Pillaging for Fun & Profit

So you're playing a peaceful game but things are getting a little boring making buildings and maybe your economic dominance has you hitting a wall anyway with not much left to build. Going on a mini conquering spree is going to throw your carefully balanced tall empire out of whack so that simply won't do. You need a sucker -- somebody you can rough up with little risk to you.

Prime Candidate:
1. Neighbor.
2. Has been an unbalanced to you all game and you just can't get a profitable trade going with him.
3. Hates one of his other neighbors.
4. You are friends with that other neighbor.
5. That other neighbor has a stronger military than you.

The real idea is to just attack someone when he's in a serious war with someone else. If you're just bored, try to get a neighbor powerhouse to declare on him and start in a few turns later. While he's distracted fighting the other guy send in a couple cavalry on a pillage spree. I've seen pillage values as high as 40 gold per improvement. If you're really on a tear this actually can set the AI back just enough to give you breathing room later when you're on a heavy build push. And the magical hidden super happy bonus... Stalemated wars where you just push forces back usually only end in neutral peace deals. This can be the tiny push necessary to broker a favorable peace deal where you will make money and/or resources. $$$!!!!!

All in all it's a good way for tall empires with a few spare hammers to make money off of uncooperative AIs while having a bit of fun in the process.

I'd never really tried pillaging before in Civ 5, since I'm usually a conqueror capturing the territory I'm invading, and don't want to damage my future investment. Yet you bring up a really interesting possibility! In a peaceful game, without actually taking any cities or killing (many) units it won't cause much war anger from other peaceful leaders.

This should be an even more powerful strategy with the pillage-friendly promotion for Vanguard-class units in the next version.

Ya the first mention of Vanguard is what made me type this up. I was like oooooooooo

GoodRevrnd said:

...This can be the tiny push necessary to broker a favorable peace deal where you will make money and/or resources. $$$!!!!!

Click to expand...

This is the main problem with the strategy. If you pillage all the enemy's resources, you won't get them when they sue for peace.

Well, this strategy is used against a leader we cannot trade with anyway. I haven't seen leaders accept favorable onesided peace treaties as much lately... usually they are the ones making demands. For a while now I've been working at making the AIs value different sorts of peace bargains in a more rational manner than vanilla.

I'm playing Civ 5 on a Mac, and I can't find a pillage command, keystroke etc.
On previous versions it was a clickable button when possible.
I thought it had been taken out of the game but then I saw your thread.
I also found a one sentence reference to it in the Civilopedia, but no explanation of how.
thanks,
ernie

Amaruq said:

I'm playing Civ 5 on a Mac, and I can't find a pillage command, keystroke etc.
On previous versions it was a clickable button when possible.
I thought it had been taken out of the game but then I saw your thread.
I also found a one sentence reference to it in the Civilopedia, but no explanation of how.
thanks,
ernie

Click to expand...

Sorry, I found it. The little skull icon I was mistaking for the "disband" skull icon.
thanks, ernie