Thieves

The 1 gold = 1 item rule is silly from a logical perspective, but it's necessary to preserve game balance. Otherwise you could just disband armies with a single big t2 thief strike. We accept lots of absurd abstractions, such as a city of 10000 people being unable to notice a theft attempt by 50000 thieves that takes literally all supplies in the city. Or the absurdity that highly trained thieves might randomly prefer a giant pile of lumber over all the swords and armor in the city arsenal (or for that matter, all the rare and precious minerals used for crafting).

The classic way to identify who has thieved you is to note the direction the thieves came/went and continue the line until you hit a town. It's not conclusive and leads to frequent arguments. However, if you have a reasonable number of thieves yourself and a suspect, you can look at the suspect's diplo score and look for a jump at the time of the robbery. By this method I know the following players have the following number of thieves in one of their towns (The vector method can help identify the town)

Edited by Hucbold - 22 Jan 2018 at 11:24

The change in diplo score corresponds to the diplo defense that was defeated (or the attack that was successfully resisted). It does not correspond to the points in the successful side. If you send 100000 spies against 5 spies, then your diplo score will climb by 5 spies, not 100000.

Anyone making an accusation should first do the math. Assuming there were still theft-worthy items remaining, you can total the stolen goods. By dividing the carrying capacity of all racial thieves, only one should come out to an integer without a decimal fraction. That gives the race of the thief. Of course, if they steal everything available, there is no tracking via that number.