Thief/Mage Strategies

From UtopiaWiki

There are a few really effective strategies to use if you are a thief/mage. If done properly they can totally disable a province, which is very useful in war.

Economic Attack

This works very well against enemy attackers. The main goal is to quickly reduce the target's economy and draft by eliminating the target's peasants. Without peasants, a province will generate very little money due to a low raw peasant income and the target's Building Efficiency will quickly decline. Without peasants, a province will be able to draft very few (if any) troops due to a low peasant base and a high draft rate. In addition, as a target's province becomes unable to pay full wages the province will suffer a drop in Military Efficiency and the target will be unable to send out their army unless wages have been paid.

• Note that applying this tactic to a single province will probably not be so efficient because he will recieve aid from his kingdom mates.
• Also note that the effect of this strategy takes some time to kick in, Military Efficiency and Building Efficiency does not decrease instantly. Also remember that with Age29 "free spec" convertion he can still train defence or retrain offence without money, he just needs some soldier aid.

Thief Operations

• Riots - Reduce the targets income by causing riots. Note that merchants are immune to this op.
• Kidnappings - Steal the targets peasants. You may go over your max population, but the peasants will leave the next turn. This provides a temporary bonus to Building Efficiency and you may find yourself drafting more than usual for that hour.
• Night Strike - In case a target has a lot of defensive specs and or soldiers its wise to run a lot of NS operations on him/her. Doing NS on a province with all elite defensive is pretty useless so remember only do this op on a province with a lot of def specs/and or soldiers. It is also important to note that a nighstrike will first only target the soldiers of a province if the province has a large amount of them.
• Rob the Vaults - Reduces the amount of gold the enemy has to fund or rebuild their damaged armies.

Woot, I will cetraliny put this to good use!

Common Mistakes

The target chosen for an economic attack should not be immediate targets for attackers unless that province is already underpopulated. If T/M's take 20,000 peasants off a province and then attacks come through and take off 500 acres all of the T/M's work has been undone. Most of those 20,000 peasants would have been force to leave due to lack of space. T/M's and attackers need to coordinate targets to make sure the attackers do not undo all of the hard work of your T/M's.

A series of ops and spells on a target should serve a set goals. eg, starving a target, weaken the economy, ... Different goals dont mix. For each goals there is an assorted set of completing ops and spells. For instance starving should be done by casting vermin, droughts, torching farms, stealing food. It does not help if one cast fireballs of kidnaps the starvation target because that only reduces the effect of the previous ops performed (less peasants means less need for food, they would have died anyway).

I found just what I was needed, and it was entrteaiinng!

Felt so hopeless looking for anwsres to my questions...until now.This is way bteetr than a brick & mortar establishment.You get a lot of respect from me for writing these helpful atrilces.