Can't unite in distort, but yes, if they changed divinefire and keep removing ways out, then it's pretty much impossible to keep being a conquest nation, which is kind of a bummer.

Airpike and sprint?

See, in lots of villages sprint doesn't work (that's part of the point of a chokepoint, after all).

I've been told that bard-guards don't play nicely with airpike, but I'm not positive about that one.

Or you could do what you did to Estelbar and just kill all the guards.

Depends on the number of guards and presence of the statue. Enough guards plus a statue and they're not really going to die.

The pyramid thing is easy enough. Give it to a non-enemy and have them go set a point for you. That should work, no? Same basic thing with the spores, too.

Brand non-enemy enemy For helping to raid our villages.

Like I said, they require getting past the guards in the first place.

Also, alt-abuse is bad, so over time all the little helpers should get enemied.

I'm positive about that one.

As much as I hate getting raided, what is the point of AirPike if not bypassing guards at a corner?

Hopping over a camping group.

Hopping past an ancestralwatch spirit.

Hopping over globules in Muud.

I've been told it works this way (and this also applies to statues): you get hit by the bard guard/statue/whatever, but end up in the next room anyway.

At a guess, this means that guards not on standguard permanent would probably chase.

If you can use rifts through distort, that probably is a bug, actually.

So, the only way out of a village with guards is supposed to be DivineFire? Period?

Seriously?

Aren't we supposed to be raiding as a Conquest government?

(You do realize that village distort is a 'raise once and forget it' power, right? You raise it when you get the village and never pay for it again.)

Last time I checked distort did not prevent you from walking into a village. Clumps of guards are generally resolved with an iron fist - the nature of conquest governments to begin with.

I'm simply stating that rifts being usable through distort is quite possibly a bug. I'm not 110% certain, but I remember it coming up in discussion when distort was made do-able on non-prime planes. Up to Estarra and Sior!

There's a 2 million essence cost on death in enemy territory, and statues can be placed at most guard clumps. 40ish guards plus a statue is pretty close to invulnerable no matter how many people you throw at them, but 20 are doable.

Some villages only have 1 entrance with an easily-defended choke point, some have more than one entrance (and multiple clumps of 40 guards are overly expensive). With the villages that only have 1 entrance point, it's actually quite feasible to lock them down for around 1000 power a day (the same that they generate passively).

Edit:
Idea: Make a second entrance into villages that only have one!

Can put 20 at each with a statue to discourage casual raiding, but allows for the "iron fist" effect to actually be used... or you can try to lock it down with tons of guards at a much higher cost than the village could ever hope to produce, taking a hefty loss for safety.

Even as religious despotic they didn't quite produce 1k power a day each.

As I recall it was close enough (960ish-980ish, depending on certain factors, fluctuated a bit day to day).

Log of trying to airpike past guards, edited to remove uninteresting parts.