Units

Raider

The Raider is the open-field hunter: it has the highest attack on the board and it is fast.

Horses first

The Raider is a gated unit: with no Horse pasture inside your territory it cannot enter a queue at all. The prerequisite is empire-wide — one pasture unlocks every city — and losing the pasture while the item waits does not delete it, the item waits. The full rule is on The production queue.

The practical consequence: building a mobile army starts with a decision about land, not about production.

The prerequisite gates the production queue, not ownership. Raiders already in the field stay on the board and keep fighting if you lose the pasture; what you lose is the right to build more. The second consequence of that distinction is even more useful: buying a bandit camp (Bandit camp) turns the camp's warband into your units, and the engine asks for no resource condition there — and Raiders are among the bandits. So an empire with no pasture cannot build a Raider, but it can acquire one with gold.

How to use it

• Hunt Pioneer and Siege. Both are poorly defended; the Raider usually kills them in a single blow.
• Move and attack in the same turn is allowed; the reverse is not. With 6 move points it usually reaches a target it can see on the same turn.
• If the defender dies the Raider advances into the tile — clearing a chain of targets is possible.

Zones of control cut its speed

However many move points it has, entering a tile adjacent to an enemy unit ends its move right there (Combat). Slipping past a Spearman line and getting behind it is therefore impossible: the Raider halts in front of the line, and the answer comes on the next turn.

It can still attack from where it stopped — what ends is the movement, not the action. So before you throw a Raider at a line, ask: on the tile where I will be forced to stop, is there something I can hit, or will I only be hit?

Its weakness

Its defense is 1, and Spearman defends 2 times as hard against it. Throwing Raiders at a Spearman, especially one in a forest, is the fastest way to burn resources.

Never attack a fortified target. A dug-in defender defends 1.5 times as hard, and that multiplier stacks on top of the terrain and type ones (Combat). Breaking a position is not the Raider's job; going around a fortified line — or at the soft target behind it — is. With 6 move points that is usually possible.

A battered Raider can rest by fortifying inside your own territory: it recovers 4 HP per turn (The turn cycle). Since attack power scales with the remaining HP ratio, a half-health Raider is half a Raider — waiting one turn usually pays better than a second attack.

Against a city its value is 2 — siege work is not its job (Siege).

Its attack under a dynasty

Playing the Opportunist line dynasty, the Raider's attack is 5 instead of 4. The increase applies only against units; its attack vs. city value (2) does not change (Getting started).

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.