Gym

The City Gym builds the physical stats used in mugging scraps. Shooting accuracy stays on the range. Gym is fists and melee.

• Every city has its own gym, reached from the City page or the sidebar, and each one looks the part. Your stats, your training, and the fight board are the same wherever you are, so travelling never costs you progress.

• Four stations, and each one does a different job in a fight. There is no ceiling on any of them.

  • Strength is how hard you hit. Every shot you land does more damage.
  • Stamina is how much you can take before you go down.
  • Speed decides who swings first, and buys you extra shots against slower fighters.
  • Dexterity is timing. You land clean more often, and you slip more of what comes back.

• Balance matters more than any one station. A fighter with nothing in the tank goes down early no matter how hard they hit, and a fighter who cannot hurt anyone never wins on points. Lean towards a style by all means, but do not leave a station empty.

• The gym page sums this up as offence (strength and speed, what you do to them) and defence (stamina and dexterity, what they struggle to do to you). A fight is one measured against the other, so if those two numbers are miles apart you already know which station to book next.

• Each session costs energy and a small cash fee, then a short cooldown. Energy is the volume cap; adrenaline does not bypass gym.

• Every session is worth one point up to 100. Past 100 a session buys you part of a point rather than a whole one, and the further you push the more sessions each point costs. It never stops entirely.

• Watch for double gym gains events. They are worth an extra point a session while you are climbing to 100, and they halve the grind once you are past it.

• Stats decay if you leave a station idle. Decay is a percentage of your combined total rather than of each stat on its own, so holding 400 points costs the same upkeep whether that is 100 in each station or everything in one. Climbing higher still costs more training to stand still.

• When gym is live, mugging uses both fighters' gym stats as a small swing on top of rank odds, and shows a fight log. Guns stay out of mugs; equipped melee and armour matter.

Energy spent training is energy you are not spending on jobs or the dump.

Underground fights

Off the gym page is a fight board where players stake cash against each other.

• Post a fight with a stake of $1,000 or more. It costs 5 energy and your stake is held until someone takes it.

• You can only have one fight up at a time. Withdraw it any time before it is taken and your stake comes straight back.

• Taking a fight costs 5 energy and matches the stake. Anyone can take any fight, gang mates included.

• The winner takes the doubled pot minus a 10% house cut.

• Nothing is decided by a coin toss. The fight is played out exchange by exchange using both fighters' stats, and the log you read afterwards is the record of what actually happened, punch by punch. If it says you were caught clean in the fourth, that is because you were.

• Because fights are fought rather than rolled, training tells. A fighter even ten percent above you wins about three times in four, and a serious gap is close to a foregone conclusion. There is still a puncher's chance: keep swinging and a clean shot can drop anyone.

• Both fighters take damage and both earn experience. How badly you are hurt depends on how the fight went, so a conditioned fighter walks away in better shape. The loser takes the worse beating, and either fighter can end up in hospital.

The board stays blind. You see a name, a record, a stake, and how the matchup reads for you, but never the other fighter's numbers. If you are outmatched the board says so plainly before you commit. It will not stop you: take the fight anyway if you fancy it, but you have been told.