Crew

*The salt of the Earth. Hard working. For a price.*

At various points in the game, you will have the option to spend money to recruit people to work Your Character. After you've recruited people, you'll have options when doing some activities to have your crew contribute.

Each location in the game has a different set of crew. You might have 12 guys in the Cinci Bordertown, 7 in the Cinci Slums, and only 2 guys at the Cinci Dump.

You generally want as much crew as you can afford. You don't have to pay crew on any schedule, but they'll still want to be paid sometimes. You can often give them alcohol, drugs, or weapons in lieu of actual cash. How much crew you can afford is a question, but even in the early game, you can probably manage at least 7 and once you start Making Money, you'll want 12 or more.

## The benefits of crew

Crew help in a lot of ways. They can act as informants when you're searching for someone, or distractions when you're chasing someone or running from someone. They can collect rumors for you. They're generally useful.

### Specialty Teams

You can also go to your Inventory tab and create specialty teams from your crew. This reduces the amount of crew you have generally available, but gives you a specialized resource that can perform other tasks. For instance, if you go the Cinci Dump and get involved in the Junk trade, a Logistics Team will do most of the work. Teams are specific to a place, and you generally need a Familiarity of 10 in a place to set up a team there. You can have multiples of some teams.

Some specialty teams are very expensive to set up: Logistics teams require a Flatbed Truck or Pickup, and murder squads require a payment of $1,700.

Specialty teams have a Quality. If at all possible, you want it to be at least 15 and 20 or more is helpful. You can use Advanced Moods or Inspired Thinking to encourage your crews to increase their Quality, or you can give them money or goods. Some crews can also be trained, which also increases your Skills. Specialty Teams need a minimum Quality of 7 to be trained, and automatically disband if their Quality reaches 0. If you have multiple teams of the same type in the same location, the costs in goods, money, information, or moods to raise their Quality is multiplied by the number of teams.

An Informer Network is very useful if you decide to build Your Fuel Depot, because there are multiple cards that cost $350-700 to resolve, or you can use the Informer network to improve it for free.

### Trusted Sidekicks

If you have crew, you'll sometimes get a card that lets you evaluate them for a Trusted Sidekick. It's a very hard Skill/Leadership test, but it's very worthwhile. Trusted sidekicks, at a minimum, let you manage your specialty teams that are in another location. They can also give other benefits, such as Patterns and Mysteries for free.

You can't convert Contacts like Contact/Ann or Contact/Smith into sidekicks. You have to get the sidekick from your crews. The test is slightly easier as the size of your crews increase.

## Drawbacks of Crew

Supporting a crew will cost you money and goods. You have to decide how much crew that you can afford.

Crew members will sometimes die. Life in Cinci is cheap. Selling the dead bodies of a crew member to the Backstreet Clinic is somewhat profitable, but it will also scare off some of your crew members, so do it with caution.