[Baalz]

Heh, Micah was actually who I specifically had in mind when I mentioned other top players play differently, he's the best player I know and he consistently goes in a different direction than I do. Pillaging is certainly something that you don't always want to do, but I find that if you have the right opportunity then it changes a close war to a one sided one. I actually have a specific game which convinced me of that. As Sauro I got attacked by a Hinnom who was about the same size just as I was finishing another war and a bit strung out (Yikes!). In conjunction with a major battle that went my way and gave me temporary locational supremacy I dropped arouse hunger on all his farmlands and a few rain of toads on his cap. The ghouls had 1-2 turns to pillage, and despite me being the marginally smaller nation at that point that was the last real major battle we fought. This wasn't really a Blitzkreig deployment as neither one of us really had heavy raiders, but it does illustrate a good example of when you would want to use pillaging. If you've got a reasonable guess that most/all of the fighting in the short term is going to be in "his" territory then the chance of reciprocity should hopefully be fairly low.