Greetings, emperors!

Last time I introduced the Crime and Provincial Order system and explained the Sprawl Factor, the core mechanic driving how much crime a city generates. Today I want to walk through what crime actually does to your settlements, and everything you can do about it.

What crime costs you

The most direct effect is resource loss. A percentage of everything your city collects each month, stone, grain and everything else, is lost to theft and smuggling before it ever reaches your Global Equipment Stock. At 10% crime you lose a tenth of your monthly output. At 25% you lose a quarter. At the maximum of 40%, you’re losing nearly half of everything that city produces. This is exactly the uncapped resource problem the system was built to solve.

Crime also slows down construction. Labour disruption means settlement projects, including the crucial Develop Province project itself, take longer to complete at higher crime rates. And this creates a genuinely nasty vicious cycle, neglect a city and crime rises, but rising crime makes developing your province (which would lower crime) even slower. You have to actively break that cycle rather than simply waiting it out.

Beyond that, high crime in a racial group slows their assimilation into your culture, since criminal networks reinforce cultural separation rather than integration. High-crime groups also contribute fewer recruits to your manpower pool, criminals don’t tend to enlist, or they don’t stay long if they do. And crime steadily drags down a city’s base loyalty over time, meaning a lawless city slowly becomes an unhappy one as well.

To put some numbers on it: a moderately neglected city sitting at 25% crime loses a quarter of its resources, sees project times increase by roughly 12.5%, and loses a quarter of its potential recruits. A well-managed city, by contrast, should sit comfortably below 5% on all of these.

I do want to be clear about the limits of the system though. Crime never causes a rebellion on its own, and it never cripples a city’s workshop capacity below a survivable level. Loyalty remains the gatekeeper for rebellion, as it always has been. Crime is purely an economic penalty, not an existential threat to your empire.

How you fight back

Here’s the part I’m genuinely pleased with: every single tool for fighting crime is something that already exists in the game. No new buildings, no new project categories, nothing extra to learn. It’s all about how you use what you already have.

Developing your Province Development Level is the single biggest lever, since it’s the divisor in the Sprawl Factor itself. Inquisition, already used to accelerate assimilation, also suppresses crime hard, though at a real loyalty cost, a brutal but effective option when you need results fast. Strengthening your garrison relative to your hexes helps directly, as does hiring a governor with strong Logistics skill, or finally getting rid of that Corrupt governor you’ve been putting up with. Even a Marketplace outpost gives a modest reduction, on top of the assimilation and trade benefits it already provides.

And here’s the choice I find most interesting: you’re allowed to simply accept the crime rate in some cities. A frontier settlement deep in contested territory, far from your capital, might genuinely not be worth the governance investment. The system is designed to reward players who engage with it, not to punish players who choose not to, in every single city.

In the settlement view, crime will show up as a simple tier label alongside the percentage, Low, Moderate, High or Rampant, with a colour-coded icon so you can tell at a glance whether a city needs your attention. You’ll also be able to see which racial groups are driving the crime rate in a given city, so you know exactly where to focus.

Taken together, I think this system does something quietly important. It gives sprawling, resource-rich cities a real reason to invest in themselves rather than just expanding forever, and it turns garrison size, governor choice and provincial development into decisions with an economic dimension as well as a military and loyalty one.

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.

There’s more still to come in this series. Stay tuned, and if you haven’t wishlisted Imperium Sine Fine on Steam yet, it really does help as I head towards launch!

Cheers!