Building a Stronger Defense

Troops are actually the last line of defense when you are offline. Always keep the gates closed (in Rally Point where the little "open gates when fighting?" box is..NO.)

Have enough warehouses and upgrades on warehouses and Academy warehousing courses to have everything secure, then when you are attacked, they don't leave with your stuff..though you can't seem to warehouse gold, try to invest it in training or upgrading before you go offline. If an attack is pretty inevitable and it is worth the commission fees, make a ridiculously low offer on logs or whatever is most expensive at the market place , ordering enough at that price to use up all your gold. When you come back in the morning or whenever, cancel the offer, the gold will be put back in your account less the commission fees. You can also do this on the sell side, putting something up for sell at the highest price like stone or logs that won't fit in your warehouse, but remember it is going to charge you a commission. (Bai thought that move up, very clever)

Protecting your city from being over run, upgrade your walls and build up your towers till you have a minimum of a thousand archery towers, traps and abatis and rolling logs and rock fall. Invest heavily in this.

Improve the range of your archery towers with greater levels of archery training, improve the strength of your fortifications with engineering. Other courses in the academy will be helpful to you in a defense matter.

Be sure in your embassy to have the box checked so someone in your guild can send reinforcement if you are being attacked (always make sure your hourly food production is way more than what you need so that you can feed troops while you are away if they need to garrison there.) Embassy upgrades allow more than one person in your alliance to send in troops. But I don't believe these troops will come into play until the wall is breached.

Felidra had an excellent quick reaction..while she actually was still in beginner status on her screen the olive branch was still up, she logged in and saw having just been pillaged with the first run from Mayhem, she quickly applied Truce from "my items". Give her time to warehouse stuff. Tirfing also reacted quickly to the attack on his city in the post that follows this (about Mayhem..this is an edit of this building a stronger defense post)..he logged in, attacked a weaker of their tribe...and teleported. Brilliant people.