask them to open up a front for you. Tell the front to start expanding your territory. It will cost you a small fee.

Talk to the other business(es) on your starting corner and tell them to get in line. Each business you extort adds $20 to the total the front brings in each month. Yes, some of them get real sore about it, but any negative relationship goes away after some time, so don’t worry about it. Unless you’ve killed one of their relatives, they don’t hold a grudge for long. (Later on you’ll be able to pay money to instantly increase your relationship level as well.)

When you get to July 1920, you’ll get your first extortion money rolling in. Collect it by visiting your front.

As the territory expands to the (up to) four corners adjacent to the front, you can extort more businesses within that territory and get more money. In the below example, the dairy became a front, and the furniture store was extorted. The first expansion cost -$8, but with one extorted business you’d be able to pick up $12 every month. It’s not much, but every little helps.

This particular boss started with the Protection Rackets skill, so in July he actually collected $17, not $12. After the first expansion (right) finished, he picked up a total of $82. After the second (below), $122. After the third and final expansion (left), $147. It’s income generated once a month without having to do anything other than pick up the money at the beginning of each month, so it’s a good way of getting money rolling in.

Dump the money in the safe house so you don’t lose it if you’re arrested. To build an operation the money needs to be in the building anyway, and by putting the extortion cash there you can see how much you have accrued.

Level up

Go for whichever option you think is most fitting for your boss. I like to start with Well-Known Brawler to make them a bit more hardy in a fight, because if your boss dies it’s game over, but adding more action points or movement points is never wrong.

Sell some alcohol

Your safe house comes with a number of T1 crocks for you to sell to raise some cash while you go exploring. Pack a few into your car, but don’t fill the car up. (You don’t want to risk losing them, and all the money you’re carrying, if you get arrested.)

If you find someone to buy the alcohol, sell a few. Don’t sell them all in one go in case you find more people who want them, because you have a limited supply and you don’t want to have to go back to the safe house to restock every turn.

Click on a business. That’s all you need to do to find out what they’re selling/buying. If all you can see when you mouseover the business is “?” it means you haven’t discovered that resource yet, or they don’t know you well enough to want to buy from you. That’s why you need some introductions. Look for businesses with the icon. Don’t be afraid of using up some Favors for this. You can get more later.

Do some missions

Pick up any missions you come across. Some might be to deliver some booze. Sure, giving them 10 crocks might not give you any cash, but you get a Favor, which is useful too. Missions can bring in more Favors, money, or ingredients – or valuable skills you need to build or improve operations. In some cases you can even get a building!

Some of the skill missions might be really expensive to complete – for instance, Expansive Venues always shows up surprisingly early, and it costs $5000 to complete, and maybe you don’t even have a bootlegging operation yet. Pick up the mission so you have it, but save your money and leave that one alone for now. It won’t be relevant for literal years in-game (it unlocks the highest level speakeasy upgrade, but you need to have unlocked a bunch of other things first), so you can safely leave it alone and focus on more immediately relevant missions.

Sometimes you find a repeatable mission you can keep doing in order to get some materials you need. In the game where these examples are from, I found someone who was willing to set us up with a repeatable mission where I gave him 18 Small Barrels and he gave me 18 Grape Concentrate in return, which is why I decided I was going to make Brick Wine. Every time I needed more Grape Concentrate, I just completed handing in 18 Small Barrels.

If you’re lucky, a business might offer you some money ($750) to help you find your feet. I don’t know if this is map specific, because in some games I’ve been offered it, in others not. In this case, I did and it gave me enough to finally build a Backroom Wine Operation. Don’t worry – it’s phrased as them giving you a loan, but you never have to pay it back.

Build!

As soon as you have enough money for your chosen operation, build it, and go buy some ingredients so it can start production as soon as it comes online. You will need to keep selling what you produce to raise more money for your outfit.

Hire a manager

Why should your operation have a manager? Because as they level up, they make the operation produce more things for the same number of ingredients. More things to sell, more money to make!

If you have at least five corners, you can support a second crew member.

Look at the Crew List (look at the icons on the top left of the screen, click the third one from the left), and filter it for people with the Hardworking trait. (Hardworking and Organized usually appear together.) A Hardworking and Organized manager can (usually) have three expansions instead of two, which will give bonuses later. If the list is blank, explore the map more until the list isn’t blank.

Today we’re in luck. There is one such person available at the moment. If we press the pin next to his name we can see who we need to go and talk to in order to hire him.

Once Jarosław is hired and assigned to the building, adding the Production Tracking expansion (because it’s cheap) gives extra 4 Brick Wine per production cycle.

Can you run an operation without a manager? Yes, but you won’t be able to add expansions to improve it. Can you run an operation with a manager who isn’t Hardworking? Yes, but you’ll only get two expansion slots, and Production Tracking won’t be available, so you’ll have to pay a lot more if you want the same 10% output bonus. All operation managers you hire should ideally be Hardworking and Organized.

Level up the manager

You will have three different options when it’s time for the manager to level up the first time: Production Manager, Distillation: Booze Manufacture, and one related to whatever you’re producing, in this case Winemaking: Brick Wine.

Always start with the one that gives you increased output – Winemaking: Brick Wine in this case. At level 5 this gives an extra 66 Brick Wine every time the production cycle completes. The reason is that once you pick Distillation: Booze Manufacture, you won’t be able to pick the increased output option, but you will be able to pick Distillation: BM once you’ve maxed out the output one.

The other reason for choosing increased output over decreased time is that you want to make as much booze as you can, and you don’t want to get bogged down right at the beginning by having to keep on top of an operation that maybe requires 100 crocks every single turn. Supplies cost money, and you don’t have a big enough crew – or territory! – to keep it stocked up right now.

By focusing on getting more out of the same amount of ingredients, you save money and make more booze ( = more money) at the same time, and you don’t have to get stressed about suppliers not having restocked when you need to buy more.

Keep expanding

Look at the businesses on the edge of your territory. Is there space to expand in, preferably, three directions from there? If there’s a business with a Favor and a relationship score of at least 15, you should be able to ask them to become a front. It will only cost you 1 Favor, so it’s a good way of expanding when you’re low on cash.

Because you’re already extorting any other businesses on that corner, you need to expand the territory before the new front can start earning money. You can’t extort the same business into paying two different fronts. This means you’ll need to pay the new front’s expenses until they’ve expanded into an adjacent corner and you’ve got at least one business paying them for protection.

You can also pay a business outside of your current territory to open a front, but that costs money, and at the beginning of the game that’s money you probably don’t really have. But if you do, go for it. Preferably look at corners that either have a bunch of businesses on them, and/or that can expand in four different directions adjacent to the front (like a + pattern with the front in the middle) to get best value for money.

Another reason to keep expanding is that the more corners you have, the more crew members you can have. Would be nice to have more than one person exploring the map, wouldn’t it?

Hire more people

The cheapest way is to buy a car from a Car Dealership and hire someone by using a Favor with a business owner. You can either look at the Crew List and headhunt someone with a specific trait (like with the manager above), or you can pick someone at random.

Assign the new crew member to a car and now you have two people who can sell goods, buy ingredients, pick up money from fronts, do missions, and so on.

A more expensive way ($700-800) is to hire a corner hooligan, but on the plus side they come with a two-door passenger car and probably already have enough XP to level up at least once. Plus it always amuses me when they’ve attacked you and you turn around to say “hey, I could use someone like you” and they get sent to your safe house to heal up from the damage you inflicted on them.

Find a second building

If you get a mission that grants you a free building (e.g. Rental Assistance), that’s great. If not, as soon as you have enough money to buy a second building (speak to anyone with the symbol), make that investment.

However you gain a second building doesn’t matter, but your second building should be turned into a Backroom Bootlegging Operation, so ideally look for something bigger than 1000 ft³. BBOs don’t sell a lot each turn, but it means you can put some of your homemade booze in there and sell it to thirsty customers for double the price of what you sell it for to businesses. In this case, Brick Wine sells for $15 to businesses, $30 in any kind of speakeasy.

Putting your booze into the bootlegging op not only means you earn more than what you’d get from driving around, it also means you don’t have to keep driving around just to find people who want to buy your booze. You can keep exploring and open new fronts instead.

Upgrade the BBO to an Improved Bootlegger, which gives you some crocks in return (a good money saver), and you’ll eventually be able to upgrade it to an Expanded Bootlegger. Hold off on the Expanded upgrade until you actually have a plan – or a spare building – for a second booze operation, because the Expanded Bootlegger sells two different types of booze, and you don’t want to lock yourself in before you know what you’ll be making.

Once you’ve got an Expanded Bootlegger going, you’ll get the mission that allows you to upgrade the Bootlegger to a Corner Speakeasy, which sells all four types of T1 alcohol, plus cigarettes and a T2 alcohol. Then you can really start to earn money.

Beyond this first building purchase, maybe the second depending on price, it’s better to hope for missions that give you buildings, and eventually look at extorting gamblers for buildings, because buying buildings becomes unaffordable very quickly.

Automating routes

When you have a crew member in a car that you can spare, and have enough fronts to really warrant automation (if you only have two, there’s not much point, but if you have maybe 8-10, it’s about time), you can start creating an automated route to pick up money from fronts. That way you won’t have to worry about collecting money every month.

Once you get a bigger truck, you can create another route to move that Brick Wine from the winery to the bootlegger/speakeasy, so you won’t have to worry about that either.

Basically, create routes for automation as and when you get to a point where you have the crew spaces and vehicles to be able to so, and it will free you up to do other things.

Keep adding more routes as and when your organization needs it. Adding them as you go along will help minimize the time it takes to play a turn, plus it’s much more of a headache to set up after the fact.

Gambling

When should you get your first gambling operation? When you have enough money to spare. You’ll need a minimum of $1500 (slightly less in Atlantic City) for the smallest one, a Gambling Den. Hire a manager (look for Hardworking/Organized or Intelligent) and assign them to the building. You’ll then need to go there and give them money to build features.

For the basic two features, which don’t require a minimum of $1000 to learn the skill (like Card Games), you’ll need at least $3000 in spare cash. $1000 each for the features, plus $500 each for the required cash in hand, preferably at least $200 more to cover any eventualities.

So, if you have a minimum of $5000 to spare, go build a gambling house. Once you can afford to get the Card Games skill, add the Card Games feature, because from now on extorting gamblers is going to be your ticket to getting more buildings to expand your operations.

In conclusion …

We’ve covered the basics. Now it’s regular game play. Keep doing missions to learn new skills, get more buildings, build new back room operations, explore more territory, advance deeper into the seedy underbelly of Prohibition.

This is where this little tutorial ends. To recap, your starting priorities are:

1. Add fronts and extort businesses for cash and expand territory to allow more crew members and more cash.
2. Build your first operation based on ingredients available nearby.
3. Build a bootlegger as soon as you have a second building to keep money coming in while you do other things.
4. Add auto-routes as and when appropriate.
5. Bribe a cop and get a gambling house when you can afford it.
6. Profit!

Happy racketeering!