Raiders trait is harmful

Ghostslayer

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 5, 2010
Messages
83
In general traits are supposed to help the player and to orientate its strategy. To my opinion, the raiders trait in FF is really too weak and in many cases even detrimental to the player.

The extra cash from pillaging is nice, but in general I do not pillage that much. When I attack a civ, it is to conquer its cities and I really prefer to keep the improvments that has been done for the towns that I expect to conquer.
And the automatic pillaging is a real pain. Especially if I am attacking an elven civ with nice improvments in ancient forests!!! Especially for towns, that I *really* do not want do degrade to a village (or worse if several attackers pass on it), even for tens of gold pieces. So in general, I avoid leaders with the raiders trait, but for some civs, you do not have the choice.

I can understand that the raiders trait in FFH with a free commando promotion from scratch was too powerful, but I think that the trait should be enhanced in FF.

1/ provide some mean to disable the automatic pillaging (like the possibility to refuse the invisibility provided by Nox Noctis).
2/ increase the usefulness of the trait. Ideas :
- extra gold when conquering a city
- +10% to city attck
- automatic gain of the commando promotion at level 3 (or 4 or 5)
- etc
 
In general traits are supposed to help the player and to orientate its strategy. To my opinion, the raiders trait in FF is really too weak and in many cases even detrimental to the player.

The extra cash from pillaging is nice, but in general I do not pillage that much. When I attack a civ, it is to conquer its cities and I really prefer to keep the improvments that has been done for the towns that I expect to conquer.
And the automatic pillaging is a real pain. Especially if I am attacking an elven civ with nice improvments in ancient forests!!! Especially for towns, that I *really* do not want do degrade to a village (or worse if several attackers pass on it), even for tens of gold pieces. So in general, I avoid leaders with the raiders trait, but for some civs, you do not have the choice.

I can understand that the raiders trait in FFH with a free commando promotion from scratch was too powerful, but I think that the trait should be enhanced in FF.

1/ provide some mean to disable the automatic pillaging (like the possibility to refuse the invisibility provided by Nox Noctis).
2/ increase the usefulness of the trait. Ideas :
- extra gold when conquering a city
- +10% to city attck
- automatic gain of the commando promotion at level 3 (or 4 or 5)
- etc

So, your basic point is that because you don't use the trait the way it was meant to be used, it's weak?

Raiders is not meant for wars of conquest. Raiders is meant for wars of destruction. Run in with fast units, pillage the land, raze the cities, and get back out. The autoraze allows your units to pillage a town (and reap the commerce benefits from doing so) and still move away; It is very strong, if used correctly.

So yes, it's a specialized trait, but it is not weak by any means. Playing Hippus, you can finance your economy off it.
 
Warring to capture cites is more of a long term strategy, since the cities themselves take some time to get useful - resist time makes them a drain on your economy for a while, ratcheting up maintenance and giving you nothing in return, and culture choke combined with the stupid ass automatic building destruction feature means that when a city comes out of revolt, it's operating well below capacity for a while, even if unhappiness isn't crippling it (if you're conquering elven cities it probably is.)

Warring with raiders is more of an "oh crap, a neighbor is getting powerful and I need my killer tech ASAP, better pillage some extra gold to finance my research" thing. Blood your army on some relatively weak civ you'd normally conquer and get immediate benefits instead of long term ones.

You do need to pick your fights just like you would without raiders though. A lot of people probably have a vision where you would use a war of pillaging to weaken a stronger civ until it can be outright beaten with force. Doesn't work that way. You'll just get counterattacked and have the :):):):) smashed out of you.

That said, I do hate the double-edged aspect of it. Every civ wants to war for conquest sometimes and a raider one is less effective at that no matter what. The only other trait that's like that is Barbarian, which in modmods offers a much greater benefit than raiders (and sucks ass in FfH).
 
So, your basic point is that because you don't use the trait the way it was meant to be used, it's weak?

Raiders is not meant for wars of conquest. Raiders is meant for wars of destruction. Run in with fast units, pillage the land, raze the cities, and get back out. The autoraze allows your units to pillage a town (and reap the commerce benefits from doing so) and still move away; It is very strong, if used correctly.

So yes, it's a specialized trait, but it is not weak by any means. Playing Hippus, you can finance your economy off it.

I agree partly. You can use it effectively in some cases, and I have already used this kind of strategy with Tasunke and its very mobile army. But it is really less effective with Hannah, or even the elven leaders and the advantages of the trait are rather limited for them. And whatever your civ, as stated by Monkeyfinger, it is a clear drawback if you want to do a conquest war, and most probably you will want to at a given time of the game.

So my point is : a trait should not be a handicap. Agressive, charismatic, financial, etc are never bad. Depending on the situation, they may be more or less useful, but they never harm.
Why should you be *obliged* to pillage the land. You should be able to order your army to take control of the cities, but not to do any damage to the land. You are supposed to be the chief :lol:
 
As Valk said, Raider Leaders should approach war in a different way. You are probably like me, turtle and tech, once you have a strong advantage in tech, build a massive army and proceed to stomp one target you KNOW you can defeat. Once they are eliminated, choose a new target, or turtle and rebuild your infrastructure. Always choose a target from those who neighbor you so you don't have a massive distance penalty to your maintenance.


For a Raider, you should declare war almost immediately. Pick on people who are bigger than you. Focus on developing units, not techs. Fight people who are far away from you. Basically, your target is anyone with a higher score than yourself, no matter where they are or how easily they can stomp you.

The goal is to force them to move from "We Tech better than you" to "We need units!" and then tie up their units with travel to find your territory. It is GREAT if you can convince some people between yourself and the enemy to keep their borders closed, or even join the war.

Since the enemy is so far away, you don't care to keep the cities which you might happen to capture. But you'd only attack a city anyway if you saw it was defended by a warrior only (or for some other reason knew it was easy picking). The main goal is to demolish the improvements, racking up some serious cash for yourself, and gimping the economy of the score leader severely. Keep some units on hills a decent distance from a city with some high mobility units nearby so you can pick off any workers sent out to repair the landscape. If the enemy has to build workers, it means they can build fewer defenders.

Even if you couldn't convince anyone to join you in the war earlier, once you wipe out all of the improvements of the civ they will probably be weak enough you can get someone to wardec them now. Let the other civ finish them off and cripple themselves with barren land. While they focus on building workers and developing their new territory, you work on replenishing your raider forces in preparation to wardec this previous ally, as they are about to climb the score charts a bit.
 
Right, I like to to build a civ and I am rather turtle and tech. But I also had a great fun with Tasunke terrorizing its neighbors and using the pillaging income to buy more and more mercenaries. I never tried the distant war that Xienwolf describes, but maybe I will. Sounds very interesting and can be fun.

Anyway, I think that this kind of strategy can be quite efficient with Tasunke, probably also with Hanna if the terrain (or rather sea!) is adapted. But for other civs... For instance, the elven civs, that are both raiders, do not seem really adapted to that. Ot course, they can sneak rapidly in the forests and this is quite efficient in the early game, but there isn't already so much interesting improvments to pillage. And when the AI has chopped most of the forest and build roads that ease retaliation, I think that one would just get slaughtered if using an using an hit, pillage and run strategy. And the elven can build so incredible civs. Whith them, FoL, and way of the forest, it is no very difficult to have at turn 200-250 a civ with several towns of size 30, each with 4 or 5 GP, producing at least 100 hammers, generating tens of gold, and to build this way a powerful army for a conquest war.

So why choosing an elven civ should *oblige* me to act as a raider? I like to build a a strong empire with this kind of civ and to conduct conquest wars later. Turtle and tech, yes. And of course, I hate to destroy any single improvment that I walk on during my conquest. I really feel this as an handicap. And I do not understand the reason for this *obligation*. If I have an Esus recon, I can *choose* either to have hidden or declared nationality. If I have Nox, I can *choose* either to be invisible or to refuse the invisibility if I need to defend a given position. If I have an adept with life1, I can *choose* either do an "autocleaning" of the terrain or not depending on my goals. Etc.

So my point is: why would a trait *impose* me some actions and *force* me to destroy improvments that I want to keep? This is not coherent. No sane leader would do that. I really think that there should be a mean to select for every unit autopillaging ON/OFF. Probably technically quite simple and it would allow a greater flexibility to play this kind of civ.
 
The point you can't use a city immediately because of unrest isn't really valid, as a tier one priestly unit can stop it with their great work spell (the +30 culture one). And you can build those without having to follow the religion, if I'm not mistaken.

It is true this trait seems rather weak now, as it forces you to have a given way to wage war. So it rather reduces your options.
 
Right, I like to to build a civ and I am rather turtle and tech. But I also had a great fun with Tasunke terrorizing its neighbors and using the pillaging income to buy more and more mercenaries. I never tried the distant war that Xienwolf describes, but maybe I will. Sounds very interesting and can be fun.

Anyway, I think that this kind of strategy can be quite efficient with Tasunke, probably also with Hanna if the terrain (or rather sea!) is adapted. But for other civs... For instance, the elven civs, that are both raiders, do not seem really adapted to that. Ot course, they can sneak rapidly in the forests and this is quite efficient in the early game, but there isn't already so much interesting improvments to pillage. And when the AI has chopped most of the forest and build roads that ease retaliation, I think that one would just get slaughtered if using an using an hit, pillage and run strategy. And the elven can build so incredible civs. Whith them, FoL, and way of the forest, it is no very difficult to have at turn 200-250 a civ with several towns of size 30, each with 4 or 5 GP, producing at least 100 hammers, generating tens of gold, and to build this way a powerful army for a conquest war.

So why choosing an elven civ should *oblige* me to act as a raider? I like to build a a strong empire with this kind of civ and to conduct conquest wars later. Turtle and tech, yes. And of course, I hate to destroy any single improvment that I walk on during my conquest. I really feel this as an handicap. And I do not understand the reason for this *obligation*. If I have an Esus recon, I can *choose* either to have hidden or declared nationality. If I have Nox, I can *choose* either to be invisible or to refuse the invisibility if I need to defend a given position. If I have an adept with life1, I can *choose* either do an "autocleaning" of the terrain or not depending on my goals. Etc.

So my point is: why would a trait *impose* me some actions and *force* me to destroy improvments that I want to keep? This is not coherent. No sane leader would do that. I really think that there should be a mean to select for every unit autopillaging ON/OFF. Probably technically quite simple and it would allow a greater flexibility to play this kind of civ.

Playing an elven civ does not mean you will automatically have Raiders. Play a different leader. :p

That said, I can see the purpose of being able to turn off autopillage; Wouldn't be difficult at all either (1 new promotion, tweak to existing raider promotion, done). My original point was more that it is NOT weak, you just have to leverage it differently. ;)
 
Playing an elven civ does not mean you will automatically have Raiders. Play a different leader. :p

For the Ljos, I could choose either Thessa or Arendel. But the defender trait of Amelanchier has such a good synergy with the archery theme of this civ...
And for the Svarts (which I really prefer), there is no other choice than Faeryl :sad:
Maybe it would be a good thing to have another leader for them with different traits (I do not think arcane is the most interesting for the svarts either)...
 
For the Ljos, I could choose either Thessa or Arendel. But the defender trait of Amelanchier has such a good synergy with the archery theme of this civ...
And for the Svarts (which I really prefer), there is no other choice than Faeryl :sad:
Maybe it would be a good thing to have another leader for them with different traits (I do not think arcane is the most interesting for the svarts either)...

Hmm. Forgot Svarts only have the one leader in FF. There are like... 5 of them in RifE. :lol:
 
Xeinwolf, the difference between attacking a bigger neighbor who is right next to you and attacking a bigger neighbor who is 20 tiles away from you is that in one case you start getting squashed by a counterattack immediately, and in the other you start getting squashed by a counterattack after 20 turns. The AI doesn't just hole up its units if they're being attacked by someone they can easily beat.

So don't do that.

It is GREAT if you can convince some people between yourself and the enemy to keep their borders closed, or even join the war.

When can you ever do this? Thanks to weird obscure quirks in AI-AI relations like peaceweight and warmonger respect, AIs tend to have pretty high relations with each other and tend to give you the " werefuse to stop trading with our close friends" line. I suppose it works if a good-aligned military civ like the Bannor gets uncomfortably big and you've got someone stingy and evil like Charadon between you, but that's a pretty specific and rare set of circumstances.
 
Mostly, I manage it by having the same religion as my neighbor and tossing them free junk on a regular basis. Techs, spare Resources, whatever. Then I am their best friend, and I can talk them into joining a war.

And yes, the AI will try to find a way to get his units to you, unless he has another target along that path. So blocking all paths to yourself, or getting another sap to play meatshield is pretty important.

But the important fact above all else is that you are a Raider civ. If your units are in position to strike before the war starts, then you demolish the infrastructure which is capable of tossing units at you before the AI ramps up to war status. Thus at best they have 1 stack of doom which they send at you, and it crumbles against your first city. After that you just have an occasional unit popping out to try and stop your mauraders (if you do this late enough in the game that mines are mandatory for production of units)
 
That's why I just open TraitInfos and replace raider with good ol' commando.
 
Raider seems to me the most interesting and quite powerful trait. Fear Svartalfar in multiplayer now.
 
Personally, I wary much preferred the base FFH raider that gave units commando.
I newer, and I mean newer pillage improvements and I even go so far not to include raider leaders into my games (her ladyship excluded).

But to each his own.
 
Raider in FF is powerful. Play as Hippus and see the destruction you can reap with just a few cavalry...
 
Top Bottom