Raid losses: How much food and iron gets actually taken? We investigate

[Zack]

As the title says.

Your watchtower lists all the raid attacks against you and how much cups, food and iron the raiders get from their wins and how many cups they lose to you when they lose. The cups are very easy to track and probably everybody has roughly checked and verified that the raiders take your cups. So it’s evident that they also take your food and iron, right?

Well, not so quick!

When the raiders lose, they only lose cups to you, but they don’t lose any food and iron, right?
So do you actually lose food and iron when the raiders win?

Some first tests suggest that

• you actually lose somewhere in the range of 20-30% of the indicated food and iron losses
• you actually lose no food and iron at all

Well, that doesn’t look like much of a loss anymore, but which one is it?

=> If we lose little to no food and iron at all, only the expected lost cups remain in the focus when setting your raid defense team.
=> You may even collect from your watchtower only every 12h without any worries of losing (much) food and iron.

Don’t you get more food and iron from a raid the longer that person was offline? Is this because they were offline, or is it because they left their watchtower untouched?
Do we know the raid formula to determine the amount of food and iron you get from a raid?

edit:
results of the tests so far:
You only lose food and iron to raiders, if you didn’t empty your watchtower when you were online last time and could empty it.

That means the following steps:

1. empty your watchtower and leave the game
2. come back to the game after one hour and leave again without emptying your watchtower (it doesn’t seem to matter, if you were raided in the meantime, or not, but any raids until now won’t result in any actual ham and iron losses)
3. any raids after this will result in ham and iron losses to your watchtower (extent of losses varies, but can go up to at least 99% of what the raiders get)

=> To avoid food and iron losses to raiders just empty your watchtower every time you are online (when the watchtower can be emptied)

[Zack]

@Elayanith

The amount of ham you loose in raids seems to show that ham is mot very important to you.
Good for the raiders.

@Pr0spero

I’ll be honest, I wasnt really thinking about the ham and iron when I set the defence.

On the plus side, revenge attacks seem to accrue more ham than you lose.

@BobTheSnark

Possible counterpoint: the loss of ham to incoming raids should be compared to (1) how much ham would be lost to incoming raids anyway, but also (2) how many fewer rerolls are needed/desired when attacking from a lower cups ranking.

Until recently I also thought that you lose ham and iron when you get raided and lose, because when you come back to the game it lists all those attacks and how much ham and iron the raiders won.

Then I checked this with ham before and after the raid, how much ham I gained over time from the watchtower and how much ham I lost according to the raid list.
And to my surprise I didn’t lose any of the ham to the raiders, zero, zip, nada anything like what the raider got from the raid. I only lost cups. Most of the ham and iron the raiders win just pops into existence so to speak.

=> you can leave your watchtower for up to 12.9 hours without collecting ham and iron, and just go and collect ham and iron basically twice a day, every 12h and your raiders will love the extra ham

edit: corrected my statement about not losing any ham and iron to raiders as a 39-41 minute test showed that I lost 20-30% of what the raider got, which is still much lower, but it is a loss.

[Zack]

@BobTheSnark

I should check that myself, but it would seem to mean that at minimum the wiki for the Watchtower should be edited/updated!

If the wiki says so, I really want to check again to make sure that I didn’t make a mistake.

Here is a quick check with approx. 39-41 minutes of watchtower operation:
I started at 22:45 with 10259 ham and 5311 iron and 278 cups.

Then I closed the game and waited for a popup message informing me about a raid attack, but nothing happened. So I opened the game, did a few event stages and then found that somebody actually was just attacking me:

The raider got 25 cups, 5078 ham and 2629 iron.

Now my watchtower shows 2723 cups, 18491 ham and 9572 iron at 23:26.

During these 39-41 minutes my watchtower generated 9308-9786 ham and 4819-5066 iron, so my tower should have 19567-20045 ham and 10130-10377 iron, if nothing was lost to the raider, but I have 1076-1554 less ham and 558-805 less iron than that.

The 1076-1554 reduction in ham are 20-30% of the raided 5078 ham, same goes for the iron.

=> This suggests that you do lose some ham and iron, but it is in the range of 20-30% of what the raider actually gets.

=> I’ll do another, longer test to confirm this result and get a more precise number percentage

[Zack]

Another test over night for the ham and iron losses from raids:

tldr: no losses for ham and iron from raiders this time

Details:
My tower started at 01:38 with 1177 ham and 609 iron.
Raiders got a total of 2700 ham and 1410 iron (these numbers are suspiciously low. why would anybody raid for such tiny loot? I’ve never seen such low numbers in any of my raids as far as I an remember.)
At 09:22 my tower was at 111k ham and 57945 iron.
That means that during these 7h44min approx. 110749 ham and 57334 iron were generated.

	cups	ham	iron
01:38:00	2834	1177	609
raid	-34	-453	-235
raid	12
raid	-48	-435	-235
raid	8
raid	7
raid	25
raid	-54	-453	-235
raid	-31	-453	-235
raid	16
raid	-47	-453	-235
raid	18
raid	-44	-453	-235
total losses	-172	-2700	-1410
generated	0	110749	57334
sum with losses		109226	56533
sum w/o losses		111926	57943
09:22:00	2662	111000	57945

The 111926 ham would be indicated as 111k.
=> Ham and iron in my tower at 09:22 show no signs of any ham and iron losses. Only cups were lost.

To make sure that the ham and iron production is working correctly I did another test without raids:
At 09:25 my watchtower had 119 ham and 61 iron.
At 09:38 my watchtower had 3218 ham and 1666 iron.
At 10:11 my watchtower had 11090 ham and 5741 iron.

	ham	iron
09:25:00	119	61
09:38:00	3218	1666
delta	3099	1605
generated	3102	1606

	ham	iron
09:38:00	3218	1666
10:11:00	11090	5741
delta	7872	4075
generated	7876	4077

=> watchtower produces exactly the 14321/h ham and 7414/h iron.

I have no explanation currently why my 40-minute-test yesterday shows some ham and iron losses, while my 7h44min-test shows no losses at all.

Either I made a mistake (most likely), the ham and iron losses from raiders vary between 0% and 20-30%, or something yet unknown can remove ham and iron from the watchtower.

My yesterday’s defense team until 10:02 today should not be responsible:

For today I switched to these

[Zack]

Another 2 tests today:

tldr: again no food and iron losses from raiders

Details:

Test 1:
Started at 00:57 with 111 ham and 57 iron, ended at 07:49 with 98456 ham and 50971 iron after getting raided 6 times.

	ham	iron
00:57:00	111	57
07:49:00	98456	50971
delta	98345	50914
generated	98337	50909

=> no losses

Strange that no ham and iron losses are indicated for these attacks at all!

Test 2:
Started at 07:51 with 218 ham an 113 iron, ended at 12:39 with 68951 ham and 35696 iron after getting raided twice.

	ham	iron
07:51:00	218	113
12:39:00	68951	35696
delta	68733	35583
generated	68740	35587

=> no ham and iron losses

This time the two raid attacks show some non-existant ham and iron losses, again.

[Mikal]

I find this really interesting. We all assumed that they were being honest with us, but it looks like they’re only simulating the exchange. Either that, or it’s bugged and they never got around to fixing it. Thanks for looking into this.

[Ruskin505]

First I’m happy you did this analysis and shared.

Second this seems like a win for players as we get a net resource increase from raiding.

What the actually programming here is questionable. But it works in our favor for the time being.

[Zack]

Another 3 tests today:

tldr: no losses in 2 cases today, where I emptied my watchtower, left the game shortly after, came back later after being raided and then I emptied the watchtower again.
But a third test, where I started with 21600 ham, show a loss of 890 ham. This needs to be investigated further.

Details:
test 1: started at 00:27 with 1093 ham and 566 iron, ended at 07:54 with 105907 ham and 55237 iron despite lots of raiders.

	ham	iron
00:27:00	1093	566
07:54:00	107k	55803
delta	“105907”	55237
generated	106691	55234

=> no losses at all, because 107k is not showing the exact amount of ham, but iron shows the correct amount and shows no losses.

test 2: started at 10:30 with 338 ham and 175 iron, ended after several raids at 13:28 with 42827 ham and 22171 iron.

	ham	iron
10:30:00	338	175
13:28:00	42827	22171
delta	42489	21996
generated	42485	21994

=> no losses at all

Test 3: started at 15:03 with 21624 ham and 11195 iron, ended after several raids at 18:59 with 77064 ham and 39895 iron.

	ham	iron
15:03:00	21624	11195
18:59:00	77064	39895
delta	55440	28700
generated	56329	29161

That clearly looks like a loss of 889 ham and 461 iron, which is not much, but it is something.

=> This needs further testing

[Mikal]

One explanation is that the production of the watchtower is discrete when you’re off-line… like every 1/2 hour or something. So for the first 30 minutes (hypothetically) you have nothing to raid, but at 31 minutes you get a bunch all at once. So any raids in the first period get nothing. That’s also consistent with the rewards being equal on consecutive losses. If the losses are deducted discretely too, the later attacks wont be affected by the previous ones until after the update.

[Zack]

It looks like the trigger for losing ham and iron to raiders is having already come back once to the game in the meantime without emptying the watchtower.
That means the following steps:

1. empty your watchtower and leave the game
2. come back to the game and leave again without emptying your watchtower (it doesn’t seem to matter, if you were raided in the meantime, or not, but any raids until now won’t result in any actual ham and iron losses)
3. any raids after this will result in ham and iron losses to your watchtower (extent of losses varies, but can go up to at least 99% of what the raiders get)

Further data for this:
Test 1:

	ham	iron
01:01:00	194	100
06:27:00	78001	40381
delta	77807	40281
generated	77810	40282

=> no losses overnight despite 2 raids

Test 2:

	ham	iron
07:40:00	17380	8997
10:05:00	51988	26914
delta	34608	17917
generated	34609	17917

=> no losses despite 2 raids

Test 3:

	ham	iron
10:44:00	9241	4784
12:37:00	36211	18746
delta	26970	13962
generated	26971	13963

=> no losses despite 1 raid

From all of these tests I can derive:
Whenever I (1) empty my watchtower and leave the game, (2) then get raided (or not) and (3) come back to the game afterwards to check my watchtower, there are no ham or iron losses (to the raiders).

Now, I found that something didn’t seem right over the last days when I didn’t empty my watchtower sometimes and simply let it collect more ham and iron. So I started to test this.

Test 4:
I came back to the game after some players had raided me, but didn’t collect from the watchtower, kept it going and closed the game. After a pop-up message about somebody raiding me I went back and checked my watchtower to see that this time I actually lost most of what the raider got.

	ham	iron
15:15:00	37692	19513
15:35:00	25581	13242
delta	-12111	-6271
generated	4773	2471
loss	-16884	-8742

=> Lost approx. 16884 ham and 8742 iron, which is ~90% of what the raider got.

Test 5:
After emptying my watchtower and one more raid, I went offline, came back at 17:27 to the game to check, there were no new raids, then went offline again. Then two raiders attacked me and at 19:07 my tower showed some losses.

	ham	iron
17:27:00	7299	3779
19:07:00	29281	15158
delta	21982	11379
generated	23868	12356
loss	-1886	-977

=> Lost some ham and iron after coming back to the game once in the meantime and leaving without emptying my watchtower (which was not possible at that time because only 30 minutes had passed since I previously emptied my watchtower)

Test 6:
After coming back from being raided, my watchtower started with 44640 ham at 11:06 and at 11:30 it ended with 50365 ham, which means no losses during this time (well, there were no raids, so just to make sure).

	ham	iron
11:06:00	44640	23111
11:30:00	50365	26074
delta	5725	2963
generated	5728	2965

=> no losses

Test 7:
I let my watchtower continue from test 6, and after getting raided I ended with 31573 ham at 11:44, which means I lost 99% of the ham that the raider got.

	ham	iron
11:30:00	50365	26074
11:44:00	31573	16332
delta	-18792	-9742
generated	3341	1729
loss	-22133	-11471

[Mikal]

That’s cosisntent with the discrete changes and consistent with the design philosphy of the game. There are very few “synchronous” activities in the game.

[danenp]

TLDR. Can u summarize your findings? Thanks.

[Zack]

Thanks for the reminder.

The OP has been updated now with the test results

[Zack]

Since there is a 1h timer that prevents you from constantly emptying your watchtower, I wanted to check, if you lose food to raiders, if you come back more than once during this 1h.

Result: no food and iron loss for coming back once within the 1h
=> you can safely come back to the game during the 1h timer of the watchtower

Details:
Emptied my watchtower, then checked my watchtower at 17:24 and left the game.
Got raided and came back at 17:41 to check on my watchtower, then left again.
Got raided again and came back at 19:05.
=> no losses

	ham	iron
17:24:00	839	434
17:41:00	4856	2513
delta	4017	2079
generated	4057	2100
loss	-40	-21

=> no losses

	ham	iron
17:41:00	4856	2513
19:05:00	24904	12892
delta	20048	10379
generated	20049	10379
loss	-1	0

=> no losses