Razing and Pillaging: A murderous guide to plundering your enemies

Raze, pillage, murder, enslave.

Razing enemy cities will clear land for you to expand.

Pillaging will give large amounts of gold for you and will weaken your opponents economy, as well as healing your units.

Murder their army so they cannot fight back.

Enslave their workers so they cannot recover and to give you some nice new improvements over near your capital that you keep forgetting to build a worker for.

Be wary of being seen as a warmonger, however, there are ways to get cities without capturing them and hence becoming a warmonger.

To maximise your profit, while minimising warmonger penalty, one must avoid taking cities.

This means no capturing cities through combat and therefore no razing time.

In both multiplayer and singleplayer, much can be achieved without capturing cities through combat.
By pillaging the improvements around a city, the attacker can gain large amounts of gold, to maximise this, use mounted or armoured units as they move faster and can pillage more tiles a turn.

Pillaging tiles will lead towards AI capitulation in single player and if one has a large enough army and has pillaged many tiles, the AI will offer multiple cities.

Pillaging tile improvements will mean that some cities may starve and all will lose production, making them much less useful to their owner.

To maximise profits, take workers as they make a nice workforce for you and mean that your opponent will have a hard time recovering, use fast units to quickly pillage tiles and avoid fighting their army with your raiders, instead use infantry and ranged units to engage them elsewhere while you destroy their economy.

Procedure: (Against weaklings)

1. Find weaker civ
2. Declare war (or trick them into declaring war on you such as by spying on them or forward settling).
3. Annihilate their army.
4. Pillage every tile you find, break their road chains, capture civilians.
5. After a while, when they sue for peace, enjoy your new cities and reparations.

Procedure: (Against stronger civs)

1. Start a war somehow.
2. Let them attack you, hold back the attack with ranged and infantry wall while sending cavalry around, some cavalry to attack their ranged, some to pillage.
3. Pillaging units should aim to stay away from enemy units and should take out tile improvements, capture civilians and break road chains.
4. Keep their army distracted whilst your cavalry destroys their economy.
5. After a while they will lack the means to replace units and then you can destroy their army and sue for a very favourable peace deal from the new sick man of the world.

This is the fun part.

Procedure is as follows:

1. Kill opposing army or keep it distracted somewhere else.
2. Pillage their tiles.
3. Capture city.
4. Raze city.
5. While city burns, sell buildings in it, starting with the most valuable first. Move great works from that city to your own.
6. Pillage any left over tiles.
7. Let your units heal, find a new city, repeat.

Pillaging: Use fast units such as cavalry, use pillaging to keep units on high health and avoid enemy units if behind enemy lines. Break road chains to destroy their economy. Another option is to leave on unit and one worker on a tile in enemy territory and repeatedly pillage and then repair to gain a significant gold source.

Razing: Sell buildings each turn, starting with the most expensive, use to heal your troops. While razing a captured city, move all great works in it to your own cities.

Capturing: AI units will flee if they see you, so you need surprise or to be quicker. Retreat captured units to a safe place.