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Raiding and You; Special command, not general strat
Topic Started: Aug 7 2016, 09:58 PM (1,692 Views)
Glimbur
Guy who should know better
All my data is here.

Raiding. The manual defines it thusly
Quote:
 
A raid is a move that can only be performed by a commander with the Pillage ability if all of the units under his command also have this ability. The force under his command can raid an adjacent province, killing population, causing unrest, and gaining gold. It is essentially the same as the Pillage order except it is performed from an adjacent province. The raiding force returns to its starting province after the raid.
Raiders may be discovered by province defense or patrollers. A limited combat is initiated if the raiders are caught. In this case it will be a battle between PD + patrollers and raiders. Winning the battle will not conquer the province and there will be no pillaging done that turn regardless of outcome.


This appears to all be true, but here are some additional facts about raiding:
1) You can only raid from a friendly province. If you try to have hidden units raid, they attack their current province (not the one you ask them to raid).
2) Raiding is like attacking, in that you can only raid an adjacent enemy province unless you are flying.
3) Raiding happens before normal combat and after magic (phase 19)
4) Raiding is anonymous unless your raiders are caught by patrollers. Even if the raid fails due to poor raider skill, it is anonymous unless an actual fight starts. Smart opponents will know which civilizations have native Pillage bonus units, but there are ways to get Pillage bonus.
5) Unrest generated is somehow related to raider AP, fear, pillage bonus, and maybe size.
6) Flying raiders can be caught by patrollers. This may have been a bug at one point.
7) Raiding groups are caught one commander at a time, so the battles happen one at a time and if the patrollers are wiped out later raiding groups can succeed.

Opinions about raiding:
1) Raiding is a terrible way to make money. Income seems to be based on # killed, which is somehow a function of raider ability (combination of mobility, fear, pillage bonus, size?) and of starting population. I had a unit with 20 gems of items raiding a 7k province and making 29 gold a turn, which is a miserable rate of return.
2) Raiding is a so-so way to shut down a castle. My testing suggests that you only reliably hit 100+ unrest with a serious raider, like a Dai Oni with an Implementor Axe and flying boots (5 times out of 6 hit 100+ unrest). Raiding across multiple turns might work, but that allows your opponent to add patrollers.
3) Raiding is a pretty good way to build unrest before you invade somewhere. Just a bandit leader hit 30+ unrest three times out of six.
4) Raiding gets funny in very small population provinces. I had a naked Dai Oni raid 1770 people six times and a naked bandit leader raid 4980 people six times and the bandit leader made more unrest 5/6 times. So, be careful raiding Theorodos (or MA Ermor etc.)

All in all, I'd say raiding is a waste of your time unless you have units with Chaos Power. The money is a pittance, killing population with raids is too slow, and it takes a serious commitment to hit 100+ unrest especially in one turn. You could hire a barbarian chief and a bunch of barbarians to raid, but they'll be visible on the map unless you get them an Elven Cauldron or Flying Carpet or something. Costly, seems like a niche strategy.

If you do have Chaos Powered units, I would suggest you include some raiding in your plans if possible. The Implementor Axe gives anyone a Pillage bonus, and Flying Boots are a reasonably cheap way to get flying on a single unit. It's even ok to just have a bandit leader or two raid naked, you get some unrest even if they fail.

All my data is here. Feel free to pick it apart. Potential future research ideas include: bandit leaders with amulets of growth, re-testing naked Dai Oni in larger population province, implementor axes alone, and retesting everything with different size populations. There are also a couple of other tabs in that spreadsheet, which might make for interesting discussion but have less work behind them.
Someday I'll be good at this game. Maybe.

Steam name is [RANCH]Baked Potatoe

Skype name is lloyd.c.griscom
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Sarfus
Tartarian
Quote:
 
3) Raiding is a pretty good way to build unrest before you invade somewhere. Just a bandit leader hit 30+ unrest three times out of six.


It might be worth checking this with different scales btw. I ran a couple of tests during a conversation about Yomi a while back on desura. IIRC order scales made a massive difference to the amount of unrest generated. At neutral scales it was easy to push up the unrest a lot with the bandit chiefs, but with Order scales - especially with O3 - is was virtually impossible to get the unrest high enough to get more than +1 from chaos power with the demons.

Nice info btw, and thank you for providing the data especially.
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Glimbur
Guy who should know better
Scales could be important too. I'd better go annotate the data; we have anything from Turmoil 2 to Order 3. The single bandit walking raid is into no order or turmoil, but the Dai Oni flying with an Axe was in order 0 while the flying axe bandit leader was into order 3. Might help explain why the Dai Oni did so much better; on the other hand size supposedly matters and he still has more Fear too.
Someday I'll be good at this game. Maybe.

Steam name is [RANCH]Baked Potatoe

Skype name is lloyd.c.griscom
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Qwertystop
Member Avatar
Tartarian
Hm. Raiding happens before normal combat, but if it results in a fight it only hits patrollers and PD. Can it be used to soften an army or clear out PD before a serious fight in the same turn? Posting from my phone, or I'd check it myself.
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GlointheDark
*Spicy* Crew
Qwertystop,Aug 9 2016
12:13 PM
Hm. Raiding happens before normal combat, but if it results in a fight it only hits patrollers and PD. Can it be used to soften an army or clear out PD before a serious fight in the same turn? Posting from my phone, or I'd check it myself.


I advocate this all the time with Yomi, as raiding increases the turmoil, which boosts oni. I find the ratios of unrest generated to gold collected to be consistent with the same group, and inconsistent between groups.

Poster is exactly correct that the tactic does not work well in small population places. But that is hinted at in the manual description- you are using mass death to terrorize people. If you can't kill a lot of people there is no real terror.

As a general case, it is too niche as a boost for armies. The exception is if the enemy patrollers are using gems, and its important to disrupt their gem usage.

Occasionally, on defense the boost to supplies can be worthwhile.

But the biggest general use of raiding is to shut down enemy production.

IMO (untested) the biggest cause of the unrest variance is the innate unrest recovery endemic in each turn/events. For this reason, I try to have large raid totals, to maximize the unrest vs the recovery. I would encourage the poster to try 10K+ populations.

Does it matter if the terrain is farms (ie 10k farm vs non farm)
Does it matter if the province is large vs small.

As a niche case, unrest will also unlock events.

Finally, if you want to boost unrest in your own province, but without the population loss, blood hunt with leaders that have no blood.
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