Factions and Rivals

Crossgate’s other crime organizations earn, expand, and fight every week, whether you watch them or not. The Factions and Rivals screen is your window onto them: not a live report, but a file of everything your people have actually seen.

Opening the screen

Press the Rivals button on the town map. Every organization in town is listed on the left, the file for the selected one on the right, and Back returns to the map. The town knows who the players are, so every rival appears in the list by name from the first day. Everything past the name starts as street rumor and reads “unknown” until your people learn more.

What a file shows

Each organization’s file covers:

• Wealth, always as a word: Broke, Lean, Comfortable, Rich, or Opulent. You never see an exact gold figure; nobody audits a rival’s books from the street.
• Holdings: brothels, bars, gambling halls, and businesses paying them protection, as last observed.
• Muscle: how many crews they can field, as a range.
• The last raid: how the most recent fight your people picked with them actually went.

Every line carries its own note saying where the information came from, how good it is, and how many weeks old it is. Different lines can come from different weeks; a fresh look at their muscle does not refresh an old count of their bars.

How knowledge sharpens

Information comes from contact, chiefly the Sabotage mission. The same scouting quality the mission preview shows decides what your crew brings back about the organization it actually raided:

• A good scouting week records exact holdings and a wealth estimate.
• A fair week records only coarse counts: none, 1 to 2, 3 to 4, or 5 or more.
• A poor week learns nothing beyond the fight itself.

The fight itself teaches you one honest thing: whether the raid met no organized resistance, was held off, or broke the defenders. One street fight never reveals how large the organization’s full garrison is, so winning a brawl does not update the muscle line.

Word from the streets also reaches you when an organization collapses entirely: its file stays in the list, grayed out and marked gone, so your history reads honestly.

Old information goes stale

The screen never peeks at the rival’s real books. A rival that got raided twice since your last look still shows your old picture, with its age counting up. Noticing that a figure might be out of date is your job, and the screen helps you do it honestly:

• Information up to a month old reads as fresh; up to three months, dated; older than that, stale.
• Muscle estimates blur as they age. An exact count becomes a widening range, and a stale one reads “unknown strength” instead of pretending.
• Holdings age more slowly (buildings do not move), but their notes still show how old the observation is.

A three-month-old wealth estimate on an organization that has been raided twice since is a trap. The screen will not fall into it for you, but it tells you everything you need to notice it yourself.