How to Plunder Someone

[TriPham]

I. Scout Report

Obviously, you will need a scout report of the city you're about to hit. Things to take in consideration before you scout them are:

Their alliance: How strong is their alliance?
Their prestige*: Is it higher or lower than yours?
If this city isn't something you can't attack after scouting, will they retaliate seeing your scout attempt?

Once you've decided that the city is something that probably has a decent amount of resources and probably a lot of defending troops, you can send some scouts to the city. Make sure you send a lot of them. Once you get your scout report, assuming that it was successful, take these things into consideration.

Resources : Is it worth it to go through all that trouble?
Amount of Fortifications : Do I have the necessary troops to fight?
Enemy Troops : What type of troops is his city holding?
Gates : Is it open?**
Research: What level combat researches does the defender have?

If this is not the right city for you, move on to the next one.

*Does not include Civilians.
** One way to determine this is seeing if there are scouts in the report, and checking if there was a scout battle. If there are scouts in the defending city, but there wasn't a scout battle, than the gates are closed. If there are scouts in his city, but there was a scout battle, obviously the gates are open.

II. Troops
The most important thing to take into consideration in plundering a city is their troops and fortifications and your troops. Whether their gates are opened or not is important, and as well as your rally point. Also, their wall level and archery level. I will be only using archers for this guide. Let's start.

Archer Towers: 5-10:1 Archer to Archer Tower Ratio, depending on your archery, his archery, his wall level, your hero, and your other combat researches.*
Traps: You want to send pre-waves of warriors against this.
Defensive Trebuchet: These are one use stuff, so prewaves of warriors will set these off.
Abatis: These things are worthless if you're sending archers

And there is the enemy troops, if their gates are open, and what their troops are.

Warriors, Swordsmen, Pikemen: 1:1 Archer to Infantry Ratio + Archer to Fortification
Archers: 1:1 Archer to Archer Ratio + Infantry, Fortification
Cavalry, Cataphract: 10:1 Archer to Horseback Ratio + Archer, Infantry, Fortification
Siege Units: I'll have to get back on that

So basically, you will send enough archers to destroy their fortifications, any infantry, any archers, any horseback, and any Siege Units they have.

*Please refer to Satan's guide if you want to have a better explanation. I'm not too good with determining archers.