Thievery Formulas

[E_Boko]

the last time i played thief was when gnome was around. i found the max to be near 100% of my thieves. it all depends on how many thieves you have. sometimes you need to send 50% sometimes 100% for max effectiveness in NS. if 3K thieves is needed for max results and one person has 3K thieves and another has 6K thieves one sends 100% and the other send 50%. its all relative.

[maul]

unless its been changed and i missed it
there is an optimum number of thieves to send depending on the quantity of that resource your target has.
angel has a thievery calc tool for it.
oversending thieves above that number just results in more thief losses for the same gain.

[Ordray]

Optimal number is also effected by WT's bonus

[Ethan]

Isn't there an "oversend bonus" though? At least when stealing, it seems like I get a very good return up to a point. After said point, I seem to get very poor, *but still positive*, gains from the extra thieves. Granted, the resource I'm stealing is going down, so it's almost impossible to tell exactly what is going on... but I always thought "max" gains on a thief op were actually the "sudden, massive diminishing" gains point, not a true max.

In particular, if I'm robbing gc, and am already ovesending (since I see the taken gc drop a lot each time) and then decide to oversend *even more*, I can sometimes gain the same amount at the previous op. Which, since it's from a smaller total, must mean a higher % taken, despite being over max on both. Did I imagine this effect?

[But7ers]

Nope ethan it happens but why burn the extra thieves if you fail. Not worth it economically.

Also paging Clampy he has all the answers...

[tpyo]

I've always assumed for NS there's just a max % of troops of each type you can kill, and
A) if you send enough thieves you'll kill that % and if you send more nothing happens, or
B) like ethan is saying, say you send X thieves, you'll kill 90% of the max % of troops or something, but sending 2*X thieves will only get you to 95%..
either way, there's an effective cap to how many troops you can kill based on how many troops they have

[TommyB]

In particular, if I'm robbing gc, and am already ovesending (since I see the taken gc drop a lot each time) and then decide to oversend *even more*, I can sometimes gain the same amount at the previous op. Which, since it's from a smaller total, must mean a higher % taken, despite being over max on both. Did I imagine this effect?

Isn't it more likely that the true maximum was somewhere in between the amount you send on the first and the amount you sent on the second op ?

[tpyo]

Isn't it more likely that the true maximum was somewhere in between the amount you send on the first and the amount you sent on the second op ?

He said the taken gc drops a lot each time, so if there was a true max, he would have been at it, unless you can only reach the true max by oversending

[Vengeance]

If you're trying to steal GC out of war, a simplified version of the calcs (assuming you're hitting someone close to your size) would be to say "For every $400,000 the target province has, send 600 thieves". It's not scientific, so please use as a guide. The idea of slightly oversending is simply to assist countering any NW difference losses etc.

Night-Strike - I'll let Clampy confirm, but the optimum no. of thieves to send on an NS mission is roughly equal to 1/6 of the largest "stack" within the opponents army. I say roughly as you do need to take into account WT / Relative NW etc. As a guide, you could use 1/5 accepting a slight oversend, however it's up to the individual. Would like to get Clampy's comments on this as well.