Greetings, emperors!

After the recap, it’s time for something completely new. Today I want to introduce the Crime and Provincial Order system, and more importantly, explain why I felt the empire needed one in the first place.

Here’s the problem I kept running into. Settlements in Imperium Sine Fine are designed to grow, they expand automatically, claiming new hexes whenever no other project is active. That’s exactly the empire-building fantasy I want the game to have. Ambitious cities push outward, consuming land and resources as they mature.

But in the mid-to-late game, this creates an imbalance. A city that has claimed a large number of hexes ends up producing far more resources, stone, grain and everything else, than its population and workshops can actually use. Workshop staffing and population growth are what should limit your production, not raw resource income. Once a city gets big enough, its resources become essentially uncapped, and the interesting tension between expanding and actually being able to use what you’ve claimed quietly disappears.

Crime and Provincial Order fixes this by introducing a natural consequence to ungoverned sprawl. When a city expands faster than its infrastructure, governance and garrison can keep up, criminal activity rises in the outer, under-policed reaches of the province. Resources get stolen or lost before they reach the city. Labour is disrupted. Development slows.

I want to be clear about the design intent here. This is meant to be an optimisation path, not a mandatory chore. Ignore crime entirely and you’ll suffer a meaningful but survivable resource penalty in your bigger cities. Manage it actively and you gain a real competitive edge. Nobody is forced to babysit every single settlement.

So how is crime actually calculated? The heart of the system is something I’m calling the Sprawl Factor.

Sprawl Factor = hexes controlled ÷ Province Development Level (PDL)

A city with 18 hexes and PDL 6 has a Sprawl Factor of 3.0, well-managed. The same city sitting at PDL 2 instead has a Sprawl Factor of 9.0, dangerously underpoliced. This single ratio captures the whole tension of the system in one number: expand as freely as you like, but govern what you claim.

On top of the Sprawl Factor, crime also depends heavily on who lives in your city. Different races have very different natural tendencies towards criminal behaviour, and crime is calculated per racial group, weighted by their share of the population. A city of Elves is largely self-governing, with a base crime tendency of just 5%. Goblins sit at the other end, with a base tendency of 20%, scavengers by nature, prone to opportunistic theft. The Krant, as a hive mind, have no individual criminal motivation at all and sit at exactly 0%. This means racial composition becomes a genuine governance consideration in its own right, not just something that affects loyalty.

From there, three more modifiers layer on top: how well garrisoned your hexes are, how skilled and honest your governor is, and whether you’ve invested in outposts like Marketplaces or City Walls that happen to reduce crime as a side benefit. A strong garrison of 50 or more troops per controlled hex meaningfully suppresses crime. No garrison at all and the city is essentially policing its own doom.

One more important design decision: the AI does not actively manage crime. It keeps a reasonable garrison and will eventually replace a corrupt governor if crime gets bad enough, but otherwise it simply absorbs the resource penalty. This keeps crime as a challenge and opportunity specifically for human players who want to optimise, rather than something the AI needs to be taught to juggle on top of everything else it’s already handling.

In my next post I’ll go through exactly what crime does to your settlements, and all the tools you have to fight back against it.

The figures I’ve mentioned above may be adjusted during playtesting, but they should give you a good feel for how the system is designed to work.

If you haven’t yet, please wishlist Imperium Sine Fine on Steam, it helps enormously as I work towards launch!

Cheers!