Devastation and Raids

[FactionHeir]

Raids hurt yourself in the long term as the black areas do not disappear quickly at all. Something like 2 turns per 1 turn camped or so.

If you end up deciding to take the province, you will suffer from the devastation.

[Valdincan]

I generally dont do raids. I prefer to attack with really large armies, take out any armies around, then siege for a few turns then assault. Due to the extremely large size of my force, I only lose a few hundred men for the entire "objective".

[Jagger]

Today, I did a raid on French while under warning by the Pope to leave France alone. The Pope did nothing. Looks like a good way to economically attack a country without the Pope getting mad.

[SigniferOne]

If only raids caused you as much profit as they caused the other guy damage, more people would do them. Of course in history the profit was the most common reason to raid in the first place.

But I think we can easily make raiding profitable through scripts, or even adding some VnVs to the general.

[Kobal2fr]

In my Hungarian campaign I've been raiding the Byzantines extensively. My forces were bogged in a long back-and-forth war against Venice, and while the Byz had to worry about the Turks, they still were active around Sofia, and even had the cheek to bid me become their vassals !

So, I used the remnants of the forces that had sieged Sofia (7 Magyar Cav, 1 Hungarian Noble) to do a little pillaging. First I hid some in a forest to ambush units going from Constantinople to Duras and back, or forming up for an assault on Sofia. Destroyed two siege weapons, 4 horse archers, 3 militias and ... The Emperor himself, in a few turns. Not one single ambush though, I figure the Byz must have had spies, or spotted me hiding. The Byz didn't send armies after them so I got bold and parked them on roads, but then they sent horse archers of their own to take care of them. I retreated back to Sofia.

Next turn, I sent the last two intact HAs to siege Thessalonica, hoping to draw the defenders out, pepper them with arrows, flee and repeat next turns... And then I noticed my lone, forgotten spy had managed to open the gates ! I figured, what the heck, there's only a general and a bunch of spearmen in there, go for it. Brought in the rest of the battered remnants of my HAs, stormed the place. Lost almost all of them to the general alone, because skirmishing don't work too well in streets but I took the city eventually. Can't possibly hold it of course, I'm stretched enough as it is so... Sacked it, sold every single building, cranked taxes to max, retreated the HAs back to Sofia to refit them.

Now not only have I a 4-figured treasury for the first time in god knows how long (I play 1y/1t so halved all farming in every region... And boy, am I poor), but the Byz have lost their second biggest city to Rebels... and Duras is cut off from capital so it revolts as well (remember how I killed the militia going there to keep the peace ). Not bad for a bunch of leftover plinkers, don't you think ?