Territory & Businesses

Every business in the game — Gun Store, Chop Shop, Casino, Pawn Shop, Bail Bonds, and more — is tied to a district, one of each type per city, and run by whichever crew holds the ground it sits on. Take the district, and the business (and its income) comes with it.

Home turf matters

Your crew can contest territory in any city, but you fight at full strength only around your own HQ. The farther a district is from home, the tougher the odds get — which means an over-extended empire's frontier holdings are genuinely hard to hold onto, not just nominally risky. A boss can relocate the crew's HQ to wherever they're currently standing (from the Crew page) without disbanding the crew, if a strategic move is worth it.

Control, and why turf slips away

A held district has a control percentage — how firm your crew's grip on it is. It is not decoration. Income from a district is scaled by control, while its upkeep is charged in full, so a district you're barely holding pays a fraction of its listed rate and still costs the same to run. Drive a rival's control to nothing and the district changes hands.

Control only ever falls on its own. Rival attacks chip away at it, and the Gang-War Catalyst world event knocks a slice off every crew's districts everywhere. Ground you took and then ignored will eventually slide back to neutral.

Shoring up your own ground

Shore up is how you push control back — the button sits on your districts on both the City page and the Territory page. It costs Nerve and comes out of the crew's Clean Cash, priced against that district's upkeep, so a prize district costs more to hold than a scrap one. Control tops out at 100%.

Three things worth knowing before you plan around it:

• The cooldown is on the district, not on you. A second member can't shore up the same ground again to beat the timer — a big crew can't simply out-number the clock.
• It takes the crew's money, not yours, so it needs a role that can manage territory, the same permission as collecting income.
• It won't out-pace someone who really wants your turf. Shoring up beats the weather and the occasional raid; it doesn't beat a rival crew that keeps coming.

The button shows the exact cost, the gain, and the time remaining before it's available again.

Paying to use someone else's turf

Using a service that runs out of a crew-owned venue — buying a gun at a Gun Store, pawning an item, posting bail — costs a small patronage surcharge, a cut the owning crew sets (capped, so it can't be gouged to an absurd rate) that goes straight to them. Your own crew's venues, and an allied crew's venues, never charge you this. It's a direct incentive to fight for turf, and a reason to notice whose ground you're standing on before you spend.

The map

The City page shows a real map of each city and its districts. The Territory page is your crew's ledger of everything it holds, across every city at once.