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| Front not currently expanding territory (solid white line, blue envelope, white squares) | Front currently expanding territory (blue/white dashed line, blue flag, white squares) | Front that can’t expand territory any further (gray dashed lines, blue squares and envelope) |
To open a new front you need a business with a Favor and relationship of at least 15, although sometimes 10 is enough. They’ll agree to it – for a fee, of course (the cost scales with the size of your outfit) – unless the business owner is either Religious or Upright, in which case it’s an offer they can and will refuse. Try someone else on that corner instead … if there is one. Sending a crew member who’s Religious or Upright won’t convince them, even though the game seems to imply that’s the case. Nervous business owners will only open fronts in new territory, and cost ca 20% more.
Bottle return racks
In Detroit and Pittsburgh fronts can also function as a Bottle Return Rack, which is very useful once you have an operation that requires small bottles. You get 20 bottles (per return rack) every six weeks delivered to a building of your choice if you pick them up manually – using automated routes for pick-up will deliver them to your safe house.
Protection money
If the relationship is above 15, they’re usually happy to comply. Others will comply begrudgingly, and your relationship level will take a hit. Yet others will need … convincing. (Aggressive crew members are usually more persuasive.) So you smash up their business – that’ll show ‘em who’s the boss around here! Go back next turn and try again if that didn’t make them comply. (Doing it again same turn, even with a different crew member, has no effect.)
Some cave on the second attempt, others not until the fourth, but they will cave eventually. Some refuse 3-4 times before complying. And yeah, they won’t like you after that, but a negative relationship can be improved with money, specifically the missions Local Trouble (-$500), and Building Trust (-$750). You will get either or one after the other, and hopefully after that your relationship score will be in the positive. If you get one after the other, just make sure to complete them during different turns or you might not get the expected relationship boost. Sometimes you do both and still don’t get a positive relationship score, but it is what it is.
Protection money on automated routes
Note that fronts that have no businesses paying them protection money (yet), or haven’t started expanding into an adjacent corner, will generate an income of $0. Fronts like these are ignored by automated routes until the turnover is either above or below $0, so be aware of this if your open-new-fronts phase goes into a new month.
You will have to go there to manually “collect” that $0 (yes, really) until you start expanding or get another business to pay them for your protection. If you leave it on auto and don’t visit it manually for two months it will shut down, and you’ll most likely lose the territory. Yes, even though it was on an automated route from the very beginning and you thought that would be enough. Learned this the hard way! A front that loses money will get “support” from your automated route, and one that earns money will get that money collected, but a front that loses or earns nothing? Nothing for the auto route to do, apparently.
What happens if you forget to add a front to an automated route, but it’s earning money? Good news: it keeps earning money for you until you go pick it up manually or add it to an auto route!
In the window that lists all the income and outgoings from fronts I spotted two that had a suspiciously high income compared to every other front. I wondered why that was. Were there loads of businesses in that area? No, I had just forgotten to add them to the local auto route when I set them up as fronts, so they had been quietly collecting money for a few months. They weren’t going to complain, after all, they get a cut of the income, so why should they worry about you being too busy to do your collections?
“This is my neighborhood. You and your friends should show me some respect. You should let me wet my beak a little. I hear you and your friends cleared $600 each. Give me $200 each, for your own protection. And I’ll forget the insult.”
Expanding territory
If it’s on the edge of the map, that counts as unavailable, so you won’t have to pay for a dud corner. It will also skip adjacent corners that belong to a different outfit or a hooligan. It will be listed as “available to expand into” if you look at the Fronts window, but you can’t actually expand into it because it’s occupied by someone else.
Every expansion will cost you anywhere between $6-$15 depending on the traits of both your crew member and the business owner, but $10 is pretty standard. This amount is deducted from the money you collect from the front every month.
Expanding to a corner with no businesses will mean the corner will cost you money but not bring in any in return. If you only have the front on a corner, expanding will mean you have to pay the front, at least until you’ve added a corner with more businesses to extort to make sure the front doesn’t run at a deficit.
Fronts that run at a deficit and that aren’t visited by anyone for two months will feel neglected and shut down. You may lose the whole corner and any adjacent ones attached to it!
“I like the stink of the streets. It cleans out my lungs.”
Each expansion will take around 3-6 turns to complete, and while any front is working on expanding your territory you can’t open any new fronts. To save yourself some frustration, spend a few turns opening new fronts, followed by triggering all of them to expand in one go. There is no limit to how many fronts you can open up at the same time. You can open as many fronts at the same time as you want and/or can afford. You’re only limited by a lack of money, Favors, relationship levels, business owner traits, and a lack of businesses on corners you want. Nothing else.
The devil is very much in the detail here: “you can’t open a front while another is expanding” the game says, so make sure you don’t tell a new front to expand as soon as you’ve opened it. Skip that part. Open the front, move on to the next business you want as a front, then the next, and the next, and so on. When they’re all opened, expand them all at the same time. When they’re all finished doing their first expansion (they don’t all complete in the same turn necessarily) you can open new fronts again, or you can wait until they’re all fully expanded.
Expanding territory for “free”
There is a trick to expanding territory for free, which is especially useful at the beginning of the game when your funds are the most limited, or to gain territory in awkward places. A business in your territory which is already paying you protection money can be turned into a front at the cost of a Favor alone.
Sure, you can only expand that corner up to three times instead of four, and removes one business paying the “parent” front protection money, but you’ve also opened a new front for $0. Religious or Upright people will still refuse you, but so will someone who’s Nervous – even though they will happily open a front for you for some extra cash in neutral territory.
If one of those “converted” fronts shuts down (maybe a meddling rival stuck their nose where it didn’t belong) the shut down front will revert to its old self – being an extorted business to its “parent” front. You should be able to convince them to become a front again if you so choose.
A front could just be for Christmas
You can open fronts “temporarily” in order to add an awkward corner into your territory. You’ll have to keep paying out for it every month, even when it’s been fully expanded, and keep paying for it for at least a few months.
Once enough time has passed, you can close the front but the territory should stay. This is why you need to let it run for a few months to ensure you don’t lose the territory when you close down the front, because your relationship with that ex-front will take a hit. If it takes too much of a hit, you’ll lose the territory. If you have a high relationship level, it will be dented, but the relationship should still be in the positive.
Shuffling fronts around
If you have a lot of fronts with overlapping territories you might want to eventually look into closing down a few and change the front businesses are paying their protection money to to streamline your operations.
It gives fewer fronts you need to make stops at every month, and means the ones that are left will bring in more money, as more businesses are paying them. See the example below:
Yellow = fronts.
Cyan = extorted businesses, and which front they’re paying.
A is the parent/original front.
B was an extorted business under A turned into a front. It had the ones marked (B) paying it money. (There was no point in expanding to the north because it was a dead end with no businesses. It could only expand south.)
C was an extorted business under B turned into a front. It’s expanded south, and is currently working on expanding west.
Since B was kind of pointless after I managed to get C, the corner I actually wanted, I closed down the B front and let it revert back to paying A protection money. I spoke to the business previously paying B protection money to get them back under my protection, and they’re now paying C instead.
Fronts under threat
If you get a notification to say a rival is thinking about attacking one of your fronts. Click the notification to see which front/corner it is. All you have to do to prevent the front from being shut down is to place a crew member with a weapon on that corner. You have a few turns to get people into place, and you should be able to spot the person approaching before they arrive.
When the rival reaches your front, at the start of that turn you’ll get a notification to either say your front was protected from subversion, or that a rival has forced your front to shut down. (You may or may not lose territory if the latter is the case.) It all depends on if you put a crew member on the corner before the rival got there.
If you’re not currently at war, there’s unlikely to be any bloodshed, so one person should be enough to protect the front.
If you are currently at war with the attacking outfit, put more than one crew member on the corner before they get there. If your rival sends more than one person, or sends someone with more firepower than your one person, your crew member can get killed in the ensuing fight, and if that happens your front could still be lost.