Raiding
Raiding is an attack type that sends some of your troops to burn villages, destroy military and economical structures and slay troops and population of the enemy, along with plundering and looting of food and gold.
The kinds of troops that are used when you are raiding another kingdom are fighters, rangers and thieves; mages add their power to the raiders too by joining them in the raids. On defense, the same kinds of troops try to protect the kingdom from the raiding forces of the enemy. Archers and assassins add a meager part of their potential to the army, while priests add about 1/3 of their military absorption in raids. As always, troops' quality is of paramount importance for the outcome in dead troops on both sides, and about the amount of destruction a raid will spread to the lands of the defender.
Maximum damage done with a raid is 10% of the buildings the enemy has, although it's not easy to reach that amount totally.
While a raid occurs, the attacking thieves attempt to steal food and gold to take with them. The quality of the thieves has to do with the amount they will manage to steal, as well as the quality of enemy thieves. In any case, since blueprints of new mini-vaults have been smuggled out of a gnome kingdom recently, it is not possible for raiding thieves to loot all the gold of a kingdom as every small village usually has its own (they are a nothing compared to the Vault buildings made especially for the purpose of defending against a looting, but at least help with raids by delaying thieves whatsoever). They can steal up to 1/10 of a kingdom's gold and no more. This means that one who wants to loot all the gold that is actually unprotected, must send his thieves in a mission to loot gold and only that, instead of raid.
Now, another point for raid is that generally it's good to use raid as a prep tactic when you have lots of fighters and rangers and the enemy few. And that because you will do more damage if the raid defense of the enemy is lesser. Always keep some thieves in hand when attempting to raid, especially if you don't have a spy/scry report so that you can see if you can loot any gold from your target.
A note for vampires (and other cannibalistic races for that matter): if you need food from an attack is better to raid than use military attack (provided you carry a good number of fighters/rangers), since it will give you more food than mils (you slay more enemy troops/population).
Damage Value and Absorbtion Value of the Combat Troops
“Slay their kin! Burn their homes! Salt their lands! Nothing survives today!” - a raid commander’s orders
Written by Doom. Article taken from Shadowmere Compendium