Started the game but want to know a bit more? This guide is for you.

One important thing to note - Attributes only affect combat missions. They have no impact on the map portion.


Muscle attribute +5 = Your unmodified move points (MP) in combat.
Melee damage is increased by your Muscle attribute x 2.

Finesse increases your chance to hit using a ranged weapon by 2 points for every point of Finesse.

Each point of Toughness increases your maximum Health by 15. You have a base health of 30.

Your Smart attribute = your unmodified intiative attribute. This gives you the ability to act more times in a combat situation.

Guts = increases your courage score by 15. Every point in guts also increases your reaction score which represents your ability to act first when combat opens (which really is quite useless since 90% of the time you don't encounter enemies when you enter a combat mission).
You lose Courage by taking damage. If your Courage score drops below 20, your character freaks out and loses 5 MP and 5 AP until they get back above 20. There are some perks and special abilities which can increase courage. Some weapons affect courage differently, eg a flamethrowers or running through flames drops it quite a bit. Your character should restore 10 courage each round they act.

Cunning is probably the most important stat - Your unmodified action points (AP) for combat is 5 + your cunning score. It also gives you a 1% crit chance per point of cunning.

Finesse is a great stat for ranged characters, and you need muscle for melee characters so they can have more MP and more damage once they get to melee range.

Note that your attributes from character creation are set in stone, you don't go up a level and get to increase your stats. Each attribute can increase by only one point by selecting a level dependent perk. There are no other ways to increase your starting attributes.

When you level up, you get to choose a perk, and at levels 4 and 8 additional talents become available. There are no other additional benefits.

Here is a table showing the repercussions of your choices when creating your character. You start with 6 points in each attribute.



I would also recommend looking at some of the perks you can select in planning things out since the goods ones have attribute prerequisites. My favorites are


More Criticals, Ranged / Melee Specialist are also great skills.

Since my preference is to have ranged characters, 3 with rifles (or 2 rifles and one pistol) and 1 with a shotgun / machine gun, I like to choose characters that have a high finesse and capable of getting Sadistic. So as long as a character that you create / recruit has at least 6 in cunning and toughness, you can perk them up for 7 for each attribute and select Sadistic. If you have a pistol guy for short range kills, get them the perk Dead eye (+10% bonus to hit with each subsequent attack) and Bloodlust.

Your character will end up at level 12 by the end of the campaign. Perks chosen earlier have more impact throughout the game.

Each character not only has perks they can select while levelling up, they also have 3 special abilities called Talents that "open" up at level 1, 4 and 8. Every main character has the same talents -

Level 1
Second Wind (3 AP) - Heal half the damage taken and remove all negative conditions (except the fear condition from having a low courage score). Recharges on kill.

Level 4
Surge (0 AP) - Increases your AP for that round by 5. Does not make you lose your movement points when triggered. Once per mission.

Level 8
Act now (All your AP) - Select a character to act straight after your turn. Recharges on kill.

Every other character has talents of their own. Some of the more useful ones include-
First Aid (2 AP) - Remove all negative conditions upon target, melee range.
Hold the Line (3 AP) - Gain 50 courage. Restores upon kill.
Grenade (3 AP) - Does 25-50 damage after a delay. Once per mission. I might note that enemies do everything they can to move away from grenades so used correctly, even if it hits no one, can be of benefit.
Bandage - (8 AP) Restores all health or revives injured gang member at 50% health. Does not remove injuries from downed gang members. Once per mission

Character Classes

Your character will be a Mastermind. Of the other classes, the Hitman is the most useful but they tend to have pretty bad attributes. Burglars have limited uses. Grifters and Enforcers are useless.

Loony is the best hitman, though he does have 3 for Smarts. Apart from yourself and 1 hitman, I would ignore the character classes and choose characters with attributes that would benefit you in combat.

Remember, you can remove the perks from a character and select them all over again using the respec option in the character menu. It costs 500 dirty money.

Heat is shown at the bottom right of your screen and has seven stages

1 - No Stars
2 - One Star
3 - Two Stars
4 - Three Stars
5 - Four Stars
6 - Five Stars
7 - INVESTIGATION!!!!

What activities generate heat?
Building a Smuggler, Wholesaler, Labor Union, Protection Racket, Loan Shark and Insurance Company. You cannot build these if you have 5 points of heat.

Drive bys - 1 point of heat, but about a 75% chance no heat will be generated if you use a hitman.

Stealing a car - The cars you steal are usually crappy and will stop working after a while unless you have the relevant autoshop upgrade.

Usually you also generate a point of heat per day unless you have a lawyer with the first upgrade.
Unless you have a rival gang in your area, the lawyer should be the first place you build on a construction site.

Some fights against other gangs, mobsters or police can generate heat unless they were "accidental" fights.

How can you reduce heat before an investigation occurs?
Often the deputy will offer to reduce heat in the job-special section at $150 for 1.

If you buy beer from the deputy, sometimes it will be an ambush situation where if you fight them successfully your heat will drop by 2. You will see the option to reduce heat by fighting when the option window appears.

If you have a lawyer with the first upgrade, the heat will drop over time unless the police have a high to very high presence in the area.

In general I like to keep my heat level around 2 stars, unless a rival gang is around that I want to kill off.

Investigation ends
You have to plan these out in advance. You can either -

Bribe the investigators - The cost builds over time. The first costs $500, the second $800, the third usually about $2,000. The bribe cost reduces if you have a lawyer with the second upgrade.

Blame someone else - If you have an independant operation that is warm towards you, you can blame them, which turns them cold towards you and you can no longer deal with them. Cheapest option really.

Call in a favor from a police station. You must be warm with them for this to work, and afterwards the building is no longer able to be used. Warning - Make sure you have purchased the weapon from them before doing this or you will lose the opportunity to do so unless you restart or reload. If you have 2 police stations and they are both warm towards you except one has a weapon you have not purchased yet, reload until the police station without an available weapon is chosen.

Destroy the evidence - A medium level difficulty mission.

If you have no options at the end of an investigation, you lose the game.

I can't say I am an expert on weapons, but here are a few details.

Eah weapons can have one of 4 levels.
One Star = Basic version of weapon.
Two Stars = One additional bonus.
Three Stars = Two additional bonuses.
One Star on a custom weapon graphic = 3 bonuses. The best of the best.

The characteristics could be anything from -1 AP to use, +10% hit, +10% damage or a wider cone of attack for machine guns, tommy guns and shotguns.

So how do you get these special weapons? By sucking up to the police and crime lords in your map. Find them, bribe the police up to Warm and the Crime Lords to neutral and they will allow you to buy a weapon off them. The really special ones can cost up to 3,000.

Each weapon has three different attacks or abilities. For example, a rifle has a basic attack (6 AP), an attack that does less damage but takes 5MP off the attacker (7AP) or you can place a circle on the ground at a particular place that gives a bonus for you only to hit people in that circle, which only disappears if you move.

This section is a little imcomplete as I have been lazy and relied on a few weapons only.
Pistols - Fine for short range, OK for medium and usually a 5% chance to hit at long range. Pretty low damage.
Revolvers - They have a special ability which allows you to shoot at people once per round who shoot at you. If you want to shoot someone with a revolver, find cover first. I found that the accuracy was horrible at mid-long range. It has a 3 AP ability which allows you to do courage damage only over a particular area.
Rifle - Great at every range. A fair bit of damage per hit.
Machine Gun - Low accuracy but it can shoot at everything in particular area. It is supposed to shoot at everyone in a particular area but sometimes it does not work. You have to spend 2 points to lock it into a firing position before you can use it.
Flamethrower - These are bad news for you if someone has one. They cause major courage damage and inflict a flame damage condition which makes you run at the start of your round randomly which costs MP.
Shotgun
Tommy Gun
Machine Gun (Japanese Incentive DLC)

Melee range. For the most part, you need to be melee range to attack.
Knives - Low damage, but you can throw throw it at someone to cause a bleed.
Brass Knuckles
Katana (Japanese Incentive DLC) - Its first attack allows up to three attacks. You get an additional attack if you crit automatically.

The game deals with 3 types of goods -
Beer = $10 average price
Liquor = $30 average price
Firearms = $40 average price

When making deals, keep the average prices in mind to see if the prices are worth it.

Here are a few notes on the people who offer jobs in game. Remember, jobs have five tabs - Beer, Liquor, Firearms, Money and Special. Money allows you to borrow or lend money (usually at ridiculous interest rates), launder money or swap clean money for larger amounts of dirty money (usually at a 2.5 dirty money for each 1 in clean money you choose to swap for). Special offers jobs that increase fear or liked ratings, can offer storage space, missions to retrieve jailed gang members and occasionally offers to reduce your heat rating.

Lady Cunningham
Buys liquor mostly, weapons occasionally. Also offers to improve your liked rating.
Sell to her as often as possible. Sometimes she throws a mini-tantrum which will make you lose liked ratings to get your money unless you give goods away for free. Sometimes she offers to pay double, or merely an extra 50% with a liked rating increase. If you really want to make a sale, and forcing the sale will make you lose some of your liked rating, take the money and spend 500 at a nearby politicians house for a charity event.

Rabbi Hobsbaum
Buys beer and liquor.
Complains about the beer and liquor you sell him to get a cheaper price (too much froth, not kosher) otherwise he gets angry. I would recommend forcing him to pay full price because angering a cheapskate who may not order as much in the future is not really a bad thing at all.

Mr Smith
Buys liquor, offers to buy clean money in exchange for dirty money.
He always wants to buy below market price so he is not worth selling to unless your storage is way full and you will lose stock shortly. He is best used for swapping clean money to dirty money as it is usually at a rating of $2-4 dirty to $1 clean

Charlie Luciano
Buys weapons, sells beer
Great prices for purchasing beer, but he usually likes to upsell you even more beer or he will “injure” the character that is buying the goods. Keep some cash spare in case he decides you should buy 10 beer for 190 or get a broken arm.

Joseph Springfield
Buys beer, offers to launder money (horrible rates though example - $250 dirty to $150 clean)
Always sell this guy beer. Sometimes he changes his mind and only half (which is fine) or you can sell at a discount (which I don't bother doing). Choosing the half option re-adds unsold stock to your inventory. Occasionally will want to buy another 5 beer, and perhaps an extra 10 beer afterwards as well.

Deputy Kingsley
Sells beer and liquor (at great rates but see below). Offers to reduce heat (jobs-special) at a rate of $150 for 1 point of heat. You do not have control over how heat he offers to reduce.
Just be careful buying things from him. He is a backstabbing prick. Sometimes you have to pay him off $50 to avoid building 2 heat, sometimes you have to fight the police to get your goods or you lose the lot. However, if you buy beer, you can be given the option to reduce your heat by 2 points if you do fight. If the fight will reduce your heat, it will say so on the choice screen in the options. If you end up fighting in the railway area, it sucks to be you.

Samuel Johnson
Sells beer and guns (Great rates).
No complications and cheap prices. Sometimes his inventory is small.

I'll assume you know about the basic features of the buildings.

Stock creating buildings.
Firearms - Pawn shop with the "No questions asked" upgrade.
Liquor - Distillery
Beer - Brewery
The smuggler can import all of these items but does so randomly. You can upgrade them to focus on firearms but it doesn't produce them at great rates.
Guns and Liquor require you to keep a close eye on production rates as you will rely mostly on your buildings to produce those items. Beer is easy to purchase from jobs.

Shops to sell off your stock. The more a building costs, the more it sells for you.
Speakeasy - Sells beer and liquor. Usually at the start, 1 brewery and half the production from a distillery will keep it supplied.
Weapon Store - Sells firearms at a very fast rate. Expect to have no firearms at all if you build one of these.
Nightclub - Sells beer and liquor.
Casino - Sells Liquor, but decreases your liked rating slowly.
Warehouse - Generates about 3k a day but absolutely drains your stocks. You may need to turn it off in order to get items you may need to complete quests. You will need 2 breweries, 2 distilleries and 3 pawn shops that buy guns to keep this sucker supplied. Once you get it up and running, you will rarely have to worry about cash. It does have an option which adds 100 to your inventory limit. My favorite store really.

Misc
Soup kitchens increase your liked rating over time.
The "Don" Pizzeria does the opposite.
Clinics generate liked and are the only way to heal injured gang members.
Auto Shops allow you to buy sports cars ($3,000) and armored cars for drivebys ($1,500) without the cooldown from ordinary car dealers. They can also be upgraded to generate clean cash and prevent any car you have from breaking down.

To work out your production vs consumption rates, hover the mouse over the stock items shown at the bottom. If you are generating 119 liquor and your buildings are consuming 190 liquor, time to build a new distillery or two.

So, Rival Gangs....
Rival Gangs were introduced in the Japanese Incentive. You know for sure that there is a rival gang if you enter a map and you have a little hat next to the two stars on buildings. That "hat" represents a bunch of goons guarding the building. If the rival gang decides to do a driveby on one of your properties and you have no goons on it, you lose that property to your rivals including the building and the upgrades. If you have goons there, the goons die off, and the rival gang will have to do a second driveby to capture the property, but they usually aren't that fast.

There are special buildings that you can use to protect your properties. These are only useful against rival gangs, they are useless otherwise.

Security Agency - Probably the most important building to help against rival gangs.
Provides goons for protecting buildings which normally cost $1,000 for free at regular intervals. It does so rather slowly and has a particular preferential order that you may not agree with. You can increase the speed that it spawns goons at for 30 beer. Don't think this takes you off the hook for buying goons for your other properties though, you will still lose properties that are not defended. I still buy goons for essential properties to my cashflow and to protect stock generation. Once you have a security center and your important buildings have goons, you don't have to worry so much about the rival gang.
Since rivals do not attack normal residences that you purchase for $$1,000, these do not need defending.
Hit Squad - Attacks your rivals.
Not that useful. While it does whittle away the defenders on your opponent's businesses, it does not take over a building. You get a message saying they defeated the goons at a particular building but sometimes that building doesn't exist or you have to waste 20 seconds finding where that damn building is so you could possibly deliver the fatal blow... unless of course they have 2 of those buildings.....
On the other hand, it does not generate heat. I wouldn't recomend it unless you have many construction sites and money to burn.
Private Investigator - Want to waste a joint spot to look at the enemy and waste time looking at what they have and what they have been doing? Or use the joint spot to produce funds you can use to kill off the rival squad?
Lookout - Protects properties within its area to detect attackers and allow a combat mission to protect them. The problem is that you can't work out which properties are being protected and by the time you have $1200 to spend to build one of these, you'd be better off buying goons for your properties while the security agency does its job.

Build order when starting a map.
When I start a map, these are the phases I usually go in. And of course, investigate for new areas while purchases and builds are going on to spread your territory.

Phase 1 Start
Joint - Speakeasy
Premises - Brewery.
(If you have an independent speakeasy near you, let the Brewery finish which will make the speakeasy warm towards you ("Hey guys, some guy has a supply of beer nearby we can use"), then buyout the Speakeasy for $250. Leave the joint for phase 2.)

Phase 2 Get some cash flowing
Premises - Distillery
Joint - Boxing Arena (if you can see at least two other joints. Otherwise ignore and go on)
Joint - Pawn Shop

Phase 3 Preparation for first construction
Joint- Pharmacy
Premises - Distillery no 2.

That should get you enough cash flow to start. The Pharmacy and Pawn shop should start generating enough clean cash so you can build either a lawyer if there is no rival gang, or a Security Center if there is a rival gang, and then a lawyer afterwards.

Phase 4 I'm doing great
Labor Union - Generates dirty cash on its own and increases the effects of feared and liked on your operations.
Wholesaler - Sells all your stuff and gives you more inventory slots.
More distilleries and pharmacies - More clean cash and more Lady Cunningham jobs.
You should be familiar enough to go from there.

The following buildings are useless to me -
Safe House
Hidden Storage - Unless I really need storage space, which I can buy from the special - jobs area or from a wholesaler.
Accountant - Better off with more pharmacies which generate clean cash instead of losing dirty cash to generate clean cash.
Counterfeiter - Needs heat to be either 0 or 1 to generate cash. Can be upgraded to level 2. Produces $300 cash per minute but why not build something else that can generate cash at any heat level?
Ponzi scheme - The scheme eventually goes Bernie Madoff and busts.
Protection racket - Requires independent businesses to be profitable. My plan for independent businesses is to crush them and steal their land so this building doesn't have long term potential.
Insurance Company - Same as protection racket.
Weapons Store - Really drains your firearm stock levels which I like to keep around for drivebys and jobs.

Tips and information

When you start a new map, you carry over your liked and feared rating at half their value. So if they are 100/100 on the old map, they will be 50/50 when starting the new map. This is great when informants require a certain liked or feared rating to open up areas instead of paying cash or items.

Be sure to hover over the beer, liquor and firearms tab at the bottom regularly so you can see if your producers are able to keep up with the suppliers. For example, if the beer producers are producing 50 and your businesses are consuming 100, you may need to buy another brewery or buy lots of beer. From experience, liquor is the hardest to buy so shortfalls in production there are best worked out with more distilleries. Unless you build a weapon store, 2-3 pawnshops that buy firearms sould be enough.

Clean money has limited uses beyond dirty money. It is used to purchase construction sites, to build on construction sites and for buying homes. Unless you really need a construction site (eg lawyer and security center), use it initially to build up your businesses to work towards making an operation that can start generating that clean cash back, and when you have no particular use for clean cash, launder it back for dirty money in the jobs-money area or just buy lots of homes.

Eliminate the competition. You can buyout joints if they are warm towards you. You can get speakeasys and nightclubs warm towards you by building breweries and distilleries near them, protection rackets by bribing the police and also by supplying these operations. Then with your excess cash buy the business.

You cannot buy out premises, only a driveby will clear that property out for you to obtain. You can buy stock from warehouses which makes them warm towards you, then you can buy storage space in the warehouse which makes it disappear from the map.

I have lots and lots of money!

Priority 1 - Buy all the weapons from the police and crime lords - Bribe/Gift then buy weapons. Don't finish the map until you have purchased the weapons your crew would benefit from. For those with OCD, buy ALL the weapons. You need warm with police and neutral with Crime Lords to be allowed to make the purchase.
Buy stuff from warehouses, get them to warm with you and then rent it out. Warehouse disappears and you get extra storage room.
Decorate your home! Build up the defenses first in case you get attacked at home, then waste the rest. The first time you do this you get an achievement.
Up your liked and feared rating to 100/100. Put on some parties, get a pizza joint up and buy ratings increases in the special column.
Buy sports cars for all your crew from the autoshop.
Buy all the homes with all your clean cash for $$1,000 each.

Achievements
Hot Rod - Get all your gang members sports cars. Costs 3,000 per car from the auto shop. If the gang members already have vehicles, they can still be allowed to get a sports car. If the game won't let them get into one, order them to leave their current car by clicking the car, then you should be able to order them into a sports car.

Weapons Dealer - Stockpile 200 firearms. When a map is basically conqured, get enough storage room and let it build up. You will need pawn shops / smugglers to do so as often the game sees you have a lot of firearms and sends sell your firearms jobs instead of buy jobs.

Gangster's Paradise - Decorate your house and exhaust all the decorate options.

Juggernaut, Marathon Runner and Nimble Fingers - To get the achievements for having a gang member with 200 health, 16 base action points or 20 or more critical chance, when you reach level 10, fire a member of your gang and get someone with 9-10 in the relevant category, respec them and then level them up and select the perks that will increase them to that relevant level. Easy.

Home Turf - Defeat a rival gang in 10 minutes. You can either do this in a sandbox mission or the next best place is the second last mission of the Japanese Incentive mission, Ohio Avenue. I recommend the Japanese Incentive mission since the sandbox method means you have crappy weapons and no perks. Save, investigate the map as fast as possible, buy 25 firearms via jobs and steal a car. Once you see the boss's hideout, strike before he gets too powerful for you to assault his home. As long as you start the assault within 10 minutes, you get achievement once you suceed in the fight.

The rest of the other achievements can achieved just by playing the main missions or by using particular strategies / weapons in combat missions.

Probably the worst bug is where you are in combat the game decides to stall for a while after a character has ended their turn. Most of the time the game wil eventually go to the next character after 30 seconds to 2 minutes (bathroom time, get a drink), sometimes it will just not continue at all but you can still press escape to use the menu.

However, if a rule is broken, for example an opponent tried to use a one time per fight ability twice in a row, (throwing two fire bombs) the game will not go back to normal. You can also break rules and the machine gun is a prime culprit, allowing you to use the aim function even though you may not have enough AP left, which causes a permanent freeze so you have to reload. If it is in the last phase of a multi part battle, it sucks to be you.

And check out Mikoto Mori's lips. Beautiful features, but lips that look like they were bitten with a wasp and she had an allergic reaction. Poor Mikoto.

I have used the manual in putting together parts of this guide and a thread on the Kalypso forums describing how the attributes work mathematically called "Can one of the devs descibe what each trait does?" [forum.kalypsomedia.com] Yes, an r is missing from describe in that thread's title but I make many spelling errors too.