Why my priviteer is not generating money?

[Tecibbar]

Well, I built a huge fleet of pirate, lost 20+ populations through the whipping process. Now I send them to various juicy ports and blockage them. But I don't see any increase in my income. Where do I see the income? What did I do wrong?

 

[MrCynical]

You hould get messages each turn along the lines of "your privateer has pillaged X amount of gold" for each one that's blockading. It doesn't change the actual gpt listed up by the sliders. It's added as a series of small lump sums.

 

[Navarre]

Privateers need to be placed one tile away from the city you want to pillage. Pillage and blocus are two different things. You can blockade from tiles away, but you need to place your privateer next to the city to pillage it.

 

[KMadCandy]

Privateers need to be placed one tile away from the city you want to pillage. Pillage and blocus are two different things. You can blockade from tiles away, but you need to place your privateer next to the city to pillage it.

that's not true. i plunder money from two cities at once with just one privateer by placing them in the best spot when i can. i just double-checked to make sure i wouldn't be misleading you. this is with 3.13, maybe they changed it?

 

[lutzj]

It's obviously because you spelled privateer wrong!

Are there any coastal cities in the blockade radius? Are they economically useful enough to have trade routes? Mature trading cities can give +10 gold per turn, but a freshly built one will be near-worthless.

 

[vra379971]

Did you press the cannon button to activate the effect?

 

[PieceOfMind]

Ok here's the deal.

To plunder gold from a trade route a privateer must use the blockade mission.

The blockade mission can be performed by naval units (except caravels etc.) that have at least 1 movement point left. The area of affect is a 7x7 square centred on the ship. Note this blockade can even go through land to water tiles on the other side. When you do the blockade mission all remaining movement points are used up.

For a privateer to plunder gold from a city's trade route, it's blockade area must cover all the water tiles adjacent to the city. At the start of the turn, you should see a message confirming you have plundered gold from the trade route.

NOTE you cannot use privateers to get gold from civs with whom you are at war. In this case the privateers just do the normal blockade (ie. make it impossible for enemy to work the water tiles being blockaded.

Also note it seems you can't blockade with privateers from too far out. If you are trying to blockade from outisde the enemy's culture borders (eg. 3 squares from land) then the blockade doesn't work.

 

[Jaybe]

You cannot blockade from within your OWN cultural boundaries (in 3.13 w/ Bhruic's, don't recall about otherwise). Privateers in that situation without open borders (and not at war) would make them invulnerable except to other naval units not able to ignore open border rules.

 

[Joe Harker]

The other thing might that the civ you are blockading is operating merchantilism, therefore they have no trade routes to plunder.

 

[Navarre]

that's not true. i plunder money from two cities at once with just one privateer by placing them in the best spot when i can. i just double-checked to make sure i wouldn't be misleading you. this is with 3.13, maybe they changed it?

Yeah, I just saw that after posting, one of my privateers started milking gold from two towns at once too.