Plunder Gains

You found a fat target, sent a full march, won the battle — and came home with almost nothing. Nothing is broken, and you were not shielded out. You hit the daily plunder limit.

Every commander has a daily limit on resources taken from other players' cities. Go past it and your take is cut hard for the rest of the day. Most players meet this without ever being told it exists, because the game only mentions it after it has already started costing you.

The game counts the Grain, Timber and Herb you actually carry home from attacks on player cities each day. As that running total passes your limit, your share drops.

Three details matter more than the percentages themselves.

It counts what you receive, not what you attacked for. Once you are at 15%, a march that hauls 2M only adds 300K to the counter — so the reduced bands last far longer in attacks than they look in resources. This is why the reduction feels like it never ends.

5% is the floor. It does not drop further, however long you keep going. And the counter resets daily at 02:00 UTC, not at midnight your time.

A warning triangle appears on your city screen, under your Might. That icon is the only signal you get, and it is easy to miss.

Tap it to open Effect Overview, where you will find an effect called Plunder Gains reading "Resources plundered today: 36.9M, plunder gains reduced to: 5%". The bar underneath counts down to the daily reset. The same line appears on the battle report next to the resource icons — worth reading before you commit to another attack.

One quirk: the resources-plundered figure is the total from before your latest attack, so it always reads slightly behind. Treat it as a floor, not an exact count.

If you have never seen that triangle, the limit has never touched you and every raid you have made has paid in full.

The limit is set by your Sanctuary level.

It climbs by 1M per level up to Sanctuary 20, then by 2M per level to the maximum.

Upgrade your Sanctuary. For most players this is the only lever there is. The new limit applies the moment the upgrade completes — you do not have to wait for the daily reset. If Plunder Gains is active when you upgrade and the day's total falls back under your new limit, the effect clears immediately and you are back to full gains.

Much later, take War Supply. This one is not available early: it is a Legion Commander skill belonging to the Era of Revival, which does not begin until Era Day 1, and it needs your Commander job at level 20 on top of that. If you are reading this because your raids just dried up, Sanctuary is your answer.

At skill level 5 a Sanctuary 30 commander farms 45M before any reduction instead of 30M.

This limit applies to attacks on player cities only. Caravans and Covert Operations are entirely separate systems: they do not add to your plunder total, they are never reduced by it, and they cost you nothing you need elsewhere. Caravan battles do not kill real soldiers, neither costs Stamina, and running Covert Operations does not stop you attacking cities.

Whatever your plunder total is doing, keep running both. They are free income sitting alongside the limit, not an alternative to it.

Being reduced is not a reason to stop. 15% and 5% are still resources you did not have. Against the targets most people farm — zeroed cities, or ones with little left to defend with — the only thing a raid really costs you is Stamina, so if your reserves are healthy, keep going. Against a city that can still fight back you are paying in troops and Infirmary time as well, and that is worth weighing at any rate.

Stamina is the real decision. At full rate a point of Stamina earns about seven times what it earns at 15%, and twenty times what it earns at 5%. If you are running low, the question is not whether reduced raids are worth it — it is whether that Stamina is worth more tomorrow at 100%.

Soldier Load still pays when you are reduced. 15% and 5% are shares of what your march carries, so a bigger Soldier Load means more from every reduced raid too. A Sanctuary 29 commander carrying 6.2M brings home around 930K per raid at 15%, and still over 300K at 5%.

Spend scarce Stamina on monsters instead. Monsters pay full value regardless of your plunder total, so they are the one thing genuinely competing for the same Stamina — and during Thief Hunt they are the better use of it by a wide margin.

Hit your richest targets first. The limit is a resource budget, not an attack budget, so whatever you take at full rate should be the biggest hauls you can find. Clearing small targets early spends your best band on your worst raids.

Watch for the triangle, not the totals. You do not need to do arithmetic. When that icon appears, your full-rate raids for the day are behind you.

When you find a target worth coming back to, attack it at most nine times. The tenth attack destroys the city, and the player is randomly teleported somewhere else on the map, so you lose the farm. Stopping at nine leaves them where they are, and the same target is still there for you tomorrow.

Pick those targets carefully: farm inactive players only. Repeatedly hitting someone who is still playing is bullying, it drives people off the server, and it is a good way to collect enemies who will hit back.