GridKitty’s Raiding Expanded
LAST UPDATED 2026-06-18 – READ CHANGELOG FOR DETAILS
Steal their people. Strip their planets. Fund your own pirate enclave.
Stellaris 4.4.*
Raiding forces capture enemy pops through bombardment and invasion. How many you can take is limited, but spending Influence authorizes deeper raids. Each escalation takes more, costs more, and draws galactic attention.
When a tier is filled, choose how to proceed: push deeper, hold position, switch to resource plundering, demand tribute, or negotiate policy changes from the defender. Each choice changes the war goal to match your new objective.
Four war goals shape how you raid. Raiding takes any pops. Emancipation targets the enslaved. Reaping removes all limits and denies the enemy any chance to surrender. You can also authorize Opportunistic Raiding during any non-raiding war for 50 Influence — prompted on first bombardment of each target, with doubled escalation costs.
Devastation dealt to enemy colonies generates resources based on what they actually produce. Invading colonies cashes out whatever is left. Declaring a Plunder war increases the yield and guarantees tribute on surrender.
Plunder Yield stacks from multiple sources: base, traditions, civics, and the Plunder war goal. Higher yield means more resources per devastation and harsher penalties on the worlds you strip. Occupied planets are automatically raided each month, with captured pops split among allied armies.
Every empire type gets a pop-raiding civic and a resource-raiding civic.
Pop raiders: Emancipators and Liberation Enterprise wage war to free the enslaved. Harvest Incorporated treats conquered populations as corporate assets. Harvesting Protocol abducts organics to feed a machine intelligence’s power grid, starting with its own battery species.
Resource raiders: Reavers (Standard) and vanilla Letters of Marque (Megacorp) strip enemy worlds of wealth via the Plundering stance, granting their commanders a plundering trait. Corsair Protocol (Machine) does the same, grants its commanders a ship-breaking trait, and has a 10% chance to capture enemy warships it destroys. The Nomad Void Reavers civic gains full resource-raiding access.
Ravager Swarm (Hive) is a combined raider — it abducts populations as living biomass for workforce and food, and plunders the ruins for everything else.
Reaping is a raiding focus policy, not always available. Xenophobe or Gestalt empires with Barbaric Despoiler/Harvest Inc/Nihilistic Acquisition can select it, along with Harvesting Protocol and Ravager Swarm unconditionally. Declaring a Reaping war carries a severe galaxy-wide opinion penalty that takes decades to decay.
Adopting the Despoliation tree unlocks resource plundering and the Plunder war goal for any empire, along with +1 Plunder Yield for empires that already have native plundering access. Completing the tree grants an Ascension Perk slot and unlocks the Privateer Enclave.
Found your own pirate haven. It raids autonomously, shakes down its victims for tribute, and pays you dividends. Its salvager crews pick through the wreckage of battle for alloys, minerals, and rare materials. Upgrade it to expand its fleet, increase raid frequency, and unlock richer payouts. Each enclave develops its own personality at founding. Build a Smuggler’s Port on your starbases for additional trade value. Convert freely between mercenary and privateer enclaves through the diplomacy menu.
Most core features function without DLCs.
They are required for the following additional features:
- Overlord: Privateer Enclave
- Grand Archive: Enclave specimens, Boarding Cables tradition variant, and arkship Boarding Cables building (with Nomads)
- Paragon: Recovery Fleets council agenda
Should be compatible with most mods. Full overwrites:
- Bombardment stance: raiding
- War goals: wg_plunder, wg_plunder_raid
- Casus belli: cb_despoliation, cb_pirate_raid
- Game rules: can_orbital_bombard, should_abduct_pop_group
- Scripted triggers: is_unfriendly, is_slaver, prefers_commander_governors
- Ascension perks: ap_nihilistic_acquisition
- Economic categories: planet_livestock_farmers, planet_livestock_miners, planet_livestock_metallurgists, pop_category_purge, planet_organic_batteries
- Events: enclave.2, enclave.205
Join the Discord for bug reports, suggestions, and updates.[discord.gg]
