Raiding

A raid takes unclaimed production out of another city and puts it in your treasury. It is real income, not a scoreboard — and it is the only way value moves between players.

Before you can attack anyone

Punching down is not refused, it is made worthless

Loot is multiplied by a closeness factor. Inside 2x of each other there is no penalty at all; past that it falls as the fourth power, which is very fast.

A whale raiding a beginner ten times smaller carries off sixteen hundredths of one percent of what the same force would take from a peer, and pays full gas for it. The protection is economic rather than a wall — which is a real design choice with a real consequence: it holds as long as gas costs more than the loot, and not by rule.

The same factor also scales the damage the raid does to the wall, so a mismatched attack barely scratches it either.

How a raid runs

1. 1
   Declare, and commit sealed

   You pick one industry to march on and commit SCRIP as force. The industry is public; the amount is not. What the defender sees is a ceiling — an upper bound posted at declaration — never what you actually spent.
2. 2
   It flies for eight hours

   The defender is told an attack is inbound and when it lands. 8 hours is deliberately long enough to be a real warning: time to claim the store and to reinforce.
3. 3
   Walls freeze fifteen minutes out

   Defences seal 15 minutes before impact. Without this a defender would watch for the resolving transaction and top up in front of it, which would make committing sealed pointless.
4. 4
   Someone opens it

   Resolution is a transaction. Either side can send it. What was really spent becomes public at this moment and not before.
5. 5
   It lands or it breaks

   Force against the wall on the front you chose. Higher wins. A landing carries loot home; a repel pays the defender 30% of your force and buys them 12 hours of quiet.

What you can actually take

loot  =  min(
    3x x force committed,          <- carry capacity
    the defender's unclaimed store        <- there is nothing else to take
)

Only unclaimed production is lootable. A defender who claimed an hour before you landed has nothing in the store, and your force bought you an empty room. This is why the eight-hour warning is not a courtesy: it is the mechanic that makes attention worth something.

Seizing shares

A landing also seizes a capped slice of the staked shares themselves. This is the only way a position — rather than its output — is ever at risk, and both ceilings are hard. A city cannot be emptied of its holdings in an afternoon however many attackers queue up.

What a landing does to the wall

Tying wear to loot rather than to force is what stops a raid on an empty store from costing the defender anything: nothing taken, nothing broken. And the ceiling means a wall always survives a single landing, so a defender is never wiped out by one attacker in one go.

The rules that stop the strong farming the weak

Reading a target before you commit

• Their walls are public. All six fronts, and which ones carry SCRIP. Picking the front nobody paid for is the whole game.
• Their store is not. You can see the ceiling of what they could be holding, not what is in it right now. A raid on a freshly-claimed city is force spent for nothing.
• The attack planner simulates it. Before signing, the app shows the public defences and what a given force would do against each front.

Defence is the other half of this and has its own page: walls & shields.