We have had a bunch of changes go in today, but rest assured its not as complicated as it sounds. Here is a list of what has changed and what has not changed :)

The previous 6 areas (cities) have been broken into 12 areas. These 12 areas are 4 cities each with 3 districts in them.

The districts are separated yet together in some ways.
Each district can have a godfather.
Each district has its own CLs.
All districts in the same city share the same locals.
All districts in the same city share the same wacking location.
All districts in the same city share the same pickpocketing location.
All districts in the same city share the same mugging location.
All districts in the same city share the same graverobbing location.
All districts in the same city share the same jail.
All districts in the same city share the same OCs.
All districts in the same city share the same business district forum.
HQ fortifications work in the entire city.
Casinos work in the entire city.


Each district will be based off of its city drug price, with a little % bumped up or down to give each district a slightly different price. The inner city drug prices change very often, so you can travel around and do micro-drug deals. These are not big-buck deals individually, but do add up over the hours.

You can travel to each district in 5 minutes on a new timer that is not related to your flight timer.

T: travel timer is your normal flight timer represented to those who have the toolbar package. t: travel timer is your inner city travel timer represented to those who have the toolbar package.

Travel to and from cities has changed, each carrying a flight timer related to the distance to other cities. You will find that the cities are paired as "sister cities". NY can travel to PH pretty quickly, and thus there will be a lot of drug trade between those two at a pretty high rate of speed. CH is paired with DT. While the distance between CH and DT is greater and thus a longer flight time between the two - we make up for the longer flight times by giving CH and DT higher price swings for its drugs.

Your CA will follow you wherever you go so you can always shoot him without a large flight timer.

Since there are more people per city now, we have increased the jail size to accommodate more people picking at your jails.

Tips will not show you cities that are not close to your own city.

Achievements will be discussed further later this week.

New districts will open up (to a maximum of 5 per city) as the population dictates.

There are some new strategies involved here and I know it will take a while for you guys to adjust to them. Likewise, we the admins have some work ahead of us to massage RIA distribution, drug prices and the likes.

Annnnnd that's about it for right now!

Cheers!

1. Why are the crews that have previously been in NY now in CH?

The CLs got to pick where they wanted to go ahead of time. Each city has certain advantages and certain disadvantages, so rather than me place them where I felt they should go, I let them pick.

2. WHY does each district have a Godfather? There should be just one GF per city, as GF is supposed to be the big boss, the supreme city leader.

JamesKnowles hit the nail on the head with his answer:

"As to the multiple Godfather point within a city, something more accurate would likely be each family within a district having their own Don, who would be the head of that family. One of these Dons could then be deemed by the other Dons to be the boss of bosses (Capo di tutti capi) or known as "Godfather". The stats etc. wouldn't change, although I suppose they could if people wanted them too, but it would make things a little tighter aesthetically.

You would probably have to adjust all the ranks accordingly to do the above though, so it may be a bit more effort than it's worth. I, as First Assoco of Roberto_Carlos (Consigliere), would like it a lot though."


In an ideal world, there would be no Godfathers. The leaders in each city could rank to the max of Don, and the godfather himself would be a leader who got all the required XP and hit the GF button which retires him from active play.

Because a district is supposed to be at minimum 5 separate families, I felt it best to not have a game defined "One leader", I'll let the users define that.

3. Don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but If things like locals, whacking, OCs, Jails etc are all shared city wide rather than Districts, why do we have Districts except for the aesthetics *hides*.

Once again, Knowles nailed this one too..

"I don't know for certain Felix, but in regards to your third point, I would assume this is dependent upon the population. If we split the locals etc. into the districts at the moment, then we would have some very quiet places as the population cannot support 12 independent locations."

There will be a few stages we do before we achieve the final goal. One of the last ones is proper separation between the districts (well not really the districts, but via proximity to another player). As of now we just can't really do that with our current population, but its the goal we are shooting for and hope that we can budget for some advertising drives to get us there sooner than later.

Other then that, I would in future like to see the west coast open up on this system before more districts are added per current city if the user base does grow.

The problem with this, is every city needs a sister city. (Flights from west coast to central is *really* far) LA/LV works out well. However, in order to do this we need to really at least do 2 districts in each, meaning we have to have the extra population to populate 4 districts. Our goal is to fill out the districts for the existing central/east coast cities and hopefully the game will be at a point where we can pack those 20 districts a weeeee bit past their tipping point for a bit to accumulate 4 districts worth of extra to move over to west coast. I think for us to have 4 districts worh of extra residing in our existing 12 districts would make it a little too tight.

There is a difference in drug prices between the two coasts because "how you work it" is now different. If you are NY/PH, you have a 1.4 hour flight timer to switch cities. If you are CH/DT then its a 4 hour timer, which means you will not be doing nearly as many cross city drug trades, we have increased the profit per deal in CH/DT to offset the lack of number of deals you can do in any given period.

Our goal was set out to try to balance the two coasts so that at the end of the day, people from either coast make about the same amount of money - just in slightly different methods.

Not counting having easier jail breaks then phi and chi, unless you changed that. Its just not fair that now we one side of the game has to work even harder to keep up with the other.

Each coast has the same total when it comes to difficulty for jails and crime payouts. Meaning that a Chicago member who bounces equally between CH and DT will walk away with the exact same experience, same exact skill increase, and basically same cash as a NY member who bounces equally between NY and PH.