Raiding

Unclaimed islands hold stockpiles of resources guarded only by wild defenders. A well-planned raid can fill your coffers. A careless one costs more than it returns.

Combat

Battle strength, victory odds, walls, and siege mechanics.

Espionage

Scout islands before committing your fleet.

Fleet & Garrison

Transporting troops and managing convoys.

How Raiding Works

Send a war fleet to any uninhabited island. Your forces engage the wild defenders on arrival. If victorious, your ships load up whatever resources the shore holds and sail home. The fleet returns automatically; surviving units and plunder are delivered to your harbour on arrival.

• Only uninhabited islands can be raided. Attacking a player settlement is a full assault, not a raid.
• Warships provide both combat power and cargo space. Troops fight but carry nothing.
• Use spy ships beforehand to reveal an island's resource tier and current stockpile.

Goods from Raids

A successful raid may also discover a small durable good such as rope, sailcloth, or a supply chest. These finds are separate from ordinary resource plunder: they are a post-victory search of the shore and are recorded on the raid report. The same goods also turn up as supplies for, and rewards from, expeditions.

Without storage from a level 1 Workshopat the source settlement, raids still sail and plunder normally, but discovered goods cannot be loaded. Each Workshop level adds more storage. If the fleet's home port changes hands before return, recovered goods follow the same return-destination rule as surviving units and other spoils.

Resource Tiers

Every uninhabited island has a resource tier that determines its base stockpile, wild defender strength, and withdrawal risk. Higher tiers hold more but bite harder.

Island Specialisation

Beyond tier, every island in the archipelago favours one resource over the others. An island rich in lumber will hold roughly 80% more lumber than the tier base, while its gold and stone reserves sit 40% below the standard amount. This applies to both the stores available for raiding and the production rates once colonised.

There is no way to tell an island's specialisation from the chart alone. A Governor must send spy ships to survey the shores. The resulting Shore Survey reveals each resource's relative abundance (Scarce through Overflowing) and calls out the island's chief bounty. Note that these survey labels are separate from the island's permanent resource tier.

Only a handful of abundant, lumber-dominant islands exist in a given world. A fleet that finds one has discovered something worth fighting over, or worth colonising for a permanent production advantage.

Marshal Voss: Field order

The true prize is not the raid. It is the island itself. A lumber-dominant settlement produces far more timber than one founded on an ordinary shore. Scout, conquer, and build where the land favours your ambition.

Carry Capacity

Plunder is limited by your fleet's total carry capacity. Each ship type has a fixed cargo hold. Troops occupy deck space but carry no resources themselves. Plunder is split evenly across available resource types, capped by what the shore actually holds.

Ship	Carry Capacity	Troop Capacity	Attack	Defense
Small Warship	40	5	10	10
Large Warship	90	10	30	30
Small Merchant Ship	80	5	0	5
Large Merchant Ship	200	10	0	10
Colonisation Ship	5000	0	0	5

Withdrawal Attrition

Even a victorious fleet suffers losses during the chaos of loading and withdrawal. Each surviving unit rolls independently against an attrition chance determined by the shore's tier and the size of the naval force sent:

Sending fewer ships means a lower attrition rate. A lean fleet that just barely carries the plunder will lose far fewer crews than an armada sent against a weak shore.

Attrition by Fleet Size

Diminishing Returns

Raiding the same shore repeatedly yields less and less. The decay is on the target, not on the attacker-target pair, so two different captains striking the same island still bank onto the same curve. The counter resets 12 hours after the last raid on that island.

Resources regenerate at 15% per hour, up to 150% of the tier's base stockpile. Rotate between multiple islands to keep returns high.

Treasure Chests

Chests are no longer scattered blindly across every shore. The archipelago marks a small set of uninhabited islands as treasure islands every few hours. They shimmer on the region chart for anyone to see. Only those sparkling shores can yield a chest.

Raid a treasure island successfully and the claim is yours. Most claims uncover a buried chest worth between 5,000 and 10,000 bonus coins (90% of claims). A smaller share (10%) uncovers a cursed chest instead, destroying all landing troops while the ships escape unharmed. Either way the shimmer fades the moment the claim is made.

Marshal Voss: Field order

Send cheap troops like stone throwers as landing fodder. They cost a fraction of spearfighters and are just as dead when a cursed chest opens. Keep your elite units for real battles.

Raiding Strategy

• Scout for specialisation. Send spy ships to survey uninhabited shores. The report reveals which resource dominates. A lumber-rich abundant island is worth sailing across the map for.
• Right-size your fleet. Match carry capacity to the shore's stockpile. Over-sending warships inflates attrition for no extra plunder.
• Favour rich and abundant shores. They hold 3–5 times the resources of a poor island for only modestly higher attrition.
• Rotate targets. Diminishing returns punish repeated hits on the same island. Spread raids across the map.
• Build a Workshop. Resource plunder works without one, but durable goods from raids require the launching settlement to maintain a Workshop.
• Claim the best shores. Raiding fills the coffers, but colonising a specialised island delivers a permanent production advantage. The best lumber islands are worth conquering, not just plundering.
• Use cheap troops. Stone throwers are expendable. They fight adequately and cost far less to replace than spearfighters or archers.

See Plunder Protection for how a Storehouse shields your own resources from enemy raids.

Common questions