Raids are expensive, as it takes an investment of time to craft the weapons and explosives (boom) used to break into a base. Some players that want to reduce the risk of losing their boom to defenders or counter-raiders might decide to attempt their raid when they believe the occupants of the target base are offline. Raiding an undefended base is faster (and potentially quieter) than raiding a defended one, which reduces the risk of counter-raiders discovering the raid (or having time to show up to counter it).

The strategy of "offlining" is not very exciting, and can be seen as unsportsmanlike, although it's somewhat understandable that the high number of cheaters in the game discourages the idea of deliberately taking risky battles by waiting for the defenders (that might be using cheats) to come online before launching the raid.

Players might pick a server hosted on the opposite side of the world, putting up with high latency just to (essentially) operate in a different timezone where they can raid while the native players are probably asleep.

It's common for raiders to try to avoid killing sleepers inside a base, because killing a sleeper would make the killer's name appear to them when they come online, which gives the victim a target for revenge (especially if the base was also griefed).

A large group might sometimes find that their raid was accidentally against a teammate's base (when they recognize the name of the sleeper(s) inside), and would then repair the base with a new tool cupboard and codelocks, and send the new lock code to the offline teammate(s).

There are a few tactics to mitigate or prevent offline raids.

Main index
- Raiding