Interesting topic. Here are some ideas.

Before raiding

 -1 Check if the player is in a coalition. Usually  absent player is not in a coalition. If the city is in a coalition, it might have coalition protection. Be careful.

-2 Send a message. Say hello. See if the player is active or not. If yes, make a new friend, share raiding tips, etc. If not, it may be an absent city to raid.

-3 ALWAYS scout. You must check about the resources. If the city has no resources, don't waste a raid. If the city has a large defense, don't waste your army to raid a few resources. If the city has  many resources, prepare 1 resource type to do the galley trick. 

Raiding

-1 Scythian marauders are the best because they are the fastest. You dont need to upgrade them at the academy or wait for them to train. They are for sale at the market. They cost many gold drachma and you need many of them to get resources (1=750 resources). So, if you have gold buy them, use them, but only if the city has no defense. 100-120 needed for best results.

-2 Macedonia cavalry are strong. They can carry many resources (1=1275).  Do a speed upgrade at the academy so they can move faster. Bad point - we must wait for them to train. But with 60-80 we can get good results.  Small defense or towers are no problem.

-3  Pikemen can be good. They are cheaper than cavalry and faster to train. They  are fast and can carry  60 resources each. You need many of them.  1000-1500 needed for best results. Good for many towers or some defense, but only during pvp events. If you see a large defense, maybe it is not a good idea to raid. Good luck!

1. Farm is already there so the first thing you have to do is to get your farmers. and the best are:

•  Scythian Marauder (Very fast but week though not a problem if it's just for farming. You can get them in the market using your drachmas)
•  Carthaginian Horsemen (If you don't want to invest drachmas, this is the fastest farmer you can build using ordinary resources)
  
•  Macedonian Cavalry (Much slower than the first 2 but much stronger. It has an advantage when there's a PvP and some players are sending traps everywhere.)

2. Explore the map within 30 miles radius (I only go for up to 20 miles and it can give me all the resources I need for the whole week) and dispatch scouts to presumably dead cities with level 50 or higher. You can assume that a city is dead if it doesn't belong to any coalition and all of their towers are down. Sometimes, there are cities with coalition but also dead, if you're always exploring the map and visits each city, you will notice that some of them are not leveling up and if their towers are down.

3. Make a list of cities' coordinates that can give you 100k resources. If it has a 40k of each resources and you can see the roof of their acropolis is not green, go for it. But if their acropolis is green, it means it can protect larger resources so make sure that it has 60k or more for each resources. You will notice that most dead cities gives you a lot of grains which is good for you if you have a very large army. Some cities gives almost the same amount of each resources and some of them only give bronze and timber. You can make a separate list of cities so that you can track which cities will give you which resources to fit your needs.

4. It's very important that you upgrade your port and harbor to increase the capacity of your galleys because when you send a raid to a city the game only allow you to take 50k resources. but if you send them 50k resources for about 20 seconds before your raid hit them and cancel it after the hit, you can get up to 100k. This is known as the galley trick.

    *Some players worry too much when we're talking about this trick because they're thinking that Plarium will check this bug and fix it and we can no longer get more than 50k res per raid. Good news is, Plarium already know about this for a long time but they're not removing this because it's not a bug. Let me explain. When someone raided you and they got 50k res, that 50k res came from you so when you raid them back, you can get 100k. That's 50k of their resources and 50k of what's originally yours which they took earlier. That same principle applies with trading so when you send them resources, even if it's still on the way, It's already considered as theirs even though it's not yet on their city that;s why you can get 100k resources from them using this galley trick. The good thing is you can cancel this transaction within 50 seconds of confirmation. I repeat. It's not a bug. It is a trick. You're not tricking the game, but you're tricking their city. It's like tricking your enemy in real life but it doesn't mean you're tricking the principles of life and the universe.

This is my longest post so far but to wrap it up, scout your prospects, raid them when their res is enough to give you 100k, send 50k res about 20 seconds before the raid hits and cancel the transaction after. A little warning though,the reason I prefer 20 seconds is so that you have enough time to cancel it because if you're too slow and cancel the galley after 50 seconds have passed, the game will charge you some drachmas. Anyway, If you send it 20 seconds before the hit, you still have 30 seconds to cancel and that's a lot of leeway so I guess it won't happen to you.

And for "The Irate Penguin" (T.I.P.) don't you think 250 drachmas is too small of a reward for those who give this kind of tip?

I mean I received 2000 drachmas several times by typing about 10 characters in other contest and you require us to go beyond 1000 this time. LoL

Anyway, cheers buddy and happy raiding everyone!  

Here are some screenshots:

Example of a city that gives a lot of grains.

City that only gives bronze and timber

Many thanks, KJM and WY for your posts, I'm confident they should serve newer players as guidelines or at least as food for thought as to how to approach this.

Wy said:

don't you think 250 drachmas is too small of a reward for those who give this kind of tip?

You're right of course, but moderator contests may only distribute a set amount of Drachmas and 5k is kind of an upper limit (though not an official one), I assume Plarium doesn't want this to become anything more than a small income boost.

I could have ...

1. ... asked for 10 posts / 500 Dr. each or ...
2. ... 5 posts / 1k Dr or ....
3. ... best post = 5k Dr. ...

... but I was hoping for more than 5 or 10 posts and selecting a "winner" seemed daunting, who and by what standards would one pick a winner?

When I originally created the thread I hadn't thought of adding any rewards at all but I figured an obolus could be simply understood as a small thank you.

Next time I'll try a different tack and raffle off 1x 5k Dr. among all posters, assuming there's sufficient trust that it's a fair and random raffle :-).

Cheers
P.

Premises:-

As my target's level would be the same as mine(which is 73), I would first check his city to know any signs of whether he/she is a coiner or not. It gets tougher to distinguish at higher levels. If the player is a coiner, I would not risk more than 10% of my army. And the raid capacity of troops would be atleast enough to do the galley trick.
The timing of the attack I preferably would set at 4:30 UTC to 6:30 UTC as this is when most Americans go to sleep and most of Europe is still asleep.

Selection:-

As the topic dosent allow us to spy, the selection of troops would be based on guesswork, so we must ensure to sustain minimum losses. It takes 2.5 hours for my swordsman to reach 50 miles target(according to me, swordsmen are the best units for city/capital/pantheon/emporia attacks as you can read my guide in the tutorial section under the topic "Some tools and Guides" as other units are better for positions and all), if I have enough boosts I will use them otherwise I would send my Macedonian cavalry (fast units) to attack and not my carthiginian horseman(fastest units that we can train through resources) as I would use them to raid bot cities and use as fodder for Persian Positions.

The Raid:-

The raid must be quick and clean. Boosting to lesser than 1 minute time is sometimes overkill. Don't overuse your precious boosts unless your coalition is so kind enough to achieve the legendary reward in coalition mission every day. Prepare your galleys for the galley trick too.

Other Tips:-

Always check the coalition or federation before attacking. As you don't want to put your coalition in danger as they are the ones who motivate you to play. Other than that sleep on time.

Sobre el mismo punto...

sería interesante tener respuesta de idioma español no sabría decir si está bien el post que haré en este sector por que ahora recién ingreso al foro.

Es correcto que al saquear una ciudad abandonada y mandando el truco de las galeras puedes extraer mas recursos de lo que normalmente te podría dar la ciudad, de los 50k de recursos podrias obtener 100k de recursos.

Ahora un punto que no leí o no me percate para los nuevos es que la cancelación y el tiempo que podéis tener la galera en tránsito sin tener multa por cancelarlo…

Ejemplo si tengo una tengo un saqueo a una ciudad que dura 1 minuto, a los 30 segundos antes de llega enviar al objetivo galeras cargadas de recursos (lo que no se si varía el premio según el tipo de recurso que envías sea: madera, bronce o grano) en mi caso le coloco madera pues al parecer me funciona o es algo psicológico.

En el momento de los 30 segundo antes de golpear al objetivo enviamos la galera de recursos

Posterior al impacto y mirando que ya recibimos el reporte de saqueo cancelamos el envió de recursos al objetivo sin pagar el coste de devolución de galeras.

Y obtenemos los premios apreciados, en esta oportunidad probé con un saqueo de más de 1h con 30m para saber si igual funciona.

cordialmente

blackpk