Devlog · 28 September 2026

The Police HQ: Blockline's first walk-in venue

Most buildings in a city builder are a coloured square with a number attached. The Police HQ is an experiment in doing something different with a few special sites: you can go inside it. Entering the HQ swaps the city map for an animated 3D headquarters, with its own staff, its own patrol cars and its own computer, and the decisions you make there feed straight back into the city's crime and safety.

What the HQ does for your city

The Police HQ unlocks with the A skyline of our own chapter, and you can build only one. It does not patrol any streets itself. Instead it coordinates the police stations you already have. Each station linked to the HQ reaches up to 3 tiles further and can police more residents, and the HQ's detectives and community officers take crime off on top of that.

That design choice matters: an HQ with no stations beneath it adds almost nothing. It rewards a city that has already built a sensible spread of stations, rather than replacing them with one big building.

There is a limit to how many stations the HQ can coordinate at once, and it grows as your officers' training improves. A station that is not linked tells you why in its inspector: perhaps the HQ is still being built, it has no street connection to the HQ, or the HQ is already coordinating as many stations as it can. Hovering over the HQ with the inspect tool draws gold lines to the stations it coordinates and red lines to the ones it does not.

Running the department

Inside, you assign 10 squads across four desks, and each one is a trade-off between today and later:

• Patrol pays off immediately with more reach and capacity at linked stations, but too many patrols wear down public trust.
• Investigations work open cases. Closing a case brings lasting relief from crime that builds up over weeks.
• Training raises the HQ's performance and the number of stations it can coordinate, slowly.
• Community builds trust, which adds capacity and cuts crime gradually.

You can also pick a priority district. Stations inside it reach a little further and its cases move faster, at the cost of a little reach elsewhere.

Neglect shows. The HQ's performance depends on police funding, power, its connection to the digital network, the condition of the building and the training of its officers. Without power it runs its radio room on a backup generator at 30% performance. The problems list names the weakest factor and how to fix it. Bulldozing and rebuilding is not a shortcut either: training and trust fade while no HQ is operating.

Walking in

The HQ's inspector has an Enter button. The map gives way to a cut-away isometric view of the building: the motor pool, dispatch centre, case room, academy, front desk and community room. Officers are at their desks according to how you have allocated the squads, the dispatch wall lights up with incidents, and the screens turn amber if the HQ loses its internet connection. Patrol cars park nose-out and reverse into their bays. Day and night follow the city's own clock.

The HQ has its own computer, Precinct OS, separate from the Mayor's Computer, with apps for the case board, the academy and the department's reports. Keeping each venue's apps on its own computer stops the Mayor's desktop from filling up with police paperwork.

Two mini-games

• Dispatch Drill. A short real-time round in which you route three cars to a stream of prioritised calls on a grid of blocks. A good run gives the HQ a temporary performance bonus. Only the day's first run counts, so you cannot simply retry until you get a perfect score.
• Evidence Board. A small logic puzzle: four suspects and three clues, and only all three clues together point to one person. Charge the right suspect and the case closes at once; charge the wrong one and you lose trust and time.

Both are optional, and both are re-scored by the simulation itself, which also limits how much they can help in a day.

Why build venues at all?

A city of tens of thousands can start to feel abstract. Walking into a building and seeing the effect of your choices, whether that is an empty dispatch room or a packed case board, makes the numbers feel real. The HQ was also built as the foundation for later venues, which can share its engine, people and furniture. The venues guide covers every walk-in building in one place.