Baldrik

Raiding is incredibly profitable at certain city counts and certain builds. The thing that makes it unprofitable for many is whenever you get into the 10-15 city count and hit into the Top 25 alliances. At that point, you're guaranteed to get countered by people that are more than capable of shredding a pirate without blinking (because they have builds that are more than capable of making money without needing to resort to piracy) and they generally will punish you. The point of most pirate alliances isn't money. It's to fight wars outside of globals and have fun. I can't say that I blame them.

The absolute fastest way is to pull out your wallet. A credit costs about $5 and it'll sell for more than $20 million in game. If you aren't willing to go that route then do what the other posters said. Join a Top 30 alliance and get them to teach you how to raid. A good active raider at your size can pull in close to $500 million in a month without any real trouble. You should be able to self-finance your way up to 8+ cities and build up a nice warchest on the way. Once you get over ten cities, alliances tend to be willing to help you out financially if you're an active player (the reason they're less inclined to help people below that size is because too many players tend to "wash out" and stop playing before hitting those numbers).

Propaganda Bureau, CIA, maybe even the CCE (although Infra isn't really that expensive for someone in the 3-5 range). Actually, this would make the most sense for someone in the C10-C15 range. Someone in the C3-C5 range should be raiding. Someone in that range is best off getting a bunch of soldiers and the Propaganda Bureau so they can raid inactives and steal their money. There's no point for a whale to build this. 180 resources a day is nothing to a C40 nation. However, $720,000 in resources a day is still fairly significant to someone with C10 and a very military heavy build. That's a bit too big to be an effective raider though and you've also lost the new player bonus. If you're very military-heavy then you probably don't have enough commerce, meaning that you're basically relying on sales of manufactured and raw resources to pay your bills. A built up C10 player (not a pirate) will probably have 1500-2k infra per city so they have 5-6 project slots. So you probably have PB, CIA, and probably missiles (maybe CCE or nukes if you've got a really good alliance that helped you out but most C10 players don't have the nukes). That leaves an empty slot or two depending on your war wins and something like a free $720k in resources a day might actually be useful.

Actually there was. Food went from about $103 ppu to $126 ppu. My alliance has been selling food to members for $100 ppu to help them handle the inflation.

Makes sense. The most nukes were flying during the globals. You don't usually see people using nuclear weapons outside of the global wars.

I'm not really sure that this will actually accomplish the goals that you want it to. Most players in a top 25 alliance tend to have a sizable quantity of resources in their own nation. They are usually going to be able to handle a blockade for a couple days. Pirates typically don't even have any resource production capabilities anyway so they aren't going to care if their resource production goes down in a war. It might have an impact on market prices during a global though. During the last global, prices of a lot of things (except food) fell pretty dramatically because everyone was dumping their warchests to get the money that they needed to keep fighting. I could see something like the proposed debuff stopping things like that from happening. It might shorten wars in general too since it will be harder to get the money needed to keep fighting. That may be cool but honestly very few players are going to be able to win wars once you've slotted and blockaded them. It might be possible to win three defensive wars against typical pirates but not against players that have serious militaries. I'm not sure that it would make any real difference.