Your people: Friends of ours

You’re going to need a crew to help you run things because you can’t be everywhere at once.

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.”

Crew

Finding people to work for you is easy. Any business with a Favor and a at the bottom has someone in mind for you, so you can go to them and see who they know, and what their traits are. Don’t like what you see? You can decline to hire them, not a problem.

Hiring someone usually makes the business owner happy, but you also need to make yourself happy. Not much use hiring some lazy bum who’s going to cost you more and have one less action per turn, right?

Each crew member will cost you around $17-$23 per turn in salary (depending on their traits), which is taken from any available building in which you keep cash.

A crew member needs to be assigned to a vehicle or a building so they can earn their keep. An unassigned crew member will still cost you money each turn, but won’t be able to do anything.

Managers are mentioned more in detail in other sections relating to making things or alcohol, speakeasies and gambling – and in the leveling up section. Captains and their schemes have their own sections too.

The people in cars we’ll call drivers to make things easier, but they are officially known as muscle. These are the people who move around the map doing your bidding. You probably want a good spread of traits for these people, as they’re the ones who are out there, on the road, expanding your territory, buying things, picking up protection money, fighting, and so on. Some traits will offer certain benefits, other traits offer other benefits, so they shouldn’t all have exactly the same traits.

Recruiting someone won’t automatically mean your outfit now has the skill to e.g. make moonshine. No one comes with skills preloaded. All skills have to be learned by completing missions.

Finding the right person

If you want a crew member with a specific trait, you don’t have to move around the map and check every single business to find the right person. Go to “Crew List” under Report dialogs (top left on the screen, third icon from the left). Can take a little while to load if you have a large outfit, but once it does you see a list of everyone on your payroll – and people looking to join you.

Untick “Current crew” (and “Past crew”, if applicable) and check the drop-down menu for the trait you want, e.g. Organized. It will show you every available person with that trait (if there are any), and clicking on them will show you some info about them, including their other skills. Clicking on the map marker symbol will show you where on the map you need to go to recruit them.

“Most of the fellas in this business get their retirement papers from the Grim Reaper.”

Injuries

If a crew member of yours gets injured, take them to one of your backroom operations/buildings (or fronts, at least in early game) to lick their wounds. They’ll be out of commission until they’ve healed back up to full.

A crew member who is too injured (less than 50% health) won’t be able to perform any other actions other than to drive, i.e. can’t talk to businesses, trade, attack, and so on, so the best you can do is to put them somewhere to heal up.

Death

If a crew member dies, you lose not only the person but also their car and whatever they happened to be carrying at the time – money, weapons, goods … It’s inconvenient.

If a crew member did get their retirement papers from the Grim Reaper you have the choice to keep paying their family as a way to make it up to them. The money will come out of your safe house specifically, so make sure it always has a good amount of cash in it.