ROC City

What ROC City is

ROC City is a real-time strategy game built like a castle-age classic, except the castle is a social club on the streets of Rochester, New York. You start with a club, a handful of collectors and a map of shops that have not yet been asked for protection money. The East Side crew starts with the same thing on the other side of town.

Collectors are your economy. Send them to a shop and they walk a route, lean on the owner and bring tribute back to the club. Shops run out of patience, so part of playing well is keeping collectors moving to fresh ones instead of squeezing the same block all game.

Money buys buildings. Safehouses raise the number of mobsters you can keep. Gambling houses, speakeasies and nightclubs are rackets, which earn dirty money on their own without anyone standing there. Then there are the soldiers: enforcers with chains, shooters with guns and, late on, cars packed with explosives for the buildings you cannot fight your way into.

The computer plays the same game you do. It expands, it defends its rackets and it will come for your collectors while they are out in the open. A match ends when one crew has nothing left to fight with, and the scoreboard at the end breaks down money made, units trained, enemies beaten, units lost and buildings razed for both sides.

The whole city is drawn in code in an isometric 3D view, so the buildings, cars and crews are all built from shapes rather than loaded as art.

Screenshots

How to play

1. Select with a left click, or drag a box around a group. Double-click a unit to grab every one like it on screen.
2. Send collectors to shops. Click a shop with collectors selected and they start bringing tribute back to the club.
3. Build by selecting collectors and pressing Build. You can build over houses and trees, because the crew buys out the lot.
4. Train by selecting a building, then right-click the map to set where new units gather. Aim that point at a shop and new collectors go straight to work.
5. Fight by selecting soldiers and clicking what you want gone. Space jumps the camera to the last attack.
6. Keep expanding. A crew that stops opening new rackets loses to the one that does not.

Controls

On a phone or tablet: Tap your units to select them, then tap where they should go or what they should work on. Drag to scroll the map. The letters on the buttons are their shortcuts on a keyboard.

Tips

• Count your idle collectors. The period key finds them, and an idle collector is money you are not making.
• Rackets beat tribute in the long run, because they earn without a unit standing there. Build them as soon as you can afford them.
• Collectors out on a route are the easiest thing on the map to kill. Keep a few enforcers near the shops you are working.
• Safehouses first when you are at your unit cap, or your training buildings sit there doing nothing.
• Car bombs are for buildings, not for crews. Save them for the rackets you cannot reach by force.

Questions

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