This is a follow-on from Vaelinn's Territory bounties feedback thread. I voted Option 1 (King of the Hill) there, with ticket steal, and I like Das's roster sign-up idea as a better version of the fair-fight gate.
But Vaelinn named the real risk in his own post: "special tiles need to feel worth caring about." A crown that only says "we won last week" will be dead content by month two. So this thread is my pitch for what the four hills should actually do, and how they feed back into the normal map instead of sitting off to the side.
Short version: the hills don't give perks — they give raw materials. Materials build and upgrade permanent Cartel Buildings on your own territories. Sunday perk rotation on normal TTs stays exactly as it is. This is a new layer, not a replacement.
1. How the four hills should work
Each hill is assigned to a division and fought over by the cartels in it — gold-tier cartels are contesting the gold-tier hill, and so on. So all four hills should offer the same menu of things to produce. The difference between them is reward scale: the higher the division, the better the output. That keeps every bracket playing the same game, just at different stakes, and it means the content doesn't have to be rebuilt if divisions get re-cut later.
The mechanic: every hill has one empty Industry slot. Whoever holds it installs an industry of their choice, and that's what the tile produces until the next event.
Important: every industry also produces Machined Tooling alongside its specialty material — roughly a 70/30 split, specialty to Tooling. An event cycle can run a full week, and a week of nothing but glassware would leave you with a pile of glass and still no Armory, because every recipe needs Tooling too. The split means a single cycle always ends with something buildable. The Fabrication Yard is then the industry that flips that ratio hard in Tooling's favour — you install it when you're short on the universal material, not because it's the only source of it.
Install is free the first time you take the hill in a cycle. The Industry slot is capo-locked — capo, co-capo, or anyone given the permission. It's a cartel-level economic decision and it shouldn't be settled by a vote mid-event.
Switching industries costs cash + a 12h spin-up during which the tile produces nothing.
If the hill flips mid-cycle, the new holder inherits the building but must re-tool it to their own industry (same 12h spin-up). Losing the hill doesn't destroy anything you've already banked.
This turns the crown into an actual decision every week — what do we need right now? — instead of a passive trophy.
The four Industries
Industry
Primary output
Secondary output
Feeds
Cook Site
Material: Refinery Glassware
Machined Tooling
Armory, Vault
Distillery Flats
Material: Copper Still Coil
Machined Tooling
Shipyard, HQ
Grow Complex
Material: Hydro Rig Components
Machined Tooling
Vault, HQ
Fabrication Yard
Material: Machined Tooling
— (all Tooling)
Everything (universal)
Machined Tooling being the universal component is deliberate — every building recipe needs Tooling plus one specialty material. That's what stops a cartel from parking on Fabrication Yard forever and capping everything out: all the Tooling in Bolivia won't build you an Armory without glassware to go with it. The other three industries are the "we know what we're building next" picks, and the 30% Tooling trickle means picking one is never a wasted week.
Reward scale and repeat holds
Your division sets the output rate — how much the hill produces per tick. That's the whole difference between the four hills, and it's the simplest lever to tune once it's live.
On top of that, holding the same hill across consecutive events raises your output rate, stepping up on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th consecutive hold and capping there. Lose the hill for one cycle and you drop one step rather than resetting to zero — enough to sting, not enough to make a bad week feel like a wipe.
This directly answers Das's question about repeat holds: yes, there's a streak reward, but it's more materials, not a stacking combat buff. A dynasty cartel builds faster; it doesn't get harder to kill.
Generation rules
Materials tick passively to a Cartel Stockpile while you hold the hill.
Output rate scales with the hill's division, as above — the four hills are mechanically identical, only the payout differs.
Soft cap per cycle. After the cap, output drops to ~25%. Stops a single dominant cartel from banking six months of materials off one uncontested week.
Materials are cartel-bound and non-tradeable. No market, no alt-cartel funneling, no RMT surface.
Small upkeep in cash per tick while the industry runs. Holding the hill should be a commitment, not free money.
2. Cartel Buildings
Buildings are placed on territories you already own — not on the hill. That's the whole point: the KOTH layer exists to make the normal map deeper. One building per territory, so a cartel with more land can host more buildings.
There are two categories. Structures (2.1–2.5) take the territory's single building slot. Infrastructure (2.6–2.7) does not — it sits on top of a territory alongside whatever's built there, and it's meant to be broad quality-of-life rather than a specialisation. You should never have to choose between a Shipyard and a paved road.
Buildings are never destroyed. If a rival cartel takes the territory, they take the building on it, at its current level, intact. A month of materials shouldn't evaporate because you lost one tile — and more importantly, it makes developed territories worth invading. Taking a tile with a L4 Shipyard on it should be a genuine prize.
Duplicates give diminishing returns. Benefits halve for each additional building of the same type a cartel controls: 1st = 100%, 2nd = 50%, 3rd = 25%, 4th = 12.5%, and so on. This is the important half of the rule. Without it, capturing buildings turns into a runaway — the biggest cartel hoovers up every Armory on the map and compounds forever. With it, a captured second Armory is still worth taking (it's a real gain, and it's a real loss for whoever you took it from), but it's never worth hunting every one of them. It also means a cartel with four territories is best served building four different things, which is what makes the whole system interesting.
Levels 1–5 across the board. Every upgrade: Machined Tooling + specialty material + cash + a Cartel Rep threshold.
2.1 Armory
The smuggling and enhancement building — and the only building that touches enhancement materials. Everything here affects how members acquire Street-Quality / Syndicate-Issued / Blacksite Prototype enhancements through the two routes that already exist, smuggling and scrapping. It does not create them out of construction materials.
Core: raises the quality floor of items obtained through smuggling — higher levels shift the distribution upward rather than adding a flat multiplier, so it makes bad pulls rarer instead of making good pulls guaranteed.
Enhancement yield: flat bonus % to enhancement material yield for members operating out of a territory with an Armory.
Scrapping: bonus % to enhancement materials recovered when scrapping equipment, scaling with level. Also a small chance at higher levels to recover one tier above what the scrapped item would normally return.
L3: small reduction to enhancement failure loss.
L5: one weekly cartel-wide "Requisition" — a guaranteed minimum-quality pull that any single member can claim, capo-assigned. Gives capos something to reward attendance with that isn't cash.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Refinery Glassware
2.2 Shipyard
The submarine building, and the answer to "the sub is great but maintaining it is miserable."
Core: reduces the chance of condition deterioration per run.
L2+: flat % chance for a run to consume no durability at all.
L3: repair cost reduction.
L5: +cargo capacity, or a reduced-risk run option — one or the other, not both, so it doesn't become mandatory.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Copper Still Coil
2.3 Headquarters
The icon of the update, and the building I'd want to be the visual centrepiece (this ties directly into the cartel identity thread).
Member capacity increases per level, picking up where cartel perks currently stop. Perks already cap out at 80 members, so the HQ takes it from there in +4 steps across L1–L5, landing at a hard ceiling of 100. That's the ceiling regardless of anything else — no stacking past it. Capacity is the single most powerful stat in the game, so the last twenty slots should be the most expensive thing in this entire post.
Cartel Job Rep gain bonus per level.
L2: cuts the cash upkeep of running your hill's industry, and shortens the re-tool spin-up when you switch industries. Ties the HQ directly into the KOTH layer instead of it being a pure stat building.
L3: cartel-wide activity log — promotions, permission changes, building upgrades, industry installs, territory gains and losses. The Vault keeps its own money log regardless; this is the wider one that pulls everything into a single feed. Capos are currently flying blind on a lot of this.
L4: custom cartel banner / crest display on the HQ tile and the cartel page.
L5: unlocks the second building slot on the HQ's own territory.
Only one HQ per cartel, and relocating it should cost real money and take real time.
Recipe: all four materials in smaller amounts — it's the hub, it should require you to have touched every industry at least once.
Each member has a personal deposit tax and deposit cap, both driven by their lifetime Cartel Rep contribution.
Tax scales down in brackets — starts at 10% for a brand new member, floors out around 2–3% for a long-term contributor. It never hits 0%.
Deposit cap scales up the same way.
The reason for both: this must not become a free anti-mugging shield. A player who joins a cartel on Monday shouldn't be able to park their entire net worth somewhere untouchable on Tuesday. The tax and the cap mean the vault is a service you earn, and estate vault upgrades stay relevant — you still want your own vault, the cartel vault is for the overflow and for people who've put in the work.
Withdrawals
Small flat fee, or free on a cooldown — either works, as long as it isn't a frictionless in-and-out.
Vault building level raises every member's individual deposit cap and pulls their tax bracket down a step, so upgrading the building benefits the whole roster at once. There's no cartel-wide ceiling — the limits sit on the member, not on the vault.
Pay / Claim
Capo, Co-Capo, or anyone with the permission can queue payouts to specific members from vault funds.
Payouts sit in a Claim state — the member collects it themselves. Untaxed, since it's already-taxed cartel money going back out.
Unclaimed payouts expire back into the vault after 7 days.
A Remind button next to any unclaimed payout fires an in-game mail to that member telling them they have cash waiting. Capos shouldn't have to chase people in Discord over a payout the game already knows about. Rate-limited to once per payout per day so it can't be used to spam someone's inbox, and a "Remind all" option for anyone with the payroll permission.
Every action logged — deposits, withdrawals, payouts, permission changes — from Vault L1, not gated behind anything. Handing a co-capo access to the cartel's cash without an audit trail is asking for drama, so the log ships with the building.
This finally gives cartels a real payroll instead of capos manually sending cash one member at a time and hoping they remembered everyone.
The long-game building. Everything here is slow, compounding, and aimed at the members rather than the map.
Core: increases the success chance of sicarios on expeditions, scaling with level. Expeditions are one of the few places where a cartel-level investment can visibly de-risk an individual's decision, which makes this a good anchor for the building.
Intelligence cap: +300 flat. Flagging this one myself as the debatable number — it's the single largest permanent stat change in this post, and if it lands it should be spread across the levels (+60 per level, say) rather than granted at L1. I'd rather it get argued down now than get nerfed three weeks after launch.
Intelligence gain: +0.1% per level to intelligence gained, so 0.5% at max. Small on purpose. It's meant to reward cartels that have had a School standing for months, not to be felt on day one.
University: shortens course duration by up to 10% at max level. Courses are long enough that this is genuinely valuable without touching anything's power level, which makes it the safest perk on the building.
Gymnasium (School add-on). Built onto an existing School rather than taking its own territory or slot — it's an extension, not a separate site. Increases all gym gains by up to 1% at max level.
I want to be upfront that the Gymnasium is permanent cartel-wide power creep, which is a different category of thing from everything else in this post. 1% is small enough that I think it's fine, but it's the number I'd expect pushback on, and I'd rather cap it low and raise it later than the reverse. It should also require the School at max level first — an add-on that outpaces the building it's attached to is backwards.
The unglamorous one, and probably the one people would actually build first. Roads are laid on a territory and improve everything moving through it.
Core: flat % increase to cash payouts from production facilities on that territory, scaling with level.
Perk floor: lowers the chance of rolling a low-level perk in the Sunday rotation for that territory. Perks are 1–5 right now, and pulling a 1 on a good tile feels awful. Roads don't change the rotation or what perks exist — the weekly roll happens exactly as it does today. They just weight it away from the bottom of the range. At max level you'd still see a 2, just far less often than a 1.
Stacking: because each road only serves its own territory, this is exempt from the duplicate halving rule. Roading your whole map is a legitimate long-term goal rather than a trap.
That perk-floor effect is the part I'd push hardest for. It's the first thing in this post that makes an existing territory better rather than adding something new next to it, which is the whole reason to tie KOTH into the normal map.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Copper Still Coil
2.7 Improvised Armored Vehicles — infrastructure, no building slot
Cartel motor pool. Bolted plate, sandbags, and a welder's optimism.
Core: % increase to cash gained from jobs performed on that territory, and from its production facilities.
Stacks with Roads rather than overlapping — Roads improve the production side, IAVs improve the earning side, so a fully developed tile wants both.
Exempt from duplicate halving for the same reason as Roads.
Upkeep: small cash cost per cycle. Vehicles need fuel and parts, and it gives the whole thing an ongoing cost so infrastructure isn't purely free money once built.
The two together give cartels something to spend surplus materials on once the four structures are maxed.
3. Raid Tickets and the Police Station
One loose end in the current design: tickets are earned by individuals, but everything above is a cartel reward. A member who fought all week for a cartel that came second walks away with nothing personally. That needs its own outlet.
Rename them Raid Tickets. "Bounty tickets" is already doing double duty with regular bounties, and Raid Tickets reads better for what they actually represent.
Add a Police Station to the Town page. Raid Tickets are spent there, by the individual who earned them, on randomised rewards out of the evidence locker — everything the cops confiscated during the week, now quietly going out the back door. The flavour writes itself and it gives Town a reason to be visited by people who currently only load it for one or two things.
Rewards roll from a weighted table: cash, enhancement materials, equipment, consumables, small amounts of construction material.
Tickets are not cartel property. Nobody can be ordered to hand them over, and they don't feed the Stockpile directly.
Optionally a pity/streak counter so a run of bad rolls eventually guarantees something decent.
Tickets persist between events rather than expiring, so a member can save toward a bigger exchange tier if we want one.
This gives the whole event a second reward axis: the cartel fights for the hill, the individual banks Raid Tickets either way. Losing the hill stops being a total write-off for the people who showed up, which is exactly the attendance problem capos are dealing with now.
4. Why I think this works
It gives the hills a reason to exist beyond bragging rights, which was Vaelinn's own stated concern with Option 1.
It doesn't touch the Sunday rotation. Normal TTs keep doing what they do. This is additive.
It rewards consistency over dominance. The streak system gives long-term holders more materials, not better stats. A cartel that wins every week builds faster — it doesn't become unbeatable.
It pays out at both levels. The cartel fights for the hill; the individual banks Raid Tickets whether or not the cartel wins.
It stays tunable. The reward is a rate, so if one division snowballs it's a single number to adjust rather than a redesign.
It gives capos tools. Payroll, logs, requisitions, permissions. Cartel management is currently mostly vibes and Discord.
It converts a weekly event into a long-term project. Which is very much the pitch on the front page of this game.
I've got more on building interactions and a couple more infrastructure ideas, but this is enough to chew on for now. Happy to break any section out into its own thread if it's easier to discuss separately.
This is a follow-on from Vaelinn's Territory bounties feedback thread. I voted Option 1 (King of the Hill) there, with ticket steal, and I like Das's roster sign-up idea as a better version of the fair-fight gate.
But Vaelinn named the real risk in his own post: "special tiles need to feel worth caring about." A crown that only says "we won last week" will be dead content by month two. So this thread is my pitch for what the four hills should actually do, and how they feed back into the normal map instead of sitting off to the side.
Short version: the hills don't give perks — they give raw materials. Materials build and upgrade permanent Cartel Buildings on your own territories. Sunday perk rotation on normal TTs stays exactly as it is. This is a new layer, not a replacement.
1. How the four hills should work
Each hill is assigned to a division and fought over by the cartels in it — gold-tier cartels are contesting the gold-tier hill, and so on. So all four hills should offer the same menu of things to produce. The difference between them is reward scale: the higher the division, the better the output. That keeps every bracket playing the same game, just at different stakes, and it means the content doesn't have to be rebuilt if divisions get re-cut later.
The mechanic: every hill has one empty Industry slot. Whoever holds it installs an industry of their choice, and that's what the tile produces until the next event.
Important: every industry also produces Machined Tooling alongside its specialty material — roughly a 70/30 split, specialty to Tooling. An event cycle can run a full week, and a week of nothing but glassware would leave you with a pile of glass and still no Armory, because every recipe needs Tooling too. The split means a single cycle always ends with something buildable. The Fabrication Yard is then the industry that flips that ratio hard in Tooling's favour — you install it when you're short on the universal material, not because it's the only source of it.
This turns the crown into an actual decision every week — what do we need right now? — instead of a passive trophy.
The four Industries
Machined Tooling being the universal component is deliberate — every building recipe needs Tooling plus one specialty material. That's what stops a cartel from parking on Fabrication Yard forever and capping everything out: all the Tooling in Bolivia won't build you an Armory without glassware to go with it. The other three industries are the "we know what we're building next" picks, and the 30% Tooling trickle means picking one is never a wasted week.
Reward scale and repeat holds
Your division sets the output rate — how much the hill produces per tick. That's the whole difference between the four hills, and it's the simplest lever to tune once it's live.
On top of that, holding the same hill across consecutive events raises your output rate, stepping up on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th consecutive hold and capping there. Lose the hill for one cycle and you drop one step rather than resetting to zero — enough to sting, not enough to make a bad week feel like a wipe.
This directly answers Das's question about repeat holds: yes, there's a streak reward, but it's more materials, not a stacking combat buff. A dynasty cartel builds faster; it doesn't get harder to kill.
Generation rules
2. Cartel Buildings
Buildings are placed on territories you already own — not on the hill. That's the whole point: the KOTH layer exists to make the normal map deeper. One building per territory, so a cartel with more land can host more buildings.
There are two categories. Structures (2.1–2.5) take the territory's single building slot. Infrastructure (2.6–2.7) does not — it sits on top of a territory alongside whatever's built there, and it's meant to be broad quality-of-life rather than a specialisation. You should never have to choose between a Shipyard and a paved road.
Buildings are never destroyed. If a rival cartel takes the territory, they take the building on it, at its current level, intact. A month of materials shouldn't evaporate because you lost one tile — and more importantly, it makes developed territories worth invading. Taking a tile with a L4 Shipyard on it should be a genuine prize.
Duplicates give diminishing returns. Benefits halve for each additional building of the same type a cartel controls: 1st = 100%, 2nd = 50%, 3rd = 25%, 4th = 12.5%, and so on. This is the important half of the rule. Without it, capturing buildings turns into a runaway — the biggest cartel hoovers up every Armory on the map and compounds forever. With it, a captured second Armory is still worth taking (it's a real gain, and it's a real loss for whoever you took it from), but it's never worth hunting every one of them. It also means a cartel with four territories is best served building four different things, which is what makes the whole system interesting.
Levels 1–5 across the board. Every upgrade: Machined Tooling + specialty material + cash + a Cartel Rep threshold.
2.1 Armory
The smuggling and enhancement building — and the only building that touches enhancement materials. Everything here affects how members acquire Street-Quality / Syndicate-Issued / Blacksite Prototype enhancements through the two routes that already exist, smuggling and scrapping. It does not create them out of construction materials.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Refinery Glassware
2.2 Shipyard
The submarine building, and the answer to "the sub is great but maintaining it is miserable."
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Copper Still Coil
2.3 Headquarters
The icon of the update, and the building I'd want to be the visual centrepiece (this ties directly into the cartel identity thread).
Only one HQ per cartel, and relocating it should cost real money and take real time.
Recipe: all four materials in smaller amounts — it's the hub, it should require you to have touched every industry at least once.
2.4 Vault
Cartel banking, and the piece that pairs with the cash-safety discussion here.
Deposits
The reason for both: this must not become a free anti-mugging shield. A player who joins a cartel on Monday shouldn't be able to park their entire net worth somewhere untouchable on Tuesday. The tax and the cap mean the vault is a service you earn, and estate vault upgrades stay relevant — you still want your own vault, the cartel vault is for the overflow and for people who've put in the work.
Withdrawals
Pay / Claim
This finally gives cartels a real payroll instead of capos manually sending cash one member at a time and hoping they remembered everyone.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Hydro Rig Components (steel and wiring, essentially)
2.5 School
The long-game building. Everything here is slow, compounding, and aimed at the members rather than the map.
Gymnasium (School add-on). Built onto an existing School rather than taking its own territory or slot — it's an extension, not a separate site. Increases all gym gains by up to 1% at max level.
I want to be upfront that the Gymnasium is permanent cartel-wide power creep, which is a different category of thing from everything else in this post. 1% is small enough that I think it's fine, but it's the number I'd expect pushback on, and I'd rather cap it low and raise it later than the reverse. It should also require the School at max level first — an add-on that outpaces the building it's attached to is backwards.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Refinery Glassware. Gymnasium: Machined Tooling + Hydro Rig Components.
2.6 Roads — infrastructure, no building slot
The unglamorous one, and probably the one people would actually build first. Roads are laid on a territory and improve everything moving through it.
That perk-floor effect is the part I'd push hardest for. It's the first thing in this post that makes an existing territory better rather than adding something new next to it, which is the whole reason to tie KOTH into the normal map.
Recipe: Machined Tooling + Copper Still Coil
2.7 Improvised Armored Vehicles — infrastructure, no building slot
Cartel motor pool. Bolted plate, sandbags, and a welder's optimism.
The two together give cartels something to spend surplus materials on once the four structures are maxed.
3. Raid Tickets and the Police Station
One loose end in the current design: tickets are earned by individuals, but everything above is a cartel reward. A member who fought all week for a cartel that came second walks away with nothing personally. That needs its own outlet.
Rename them Raid Tickets. "Bounty tickets" is already doing double duty with regular bounties, and Raid Tickets reads better for what they actually represent.
Add a Police Station to the Town page. Raid Tickets are spent there, by the individual who earned them, on randomised rewards out of the evidence locker — everything the cops confiscated during the week, now quietly going out the back door. The flavour writes itself and it gives Town a reason to be visited by people who currently only load it for one or two things.
This gives the whole event a second reward axis: the cartel fights for the hill, the individual banks Raid Tickets either way. Losing the hill stops being a total write-off for the people who showed up, which is exactly the attendance problem capos are dealing with now.
4. Why I think this works
I've got more on building interactions and a couple more infrastructure ideas, but this is enough to chew on for now. Happy to break any section out into its own thread if it's easier to discuss separately.