A what game?
Ever played a browsergame where you start out with say a planet or a village and then harvest resources to upgrade your buildings. Then harvest some more to then build an army to kick your neighbours ass? That’s a build and raid game.
Raiding
Eventually at some point in such a game it becomes more feasable to build a large army to raid your neighbours and or kill their army and collect it’s leftovers (=resources). That way you are able to build faster than you would by just waiting for your buildings to produce enough resources. Normally a good player will start raiding very early on, to suppress its neighbours. Repeatingly raiding your neighbours so that they cannot catch up with you is called farming. If you become a farm of such a player, you are basically canned, if you haven’t heard of “saving”.
Saving
Since I mostly played space games I will use those as an example here.
So if you don’t want to become a farm for other players you have to build transport units and send them on save-flights, taking all your precious resources with them. During that time your resources are saved from enemy players and when your fleet returns you, have the resources at your disposal again. If you don’t save you will likely fall prey to a player that will strip you dry from your ressources.
Also, in many games of this kind it is possible to destroy ships that are in stationed on a planet and flying through space. Your neighbour comes visiting you, destroying all your ships and collecting the remains (debris), which is usually a big amount of the resources you used to build the ships. Now he can build even more ships and you will have a hard time catching up with him. He now has the advantage, and you, depending on the value of the fleet, will need some time to rebuild your ships.
So, saving your resources and fleet is vital to your success in such a game.
The thing with saving is, that your saveflights can only last a certain amount of time. So you mostly cannot send your fleet away for say 3 days. And you also cannot time the return of your fleet very precisely. That means that if something gets between your scheduled playtime and you miss the return of your fleet, the chances are high that your fleet will be destroyed while in orbit.
My Story
I have played a game called space-pioneers and was kinda successful at it too, because I had alot of spare time on my hands. My fleet was pretty decent in size and there were many attempts by other players and one player especially to destroy it. I always managed to save my fleet and to be there when it returns just in case I was attacked by one of these players trying to destroy it. It worked quite good until this one time. I was gone for 10 Minutes (way to work) and got into a conversation with a co-worker that took a while longer than planned. 
I switch on the pc and check with my fleet only to find it blown to a million pieces. The one player that tried so hard, finally managed to find a point in time when my guard was down. I tried to rebuild the fleet after that, but somehow I lost the fun and realized how much this game dictated my day, so I quit.
But am I all done with build and raid games? No, after a while I started playing some other games of this kind and I wondered why I do that after this unpleasant event.
Here is my take on it
Men like to build stuff. Since most of the players of such games are male, that probably makes up a big part of the success these games have. Also beeing able to dominate other players by farming them or destroying their fleet for example, may also be a motive for some players.
Well I’m not a specialist in the art of gameplay mechanics but I think that building stuff and upgrading your buildings to possibly unlock better buildings and units, is a very vital part of successful games. If you look at games this way you see that it’s everywhere. Take RPGs like World of Warcraft for example. You quest to improve your stats – to slay bigger monsters, that drop even cooler swords and shields. This grind seems to be vital to a successful gameplay, because at some points in these games – when you beat the big monster or have the resources to upgrade your powerplant to level 25 – you get that sense of achievement that your “hard work” has paid off.
What do you think makes build and raid games successful?
