Gangs

Gangs are your muscle: hired crews that guard your property, shake down the town, chase runaways, and crawl the catacombs so your workers don’t have to. This page covers the system as it works in the current game.

Where everything is

Press Staff on the building hub to open the Gangs screen. The left side lists your gangs with their mission, headcount, and combat strength; the right side holds the recruit list and the shared equipment block. Select a gang and press Details for the full picture: the leader, every member by name with his own stats, the gang’s record, and last week’s reports.

Hiring and upkeep

You hire whole gangs, not individuals, from the recruit list. Each gang holds up to 15 members and costs gold every week, and the price depends on what you ask of it: quiet duty like guarding is cheap, risky work costs more. The weekly cost of each mission is shown right next to it when you assign one.

A gang that loses men can refill itself: put it on Recruiting, or enable auto-recruit and it will try on its own (recruits cost gold too). Refilling takes persuasion now, not a signature: see the Recruiting mission for how the odds work.

Members and leaders are real

Since 1.18, a gang is not an anonymous blob. Every member has a name and his own stats; one of them is the leader. When a fight goes badly, specific men die and the roster shrinks by name. If the leader falls, the strongest survivor takes over. There is no way to hand-pick members today; you shape a gang by training it, keeping it alive, and replacing losses.

Weekly missions

Each gang takes one mission per week. Mission wages and rewards belong to your main treasury; gangs do not keep separate purses. Some jobs bring back gold or captives, while taking over businesses creates income that continues in later weeks.

See Gang Missions for all twelve assignments, the abilities they use, and a full explanation of Sabotage.

Shared equipment

Equipment lives in one shared armory that every gang draws from, bought on the Gangs screen:

• Weapons upgrade from level 0 to 3 and make every gang hit harder. Each level costs more than the last.
• Healing potions are consumed in fights to keep your men standing. Stock up before catacomb runs or sabotage campaigns.
• Nets capture targets without a fight: beasts taken alive, and kidnapping marks who couldn’t be talked into coming. A gang with a net in stock secures the catch before it ever comes to blows.

When it comes to blows

Fights play out man by man: each member fights with his own combat skill, agility, and toughness, with the leader always on the field. Casualties are real; dead members disappear from the roster by name, and men who flee a lost fight survive to fight again. A gang mauled this week is genuinely weaker next week until you let it recruit back up.

A few practical notes

• Keep at least one gang on Guarding. An unguarded operation is an invitation.
• Theft and shakedown missions earn well but push up your suspicion with the law (watch the readout on the hub).
• Training and Recruiting weeks feel slow, but a trained full-strength gang survives fights that would wipe out a fresh one.