Help:Looting

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Looting serves two purposes: One, it is a way to gain you some gold from the enemy, by taking it from their tax collectors and peasants. Two, it does damage to the enemy infrastructure and morale. Especially repeated looting will do a lot to make the peasants unhappy, and in turn unsatisfied with their government that couldn't protect them.

Aside from setting the amount of time you want to put into looting, you can also choose which "style" you want to employ:

spread out equally 

Is simply a "no preferences" choice. Your men will go out and hit whatever gets in their way.

steal tax gold 

Using this option, you can concentrate on the wealthy and the tax collectors. You will do much less damage to the region (i.e. it will remain good for further looting), but gain more gold. There will, of course, be some collateral damage.

burn food stores 

Want to starve the enemy? This lets you go straight for the food stores and burn down the grain. It will do much damage to the food stores and a bit to the fields and agriculture infrastructure, but will yield you very few gold coins.

kill, rape and burn 

This is the option for evil empires. You are going straight for the population, killing as many innocents as possible. This will of course have an impact on the production, morale and other region statistics.

pillage and maraud 

If lasting damage is your main concern, choose this option. Your men will still steal some gold, but they will rather burn then rob, and do a lot of damage to the region's production and morale. Don't do this if you want to take control of this region, as the local people are guaranteed to learn to hate you very quickly.

loot an isolated village 

Has looting been disallowed by your over-zealous ruler, or do you just not want to draw attention to yourself? Find a small village largely isolated from the rest of the region, and hit that instead, killing all witnesses.
You will gain much less in loot, essentially the equivalent of looting a small badlands region, no matter what kind of region you are actually in. On the other hand, no message will be sent to your ruler, and there is a 50% chance that the realm you are looting will not learn about your actions at all, and if they do, they will not get an immediate notice as to who did it.

damage military infrastructure 

The looting option you choose if you want to conquer. This will damage paraphernalia production, recruitment centers and what gold you can take from the barracks. This looting option does minimal damage to morale or sympathy.