How much gold one gets for pillaging, say, mature Towns, or the like? As someone who likes (ok, loves!) to uber-spam spies once most of the necessary infrastructure is in place, this could save me valuable time and EPs by selecting more "prime" targets than simply picking at random those closest to me, or whatever. Anyone know? Thanks in advance.

I dont think you get any gold by pillaging stuff with a spy. If you want gold, you need to do it the traditional way - declare war and send a bunch of dudes with pointy sticks to pillage...

Yeah I was afraid someone would call me out on that...I wasnt perfectly clear in my post. My spy games are part of a larger military operation, my first major war, usually coming sometime between Maces and Rifles, whereby I send ungodly amounts of spies to begin pillaging just about anything I can in order to soften things up. It works, it doesnt work, makes life easier, it doesnt make life easier...who knows, it makes me feel better. Plus is puts some of those EPs which are soon to be totally wasted when my nearest neighbor is eliminated to good (some) use.

To put it more clearly, when I begin sending in units, and am looking to pillage along the way to my target, is there any way to determine which tiles will yield the most gold from pillaging? Seems towns pillaged all the way to the earth will get you in the area of 100 total gold. It doesnt seem much to matter if the town gave 8 commerce or something less, the gold "earned" seems to be totally random. Sometimes it doesnt even seem to matter (though Im not totally sure...) whether its a town or a village. Sometimes the town will give you, say, 6 gold, while pillaging the village will net you 28 or whatever. Does it have anything to do with how long a town was a town? Meaning, when it passes the 60 turns from village to town, if it was a town for X number of turns, does the value of that town go up? How does any of this relate to, say, irrigated corn, or grassy farms, or other high producion tiles like mines?

I guess this was just a long winded way of asking: So how does the game determine how much gold one gets for pillaging? ( I knew I shoulda left that first post to one sentence :lol: )

Oh... i see :)

Well there is a <iPillageGold> tag in the Civ4ImprovementInfos.xml defining the pillaging value of a improvement. There is however some random deviation in the actual benefit in game.

I.g. Mature cottages are the best to pillage - because they yield a high <iPillageGold> (Town -> 25 Gold) and because they can be pillaged multiple times (All the way down...)

Yeah, Towns tend to net the most gold, even if you only pillage once. I think I recently found that Workshops tend to get very little gold (like, 0-2 maybe), but that might just be my bad luck

When you pillage a tile, you should be able to choose what you pillage - the improvement (mine, farm, cottage, etc.) or the road/railroad.

I like to cut off a city when I capture it, so AI reinforcements can't get there next turn.

When you pillage a tile, you should be able to choose what you pillage - the improvement (mine, farm, cottage, etc.) or the road/railroad.

I like to cut off a city when I capture it, so AI reinforcements can't get there next turn.

You have that choice in the mod I play.