Sacking Cities

[Didz]

BTW khaos, you've got it backwards : sacking nets you a lot more instant cash than extermination (which is what puzzles the OP)

My take on this is that it depicts the difference in motivation behind the action.

EXTERMINATION: As a the label justs is little more than the wanton slaughter of anyone and everyone you come across. Sort of 'kill first ask questions later.' Consequently, as dead men tell no tales the haul of gold is going to be limited to that which can be found in a mans house and on his person.

SACKING: I assume is a bit more of an targetted affair. Here your troops are deliberately looking for gold and so having smashed their way into a victims home their first order of business is not to kill him and his family but to persuade him to reveal where he has hidden his money. It was common practice at this period (and for sometime afterwards) for people under threat to bury their riches, and so persuading the victim to show you where he has strashed his loot requires alternative tactic's. Killing his wife, or son might be a better approach than killing him and so the death toll is somewhat lower, but the results are more financially rewarding.

Incidently, my late father, a native of Bermondsey (London) taught me a similar strategy to protect my money from muggers. He always insisted that I emptied my wallet when we travelled to London, and leaving only a token note or two in it distribute the rest about my person in various pockets with at least one note large enough to pay for my ticket home hidden in my shoe. That way the theory was that a mugger might snatch my wallet and get a small haul but short of indulging in a major body search was unlikely to clean me out and leave me stranded. I'm sure similar strategies would have been common place in Medieval times and I suspect that multiple stashes would be an almost standard trick. If nothing else it would mean that if after paying off one bunch of looters, another came calling you still had money left to bargain with.

[Kobal2fr]

Incidently, my late father, a native of Bermondsey (London) taught me a similar strategy to protect my money from muggers. He always insisted that I emptied my wallet when we travelled to London, and leaving only a token note or two in it distribute the rest about my person in various pockets with at least one note large enough to pay for my ticket home hidden in my shoe.

Hehe, I wonder where that shoe business comes from. I know it's the *first* place Paris cops look for marijuana, because most kids tuck their stash in their socks since "they'll never find it there !". And I should know. French cops have the right to bodily search you in the street out of the blue, and I used to have long hair. You do the math :). Old habits die hard...

My auvergnat grandfather (if you don't know, Auvergne is France's Scotland in terms of miserly old men) always instructed me to keep money inside my underwear, because "even if they do find it in there, half the time they'll be too grossed out to take it"

My take on this is that it depicts the difference in motivation behind the action.

Precisely. And I suppose (never checked, come to think of it) extermination comes with a few turns worth of heavy bonus to public order, which certainly helped in RTW with the culture penalty (is it still in there BTW, or has it been totally replace with religious unrest ? I used to systematically replace/destroy every infrastructure in captured cities back in Rome, but with militias and dread/chivalry I never had to in M2)