Are You tired of being plundered?

I pulled this off the Evony forum and think it is a good post. It was aimed at peeps about to come out of newbie mode but it is solid advice for any smaller player.
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Focus on production You're playing first and foremost for yourself. Make your city productive and self sufficient. To that effect, avoid building new resource fields or cottages before having maxed the other ones. Be online often and try to keep building and upgrading 24/24h. Find a good mayor as fast as possible.

Make yourself unattractive Before going offline, engage all your resources in building. First, make sure a building is being upgraded for the time you plan to be offline (Wall for example). Second, make sure a tech upgrade is underway (archery prefered, lumbering very good too). Third, train troops. Fourth, with everything left, build wall defenses. If you have gold left and 30 minutes, buy additional resources you'll use before going out. Set your tax rate to get revenues close to 0 to have the max loyalty. Ideally, when you log off, you would have 0 resource or gold. Don't stack any resource or build a warehouse if you insist on keeping some. When you come back, whether or not you've been attacked, you'll have x hours of production to engage in the same way.

Close your gate If you don't know what it means, it is probably closed. Go to your Rally Spot and make sure the box is unchecked. That way, you'll be able to build troops. It would take a lot of attacks for the gate to open and even more if you keep your tax rate very low.

Do not start a second city till you can defend the one you have. Personally I don't think you should start a 2nd city till you have enough troops to reinforce the new city to a degree that it is instantly unattractive as a target. If you only have one city it can not be taken from you but your second city can be.

Concentrate on producing scouts at first. Once you have 10000 scouts you can start leaving your gate open. If your gate is open then your scouts will go outside of your town and attack any scouting parties that attempt to recon you. Boyd15 told me of this and it has been an excellent strategy. If someone sends 5000, or what ever, scouts at you and your scouts kill them then they get 0 info on you and your town. All they will get out it is the impression that you likely have a shitload of troops sitting there.

Once you have 10k scouts start building archers but once you have 4k archers start alternating between building batches of scouts and archers. There is no need to worry about much else till you have at least 20k of each.

While you are doing that you should be constantly upgrading your walls. If your gates are open and you have 20k of archers those archer will defend your town from the top of your walls meaning they get a range bonus over the attackers.

For your wall defenses it is Archer Towers you want to build the most of. I have 10.5k of AT's on my one town and over 12k at the other. Both towns have 1000 traps, arbitis (spelling?), etc.

If you see an attacking force coming at you that you feel will destroy your army close your gates. Let them attack you and let your defenses do their work. It is much harder and more expensive to build an army then it is to build wall defenses and replenish resources if they manage to plunder you.

If your Beacon tower and informatics are high level you should be able to get info on the attacker and it may pay off to close your gates for some waves and open them for other waves. Essentially you keep your army inside for waves that look like they would seriously harm it and then let them out to attack waves you think you can take in a fight.

Initiate contact with your neighbors In case of an attack, you may ask your neighbor why he attacked. But only once, no begging. It can be a simple misunderstanding easily resolved. They can become friends or allies. I can not stress this enough. We get new players asking for help because they are being plundered on a regular basis and it is pretty common for us to simply send a "polite non threatening" mail asking them to stop. They often reply in turn and stop the attacks. Many times when someone is attacking your valleys they are simply farming for medals so a simple mail is enough.

If he doesn't answer, continue with your building. Tomorrow, you'll still be unattractive and you'll have more defenses and better production.