Pillage

General

A pillage is sending one stack of your army, to raid another kingdom for population,geld and items and burn some land including buildings (make it wilderness)

In a pillage attack, you send one stack of your units into another kingdom.

• If unsuccessful,
  • the pillager is warded off and loses a significant number (if not all) of the sent stack. The remaining numbers flee like thieves in the night, back to your kingdom.
    • This way, pillaging is a way to 'disband' undisbandable units.
  • A pillage is blocked when the raiding army is spotted. The more units you have (relative to your land), the better the chance you spot invading armies and block.
    • The odds to ward off pillagers depends foremost on the number of units within the defensive army, not on the power.
    • The odds to ward off pillagers also depend on protection by Forts (if you maintain enough, your warding army will pay maximum attention)

• If successful,
  • The pillager takes home some geld, population (in variable amounts depending on the interior of the targeted kingdom and the size of the raiding party) and possibly one item.
  • The pillager burns some of the Farms, Towns, Workshops and Guilds on the pillages land to wilderness, but the pillager does not take or destoys land (unlike siege and regular attacks).
  • The amount of goods that pillaging units can carry depends on their stack power, not on their numbers.
  • The pillager can only bring home booties of mages within 50% of your net power before the pillage (otherwise the distance is too large and your troops lose their stuff on the way).
  • If your pillage makes that the victim had 10% land burned in the last 24 hours, the victim enters Pillage Protection.
  • If the victim has neither Farms,Towns, Workshops nor Guilds, then no buildings will be burned. Such mages will not enter Pillage Protection.

• A pillage takes 2 turns
• A pillage can be blocked by Hallucination - the attacker loses 2 turns + war expense

• Epidemics can be transferred from attacker to defender and from defender to attacker in pillages.
• Enchantments can be dispelled by Pillages, no matter if you win or not.

Pillaging Formulas

Edited, starting from War Formulas from the Ronin Assassins page

Taking an item

• You steal one item in a pillage, when you send sufficiently powerfull troops
  • (and the party is not discovered)
  • (and the victim has stealable items)

• minimum number of troops to steal an item = 50 * (target's land) / (power rank of unit used)
• Unique Items cannot be taken just as lesser items
• Magical Compass and Minor Indulgence cannot be taken in a pillage. <- EDIT, now there is 25% chance to pilage it

Resources taken through Pillage

You are more vulnerable to losing stuff on pillages, when you have a relative small number of farms and towns. Amount stolen is proportional to how many troops you send(NP wise). E.G. If you need 200 NP*2k land worth of troops(400k NP) for max pillaging, but only send 350k NP worth, you will only pillage 87.5% instead of 100%.

•  % Population captured = (1/6) * % of farms burned
•  % Population killed = (1/3) * % of farms burned
•  % Geld stolen = (1/5) * % of towns burned (If target has no towns, you automatically steal up to 1/5th)

Buildings destroyed through Pillage

The maximum number of buildings that can be destroyed in a single pillage is 100.

• Number of Farms burned = round_down(X * 60)
• Number of Towns burned = round_down(X * 25)
• Number of Workshops burned = round_down(X * 10)
• Number of Guilds burned = round_down(X * 5)

with

• X = proportion of max. buildings that you can destroy in one pillage
• X = .005 * NP of troops sent / target's land
  • i.e. the max number of farms you can destroy in a pillage is 60, towns 25, etc.

For maximum effect (full pillage), the maximum value for X is 1,

• this is reached when you select a stack from your for which
  • pillage stack net power = 200 * target's land
• If you desire to only burn a portion of a full pillage, scale down the stack NP accordingly.

nodes, barriers, forts, barracks, wilderness are not visited in pillages (logically... that is where your army lives and where no people, geld and items live, and m.p. cannot be stolen...]]

Pillage Blocking

(incomplete information)

• forts above 1% is good
• xxxx units (doesn't matter how strong) / acre is good
  • in combination this gives almost 100% pillage warding

Pillage Protection

After a mage has had 10% of their acres razed by pillages he or she enters pillage protection.

• This is indicated by the "--" symbol in the ranklist (since Sept. 2006)
• It lasts as long as within the last 24 hours, over 10% of your acres was pillaged.

See Pillage Protection.