Security & Threats

Two separate values track how safe your operation is: Trust, per Settlement, and Security, per region.

Trust reflects how well a Settlement's ongoing Food supply is holding up. It's not the same as the Fill level described in Progression — Trust reacts to sustained shortages, not momentary dips.

If a Settlement goes without enough Food for long enough, it falls into unrest. An unrest Settlement still accepts normal Food deliveries, but its growth (levels and projects) pauses until Trust recovers.

Trust rises while a Settlement is supplied, and the fuller its stock, the faster. That is one rule, and it applies everywhere — there is no special crisis mode.

This is why the order you get during unrest reads “fill the stock to 100 %” and not “top it up past 85 %”. Topping a Settlement up to just past the line technically stops the shortage and then leaves it crawling back for the rest of the evening. Filling it properly is the difference between one sortie and five hours of waiting.

One aircraft speeds this up further: a Food delivery flown by a UH-1H raises the receiving Settlement's recovery rate by half for ten minutes. See Which helicopter to fly.

A region can also build for it: a Civic Administration at its City raises the recovery rate of every Settlement in the region by 25 % or 50 % — see City projects. It multiplies the rates in the table above, so it is worth most where the stock is already kept full.

Trust only falls once a Settlement's stock drops under 75 %, and the emptier it gets, the faster. At or above 75 % it does not fall at all — a brief dip right around that line costs almost nothing, because the rate is deliberately flat close to it. There's no cliff to fall off and no need to panic over one bad delivery cycle.

A Settlement genuinely running dry loses Trust fast; one that merely dips under the line and gets topped back up loses almost none.

Unrest that nobody answers does not stay where it started.

Four things keep this fair, and they are worth knowing:

• The clock only runs while someone is flying. An empty server does not escalate overnight, and a Settlement that is being resupplied stops climbing the ladder even before its Trust has recovered.
• Spreading never does worse than unrest. A Settlement dragged down by its neighbours stops at the unrest threshold. It never loses a level, a project or a build slot.
• Fixing the source stops the spread at once. The moment the original Settlement climbs back over 55 %, the spread ends. Neighbours that already lost Trust recover normally from wherever they are — no free reset, no permanent damage.
• A full stock outruns the spread across a region border. 0.5 %/min loses against the 0.6 %/min a full Settlement recovers at. Inside a region, at 1 %/min, it does not — there you have to go and fix the source.

A Civil Defense Office at a region's City halves that inbound rate, or quarters it at level 2 — enough to make a region's own full stocks outrun even the 1 %/min inside it. It only damps what arrives: a Settlement of that region that falls into unrest itself still drags on everyone around it.

Security reflects how safe the airspace over a region is, independent of Trust. Low Security means more enemy ground presence and a higher chance of cargo flights through the region being ambushed.

Security rises when players clear enemy ground groups in the region, and falls when ambushes go badly (see below) — but it never drops below that region's Security floor. The floor rises only through completed Checkpoint projects at a Hub, started from the same F10 > Other > Tycoon > Projects menu used for Settlement levels and the Survey Station. Combat swings ride on top of the floor and can never push a region below it.

The one thing that does lower the floor is tearing the Checkpoint down: demolishing it removes its floor, and the Security it granted when it was built comes back off the regional value. Standing infrastructure holds the line; nothing else takes it away.

Once the Airspace Command stands somewhere on the map, every region gets 10 points of floor on top of whatever its own Checkpoint holds — including regions that never built one. It adds to the Checkpoints, it does not replace them, and it goes away again if the Institution is ever torn down.

Every point of Security counts, all the way to 100. Ambush risk falls steadily across the whole scale rather than switching off partway up, so a region at 75 % is meaningfully safer than one at 55 % — and only a region at 100 % is safe from ambushes outright. Checkpoints alone take a region to 65 %; the rest is fought for. That matters beyond survival, because the Dispatch Office that brings AI transports into a region asks for 75 % before it can be built.

Unrest costs a region 20 points of Security for as long as it lasts — not on the displayed value, but on every ambush roll made over that region. A region you had secured well enough to fly through unescorted is not safe while one of its Settlements is rioting. It is the one place where the logistics side and the combat side of the game meet directly: a Settlement nobody fed makes the airspace above it dangerous for everyone, including the AI transports flying through.

A Checkpoint occupies one of the host Hub's build slots, and only one Hub per region can host one — its effect covers the whole region, so a second one would add nothing. Levelling that one Checkpoint from 1 to 3 is how a region raises its floor further.

In low-security regions, enemy ground groups spawn near real villages (within about 2 km) or known sites (within about 1 km) — open ground close to something worth defending, not random wilderness. Killing them is straightforward combat content — and raises the region's Security.

When a new enemy group shows up, you'll occasionally get a threat rumor: a message that hostile activity has been reported in a region with poor Security. It doesn't reveal an exact position — just a heads-up that the airspace there needs attention. The worse a region's Security gets, the more of these you'll see.

How many groups a region fills back up to depends on its Security alone — clearing one is what stops it coming back. The Airspace Command halves how thickly they return everywhere, but it never clears them for you and it never changes the Security level at which they stop appearing.

The Tycoon Map also shows detected enemy presence as a red heatmap — no individual unit markers, just a fog that intensifies where more enemy units are concentrated. For a precise read, switch on the tile overlay: it fills the affected hex tiles deep red, so you know which hexagon those enemies are actually in.

How much of a region's presence is detected depends on its Radar Post, a Hub project: a quarter without one, then half, three quarters and finally everything. No region is ever blind, but only a level 3 Radar Post tells you that what you see is all there is. The Radar Post is pure reconnaissance — it never makes a region safer, only better understood.

Any cargo flight through an insecure region — yours or an AI delivery's — can be ambushed: an enemy group appears ahead on the flight path, near a village or site, and opens fire. Player targets get an in-game warning message when this happens.

• Taking damage while carrying cargo reduces its delivered value.
• Getting shot down drops your crates at the crash site. They can usually still be recovered through the normal pickup flow, unless they're destroyed outright.
• An ambush that goes completely unanswered — no enemies killed, target still alive — costs the region some Security.

AI delivery flights defend themselves. Their door gunners return fire once the flight is shot at, and they dispense flares against incoming missiles. What they do not do is break off a delivery to chase attackers, or go looking for a fight — they hold their route and keep flying. An AI transport caught in the open by MANPADS is still in serious trouble.

Escorting supply runs, your own or the AI's, through dangerous regions is a real, useful job. The core gameplay is still logistics, but keeping the skies safe is now part of keeping the supply chain running.