Cities

**Cities** are where you trade, repair, refuel, gather intelligence, recruit Tarkhans and possibly trigger Events.

There are five main city types in the game:

* Fuel Depot: fuel bought in this city is 40% cheaper and ships refuel twice as fast.
* Shipyard: 5x faster repair docks, Shipworks have larger amounts of general modules.
* Signal Center: you can learn about positions and routes of enemy Strike Groups, Tactical Groups or Convoys here. The Intel slowly regenerates over time.
* Merchants: Shipworks have rare modules(weapons, sensors, planes, missiles)
* Mercenaries: ships for sale complete with crew and full fuel tanks. Some ships may not initially appear if a Tarkhan is present, your ships are landed or until you buy other ships already available. There can be up to 6 ships for sale per city.

In addition there are two special types of cities: Ur and Fleet HQs(including Khiva) Ur is always the starting city; Fleet HQs are starting locations of enemy Strike Groups and also serve as checkpoints in the campaign. Neither Ur nor Fleet HQs have any special features.

To make use of a city you first have to defeat its garrison - preferably using a Sudden Strike - then complete the Crash Site minigame. Alternatively the garrison can be lured out of the city if you trigger an Alarm within the garrison's bingo fuel range (about 500km or less) Except for Khiva the size of the garrison is proportional to the size of the city circle on strategic map.

Staying in a city for too long will cause it to become Dangerous which culminates in an Alarm(see the page for details) The Dangerous status does not decay.

Nuking a city can destroy its infrastructure - Repair docks, Shipworks and/or Supplies screens.

### Hidden Cities/People

In addition to cities always visible on the map there are also 6 Hidden Cities in the game which are... hidden until they enter your visual(and only visual, FCR radars don't count) identification range at which point they will appear on the strategic map as normal. These cities never have garrisons, never become Dangerous and you gain some Armament and 2 global Morale the first time you visit one. Hidden Cities don't have a type.

You can get hints as to where Hidden Citites are from the Caravan Events and Tarkhans with the "Ask for Shelter" favor but they are always vague(i.e. "north of [city name]") Hovewer because Hidden Cities can only spawn at least 600km away from normal cities/map edge so you can use the compass tool to drastically narrow your search radius. The southern map edge is at Ur, the east and west edges are 3000km in either direction. Hidden Cities cannot spawn within 4000km of Khiva.

The easiest way to find Hidden Cities is to use any radar in ground search mode as Hidden Cities always spawn surrounded by a cluster of roads. When you see roads in the middle of nowhere just follow them - the city itself will appear as a big blotch on the radar. Blotches not surrounded by roads are mountains.

You can also do the same without any radar by zooming all the way in and trying to locate the Hidden City visually using the 100km(75km at night) normal visibility radius. Same rules follow - look for roads, especially ones that go from known cities out into the desert. Depending on search area this can take much longer and occupies a lot of your attention. Note that you cannot use aircraft for this as they do not reveal terrain.

### Bugs

There are two bugs specific to cities - Shipworks store dropping as loot and Hidden City generation. See bugs.