Quote Originally Posted by Cernunnos View Post
Cheap protection trick I found out: when you put your resources on sale, they are no longer in your town. So if you see someone coming your way and believe it's probably a juggernaut of an army because the guy has literally three times the numbre of cities you have, just put everything on sale at a ridiculously high price. No one will buy lumber for 100gold per unit, so it's safe to say youre resources will still be there afterward. Buy stuff with your gold or use comforting to pre-emptively raise Loyalty to lower your reserves, send your army visiting the countryside, and let the bully skewer some of his troops on your passive defenses and gain nothing for it. If you have a warehouse, the few resources you'll produce between the moment you use the Marketplace trick and the time you get plundered will be protected. Here's what it looked like for me a few minutes ago:

battle3.civony.com/default.html?logfile/5f/ad/88/82/5fad8882ffa803814cb81677ef530e87.xml
That works if I happen to be fortunate enough to be around the computer when it is happening. But my buddy got sacked while we were both at work and could do nothing about it until we both got to our homes and read the reports that said (basically) "Your not big enough to play this game without lots of harrasing ransacking".
The threat of retaliation was just not there as the attacking player was much larger and belonged to one of those Good Ol' Boy alliances.