Thievery

Thievery is the art of infiltrate behind enemy lines, take their information, steal their resources and cause damage in the dead of night.

Link to guide

 Thieves are important for every province. Even if you don´t have the thievery function, thieves help protect your province from enemy´s thievery. So normally a province runs at least 2 thieves per acre to protect its lands, while provinces with thievery function can run up to 5 or 6 tpa (thieves per acre). A crazy but intersting strategy can be run 0 thieves per acre with great quantity of watch tower, but it is an exception.


There are 21 thievery operations, being 6 of espionage, and 15 sabotage. 

1-Taking information: 
Thieves are the responsible in collect information from enemy before and during war. Ideally we should have all information from all provinces before we join the war (SoT, infiltrate, Survey and SoS, SoM only necessary if the province attacked), so we can trace the better strategy to battle the enemy. 
Take information is one of the easier thievery operation, and to have 100% accuracy you should send 10% of your thieves to take the information (if you use Utool it will set automatically for you), unless you have the "Accurate Espionage" ability, in this case a single thief will take the information with accuracy.
Since is easy and cost little thieves, take information is essencial a dutty of provinces that DON´T have thievery function. This way our provinces with strong thieves can use their stealth to cause damage on enemy.
During war is important we keep SoT (Spy on Throne) from enemy updated (not more than 8 hours outdated) and all SoM (Spy on Military)  from all provinces that attacked (if it was with anonimity we need to discover who was). 
Take information is a simple duty but requires commitment from our players to make Upoopu a beautifull table of information, and it is the first step  to a successful war.

2 - Stealing Resources: 
From the 15 sabotage operations, there are 3 that steal the basic resources (gold, runes and food).
While the war is running the thieves fight a battle in the underground by the control of resources. Those who are more successful will help the economy of the Kingdom with more gold, runes and food. 
With gold robbed from enemy we will probably win the run of dragons, keeping the dragon active on enemy while they can´t launch on us.
With runes robbed our mages will cause much more damage than their mages.
And despite robbing food don´t be essencial as rob gold and runes, if we finish the surplus of food from enemy we can start to adopt starvation tactics, while we allow to our provinces run less percentage of farms. 
Our thieves should assume the battle for resources as their primary concern. While we have enemies with resources to be robbed we should be doing it

3 - Other Sabotage Operations: 
Besides the rob operations there are another 9 other operation that any province can do, let´s see each one of them:

• Night Strike

Night Strike is probably the most popular operation and has its reason for being. Night Strike acts directly on the main goal for a war, that is destroy enemy power. If you don´t have direct order of what to do with your thieves, or the targets designated can´t be breaked by your thieves, Night Strike is always welcome, specially if the enemy has a lot of soldiers. 
A very common misunderstanding is that NS kill only troops at home, it is not true, it kills military both at home and away.

• Kidnapping

Another very usefull operation is kidnapping. It should be used when you are underpopulated and it will help you to save your economy while you underpopulate the enemy. You should NEVER use it against provinces that are being overpopulated, and it is a waste if you use it JUST to underpopulated a province if you don´t need the peasants. Fireballs is much more efficient to this situation. 
So, use kidnap to repopulate your province against other underopulate targets.

• Incite Riots

This operation also is very popular among players of utopia, but in this case i think it is overvalued. 
Incite Riots decrease in 20% the income of a province, and many times I see players insisting on cast stealth to keep all enemies with riots. 
Let´s make a simple calculation: if you run Riots on a province with the low income of 10K, and it has 8 hours of duration, it represents 16K of gold during these 8 hours. Very likely you can use this stealth to rob more gold instantly from a province.
So, my opinion is that Incite Riots should be used only against provinces with high income.

• Bribe Thieves

Bribe thieves reduce in 10% the thievery eficiency from a province. It can be very usefull when you will run a great round of operations against a single province decreasing his defense. Also is usefull to keep the thieves of provinces with high tpa bribed, so it will cause less damage on us. 

• Bribe General

Bribe General is probably a weak operation since has only 20% of chance in cause any damage, but still it should be used when we are waving someone, and can be specially usefull if you know the enemy will attack soon, creating a chance of kill his ofense.

•  Free Prisoners and Steal Horses 

These two operation has the similar function in decrease the military offensive power from the enemy. The thieves should be always alert to provinces with great amount of prisoners or horses. While you can always free the prisoners, steal horses have the inconvenient that you only steal if horses are at home. The advantage in steal horses is that the horses come to your side, and you can increase your military offense. 

•  Sabotage Wizards

Sabotage Wizards is one of the ways of decrease the enemy's ability to cast spells (besides rob their runes and kill their wizards). It is a poor option, but can be a option if you can break the thievery defense easly.

• Arson

In my opinoin this operation is useless. If you have the intention of destroy some particular build you should use Great Arson, if you want to destroy random builds Tornadoes is much better. If you want to just use your stealth NS is more intersting.

4 - Rogue options:
The personality of Rogue gives you 3 exclusive operations.

• Great Arson 

It is an operation used in elaborate strategies. For example: 
 - Destroy Forts or Guard Station from provinces that will be chained
 - Destroy Farms from provinces that we want to starve
 - Destroy Watch Towers to open the enemy to thievery operation
 - Also can be used to destroy buldings that have a great percentage on the province (20% or more)

• Assassinate Wizards

AW is a very strong operation to be done on start of war against strong mages. Killing their wizards you will decrease their capacity in cast spell for the rest of war, besides making him pissed of.   

• Propaganda

Propaganda is a very strong operation that convert randomly any kind of troops to your land. To rogues it is probably a good alternative to Night Strike, and are allowed to use it anytime that don´t have other specific orders.   
Propaganda is the only opperation that is not limited on maximuim damage, so, more thieves you send, more damage you cause.


About Thieves Dens and Watch Towers
Thieves Dens increase your thievery power both on defense and ofense based on your TPA, while Watch Towers increase your defense naturally (no matters how many TPA do you have).
TD´s are best for provinces with high TPA that use their thieves offensively, while a good option to weak thievery that uses the thieves mainly for defense is WT.
An important thing to calculate the amount of TDs and WT can be examine the thievery power from enemy, and adjust as necessary.

Clear Sight
Clear Sight is a powerful spell against thieves, that automatically catches 25% of the thieves' operations conducted against your province.

Peace Time
During peace time our thieves must remain active, looking for resources and provinces to our attackers attack, posting all information on UpoOpu. Target Finder is an essencial tool to find good targets.

How to use your thieves 
To finish I would like to say 2 things about how many thieves send in each operation, and about ratio of sucess.
The easier way to know how many thieves send on a specific operation is using Utopia Angel. Besides Angel not be accurate in its numbers, it gives you a good base to try more or less thieves till you reach a good number. If you send more thieves than the necessary, it will not gives you more gains, but you will loose more thieves in case of fail attempts. If you send less thieves than the necessary, your operations will not have the gains optimized.
Another option to Angel is you calculate using the table on guide: link here 
About Incite Riots (the only duration of thievery operation) I never saw any information of how many thieves to send, I would suggest 10 to 20% yourself thieves.
On Propaganda, since don't have maximum gains, should be used all thieves you have.

About Ratios:
Similar to spells:
2 sucess in 3 attempts is a good ratio of sucess, keep going.
1 sucess in every 2 attempts is possible, but you are loosing 50% of your destructive potencial. So only accept it if what you are doing is important.
1 sucess in every 3 attempts or everything less than that is unacceptable, choose another target, or simple wait for a better moment to you use your thieves.