5.6 KiB
Rivalry and fights
Two gangs, one grudge. A gang fight is a crime — booked, attributed, and fed back into the colony's climate of order.
Gangs do not just supply themselves; they collide. Where the network is about who shares, rivalry is about who is opposed — and, crucially, about turning gang violence into something the rest of the suite can see and police.
Who is a rival
The rule is exactly as blunt as it sounds: two pawns in two different gangs are rivals. Both must actually be in a gang, and it must be a different gang for each. As the design puts it:
Two pawns of DIFFERENT gangs are rivals — inside the wire or out on the street.
Note what is not required. There is no separate "hostility" flag, no rival-declaration event, no threshold to cross. The moment two crews exist, their members are rivals of one another. Rivalry is a structural fact about who is in which gang, not a mood or a relationship value.
Two consequences fall straight out of that:
- Non-members are nobody's rival. A pawn in no gang — everyone in a healthy colony — is never a rival to anyone, because rivalry needs both pawns to be in a gang. No gangs, no rivalry.
- Same gang, never rivals. Members of one crew are in the same gang, so they are not rivals. Within a gang there is no rivalry to book; there is the network (see Networks and Smuggling).
Where do two different gangs come from in the first place? From the affiliations pawns already have — rival factions and rival ideoligions form into separate crews. That is the subject of Affiliations and Segregation; the short version is that gangs mesh with the colony's existing social fault lines, so rival factions run as rival gangs.
A fight is a crime
The payoff of tracking rivalry is what happens when rivals fight. When a rival-gang attack happens, it is not treated as generic brawling — it is booked as a crime through the same Justice pipeline as any other offence.
Only rival-gang violence counts: the two pawns must be in different gangs for anything to be recorded. A scuffle between gangmates, or between two non-members, is not a gang fight and is not booked. When it is rival-gang violence, the whole event is recorded as a crime against the attacker, and that does three things at once (they live in Institution: Justice, but this is what Gangs is leaning on):
| Effect of booking a gang fight | Where it lands |
|---|---|
| the attacker's crime count goes up | their criminal record (Core) |
| the time of the crime is stamped to now | their criminal record (Core) |
| the colony's deterrence nudges down (a crime happened; order slipped) | Justice's deterrence system |
Inside the wire and out on the street are the same offence
This is the design point the mod is emphatic about:
A gang fight is a CRIME — it goes on the attacker's record and moves the colony's climate through the same Justice loop as any other, so it can be investigated, attributed and policed. Rival-gang violence inside a prison and out on the street are the same offence.
There is no separate rule for a prison-yard shanking versus a colonists' brawl in the dining room. A fight is booked purely on whether the two pawns are rivals. A free colonist who is a gang member attacking a rival is booked identically to a prisoner doing the same in a cell block. The gang system does not care which side of the wall the violence is on — only that it was between rivals.
This is what makes gang violence legible to the rest of the suite. A fight is not a one-off flavour event that scrolls past in the log; it is a record entry with an attributed perpetrator and a timestamp, which means it can be investigated, blamed on a specific pawn, and answered.
How it feeds deterrence — and back into joining
Here is the loop that closes the whole suite:
- A rival-gang fight is booked as a crime against the attacker.
- That nudges the colony's deterrence down. Order has visibly slipped.
- Lower deterrence raises the nurture multiplier for every disposed pawn on the map (less deterrence means a bigger multiplier).
- Higher nurture pushes more pawns over the Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9 join bar (see Joining).
- More members → more rivals → more fights available to be booked.
Left unanswered, gang violence is self-reinforcing: each booked fight makes the next one likelier. The brake is the other half of Justice — punishment raises deterrence back up, which lowers nurture, which drops borderline pawns back under the bar. The seesaw works both ways: punishing a pawn raises the deterrence level, and a fresh crime lowers it again.
How to play it
- Respond to booked fights. A gang fight is real feedback that deterrence has slipped. Punishing the attributed attacker is not just retribution — it is the mechanical lever that pulls deterrence back up and cools the whole map's propensity.
- Don't manufacture two gangs where there was one. Rivalry needs two different crews. Housing pawns of hostile factions or clashing ideoligions together is what creates the second gang and the fights between them — see the next page.
- Read the record, not the moment. Because every fight is attributed to a perpetrator, a thick record of gang violence points you at who to segregate, discipline, or parole — the same tools the rest of the suite already gives you.
Part of the Institution suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.