Plunder

A plunder run is the quiet way to bleed a neighbour: warships slip into an enemy harbour, lift what they can carry, and steal away before the watch turns. No pitched battle, no ground taken, and no name left behind. The risk is being caught, never being identified.

Attack & Battle

The pitched landing: battle strength, casualties, siege, and razing.

Raiding

Unclaimed shores, resource tiers, and the shared diminishing returns.

Intercept

The patient alternative: blockade a harbour and rob its convoys at sea.

Espionage

Spy research raises your getaway odds and scouts the stores worth lifting.

How a run works

An assault is the pitched landing where one comparison of strength decides all. A plunder run, chosen from the same Attack menu, never fights that battle and never tries to take ground — it only steals stores. This is how a weaker Governor can "punch up" and bleed a stronger neighbour without throwing a fleet onto their walls. The loot scales with the prestige gap: raiding up a weight class pays in full, while raiding far down it does not.

Unlike an assault, a plunder run is not deterministic. It turns on a single getaway roll — the chance your raiders evade the harbour watch. Send only warships: they are both the escort and the holds that carry the loot. No troops, no merchant ships. Small warships are better at slipping close than large warships, so they count more for stealth. Your getaway chance climbs with escorts, Espionage research, old guild seals loaded for the run, the target's prestige, visible neglect, and collapsing civic happiness: strained, greying, and blackened islands are progressively more tempting. It falls against a taller Watch Tower, Kennels, risky plunder focuses, and especially a fresh patrol. A Watch Tower no longer just warns of a plunder run — there is no advance warning of one — instead it sharpens the odds of catching the raiders in the act.

A plunder run resolves one of three ways:

• Turned away. The raiders get in clean but find nothing worth taking. The fleet sails home empty, and the victim never even notices.
• Plundered. The raiders get away with the goods. The victim is told they were robbed — but the crew left no banner and no name, so they never learn who or from where.
• Caught. The watch nabs the crew at the wharf. The raiders lose part of their party (a real cost — but not the whole fleet, as a lost assault would be), and carry nothing home. The defender keeps everything and knows someone tried — but that is all they learn. Plunder crews sail without colours and do not talk: no name, no home island, ever. The risk of a plunder run is being detected, never being identified.

Old Guild Seals — getaway and silence

You can tip the roll before you sail. Load Old Guild Seals onto the run and each seal adds 8% to the getaway chance, up to four per mission for a full +32%. Without goods aboard, no run can exceed a 95% getaway chance; a sealed run can be pushed all the way to a certain getaway. The seals are spent when the fleet sails, whether the crew slips away or gets caught. Note that the seals raise your odds of escaping with the stores; a plunder run still steals resources only, never the target's goods. A seal buys one more thing: a sealed haul never appears on the public Plunderers board. Sail without one and the world watches your climb; sail sealed and you trade the glory for silence. Your alliance's raiding quests count the haul either way.

Patrol is the main counterplay, but it no longer creates a separate "turned back" result for plunder. Instead, a standing patrol applies a final multiplier to the getaway chance based on its committed warship strength and Crew Grit compared with the raiders' escort strength. Strong, fresh patrols can drag even a well-prepared run into danger; stale patrols with low grit stop mattering much, which makes neglected guarded islands tempting. Loaded goods, prestige, and blight help before this step, so they improve the attempt but cannot bypass a serious patrol. Plunder contact does not automatically spend a patrol ship. Because a plunder is a quiet theft and not a siege, it never sets the target island ablaze on the map the way an assault does.

What a plunder run can carry off is bounded by the same Storehouse protection as any raid, and repeated plunder of the same coast suffers the same diminishing returns — and shares that 24-hour window with raids, so you cannot dodge the decay by alternating the two. A plunder run never damages buildings, never razes, and never dispossesses an owner; it also does not count toward either side's war record. A plunder run is anonymous by its nature — the "Unsigned Sails" rite adds nothing here; its value is in hiding your name on open attacks and keeping your deeds off the public boards.

Size cuts against the bully. When a large realm preys on a much smaller one, two things turn against the raider at once: the getaway sags, and the haul that reaches home shrinks, down to as little as a tenth of what those same holds would carry off a near-equal coast. Grinding weak islands rarely pays for the voyage. A near-peer raid keeps its full haul, and punching up a weight class is left untouched or rewarded outright, which is the whole appeal of the run. An undefended near-peer plunder usually gets away clean; the reliable way to stop one is a standing patrol, not a taller Watch Tower.

Choosing your focus

Before you sail, choose what your raiders prize. The default is Resources — gold, stone, and lumber from the storehouse. You may instead focus on a single prize:

• Coins — break into the vault and carry the coin home to your own treasury. Coin is conspicuous cargo: the getaway is far riskier, and a raid can never empty the vault outright. Any coin that overflows your own treasury on arrival is lost.
• Lumen — strip the shrine's reliquary to starve a rival of their blessings. Same getaway risk as resources.
• Food — haul off the granary to pressure a rival's people. Bulky and dull, food is the easiest haul to slip away with, and lands in your own stores on return.

Whichever you choose, the haul is bounded by your fleet's hold and the shared raiding diminishing returns, and a slice of coin and food is always shielded so a single raid cannot ruin an island in one morning.

Marshal Voss: Field order

A plunder run is a gamble, not a sure thing. Bring escorts enough to tip the odds, expect to lose a crew now and then, and never send a hull you cannot spare. Reach for the vault only when the prize is worth the far longer odds of being caught.

Plunder Protection

A fortified Storehouse shields a portion of reserves from plunder. The stronger the stores, the less a raiding fleet can carry off. Lumen, kept in the church reliquary rather than the common stores, receives no such protection. Every drop is fair game when the shrine is sacked, and any that overflows the attacker's own reliquary evaporates on the voyage home.

Plunder is also a political risk. Crews find richer, larger realms easier to justify and easier to lose themselves within, while predatory strikes against smaller domains draw more scrutiny, are harder to carry home cleanly, and the haul itself is throttled: against a much smaller realm the crew carries home only a fraction of what those holds would lift from a peer, down to a tenth at the widest gap. A neglected or blackened island may still look tempting, but a fresh patrol remains the surest answer.

Common questions