“We been on the road for 18 hours. I need a bath, some chow; then you and me sit down, and we talk about who dies, eh?”
Automated delivery routes can make your life considerably easier. It cuts down on micromanagement a lot when you get it right!
➡️ See some examples of auto-routes here!
You can set up an automated route for pick-ups and drop-offs or buying and selling and assign one of your drivers to it. That crew member is then taken off your hands and will follow the route and do nothing else until you tell them to stop. It means they’re not free to do anything else, and since you’re not in control of them, they’re prone to get caught by unbribed cops – so make sure the precincts through which your routes are set up are in your pocket.
How quickly a driver can complete an automated route depends on how much Movement and how many Actions they have per turn. You don’t want someone with 3 Action points per turn in charge of a 30-stop route or it will take them at least 10 turns to do one circuit, which is a problem if you’ve told them to go support your fronts. Fortunately, auto-route crew tend to gain XP fairly quickly, so it’s not generally a problem assigning a rookie, because they’ll soon level up anyway.
If you’re later in the game and can recruit corner hooligans and have them level up a few times in their first turn, that’s useful, especially as they come with a car, and for money routes you don’t need more than a two-seater anyway.
If the route involves a crew member buying supplies and the businesses have run out, the route will run on empty and be pointless. To avoid this, add more stops of buying and dropping off to allow businesses time to restock between visits, so it takes a few turns before you’re back to buy more.
An automated route can be used for buying and selling goods, moving goods between buildings (e.g. picking up booze from one place and dropping it off at a speak), collecting extortion money from fronts, or making sure your safe house or gambling operations always have money on hand.
At the time of writing I’m using auto routes for buying supplies and dropping at a warehouse, distributing supplies from the warehouse to operations, distributing alcohol from operations to speaks, supporting fronts, making sure gambling houses have enough money and picking up any surplus, moving passively produced items from buildings to a warehouse, and moving some money from speaks to the safe house. And, depending on the map, a route to pick up bottle returns or sell cigarettes.
Rounds tend to go a lot quicker when you can keep a smaller crew on hand to do your manual bidding, while a bunch of others make sure the rest runs smoothly in the background!
The best strategy is to add and expand on routes as you add and expand backroom operations and territory. Adding them in long after the fact is definitely more of a headache and it can feel really overwhelming to even know where to start.
Setting up a new route
To set up an automated route, look in the list on the right hand side of the screen. Further instructions on what to do are found when setting up a route, and if you’ve done the tutorial, you will know the basics already. If not, they are pretty self-explanatory. Your action options are:
- Buy/sell resources: e.g. buy bottles from or sell booze to a business
- Storage pick up/drop off: e.g. pick up booze from a factory, drop it off at a speak
- Ensure cash on hand: make sure the place has at least $x in store
- Collect from or support a front: will pick up monthly extortion envelopes, or pay the difference if there’s a deficit (they will ignore any front with a monthly income of $0, so beware!)
- Collect at a bottle return: picks up small bottles from your bottle return fronts in Pittsburgh/Detroit
- Repair your vehicle: pay to have your vehicle fixed
All actions can be used in combination on the same route, should you want to. You could, for instance, pick up money from a front, go buy crocks, drop them off at your homemade beer operation and pick up some finished homemade beer, sell 10 beer to a business, repair your vehicle, make sure a gambling house has at least $5000 on hand, and drop the rest of the beer off at a speak if you wanted to. Rinse and repeat! But it’s easier to manage individual parts if you split it up more.
Remember to schedule a visit to a car mechanic on every route (it’s skipped if no repairs are needed) to make sure the car doesn’t fall apart when you’re not looking, and to drop money off in one of your buildings so your crew members don’t end up driving around with a fortune. I like to drop off money either to the safe house or the nearest speakeasy on the route.
Make sure to always have some cash in the car for car repairs and/or any fronts that are in negative, so always keep some money on them, even if they’re just moving stuff you own from point A to point B.
For optimum Movement use, make sure your routes are “circular”, i.e. move from point A to point B to point C in order, making a circuit, and not zigzag back and forth from A to F to B to Y. You can always reorder stops on a route, and if you need to add new stops you can push them up the route order to slot in on the way.
You can re-order the list by either using the up/down arrows, or by entering a different number in the number box on the left and then press the enter/return key.
If you need to remove a stop, you can either turn it off temporarily (it will be skipped), or you can delete it from the route order.
Keepin’ gambling joints in the green
I thought “ensure cash on hand” meant “if $ is below $X, top it up to $X. If $ is above $X, pick up surplus” but that’s not what it does. It only drops off money if there’s a deficit. If there’s a surplus it leaves the money in place and moves on to the next. It’s useful if you want to allow the gambling house to build up money so you don’t have to move money to it when you want to upgrade it or build a new feature.
So how do you get the auto route to pick up the surplus cash?
Either use “ensure cash on hand” or “storage drop off” and specify the amount, e.g. “until $5000”, followed by a “storage pick up” action set to “all but $5000”. This means if there’s more than $5000 in store, it picks up anything above $5000. If there’s less than $5000, it tops up the sum to $5000 and doesn’t pick anything up.
Movin’ along the supply chain
Gettin’ tired of having to go around and buy crocks or bottles or apples all the time? Auto route it! When I asked for best strategies for this, the answer was to use different crew members to separate buying and distribution.
One crew member (or several) does a route buying something and drops it all off at one location, from which another crew member (or several) picks it up and distributes it to where it’s needed. That way you have more control in case you need to temporarily pause a route. “I have a stack of 2000 small bottles and I’m running out of space in my warehouse, let’s pause the bottle buying for a few rounds.”
Biggest tip is to deliver supplies by using “until X”, like “drop off until location has 96 small bottles” – it means an operation using 48 small bottles per production cycle shouldn’t run out between visits, and you’ll never have the problem where you suddenly can’t complete a production cycle because the building is full.